Numbering Our Days - Part 1

I knew a church member who could tell you the exact number of holes in the church's communion rail for the used cups. Obviously he had taken the trouble to count the perforations, and I wonder how many times he tried to reach the right figure; he could have got confused midway!

Unfortunately, this man passed away before we could find out other interesting facts about the church building and its furnishings, such as the number of tiles on the sanctuary floor. Psychiatrists may have diagnosed this man as suffering from an obsessive compulsive disorder. The poor man was good at counting, but I hope he also counted the most important things.

In Psalm 90, attributed to Moses (and probably the oldest psalm in the Bible), we read a petition: "Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom" (v. 12, emphasis added). We discover that it is critical to know how to count our days, no matter what else we are drawn to count. It is not easy to do so; otherwise the psalmist would not ask God to teach him to count. Apparently, it takes more than the arithmetic skill needed to count one's trophies, calorie intake, savings from discounts or bank accounts.

The psalmist is referring to the finitude of our lives on earth. "The length of our days is seventy years – or eighty, if we have strength" (v. 10). We all have an expiry date; but we do not know it. We know our birthdates, but not the days when we shall breathe our last.

And if the psalmist is really talking about counting down rather than counting in general terms, we can appreciate how difficult it is. We can readily count the number of years we have lived, but it's not easy to count our remaining days since we don't know when the end will come.

To count our days aright is to realise that our remaining days are numbered. Counting the days will not help us arrive at a precise number, but it will bring us to true wisdom. This is a wisdom that knows the implications rather than the actual number.

Such wisdom will relativise our days on earth and all they entail. We can think about this reality in "all the days of my life" from Psalm 23:6. We long for all our days on earth to be richly blessed with God's goodness and love. But this will be true only if all our days are framed in the 'forever' reality of the 'house of the Lord'.

Only as we turn to the eternal God saying, "from everlasting to everlasting you are God" (Psalm 90:2), can we learn to count our days aright. Our limited days must be properly framed within the eternal years of God; only then can we find true meaning for our passing and transient days. Such godly wisdom will know how to differentiate the ultimate from the penultimate, the number of perforations in the communion rail from the life-transforming encounter with the living Christ.

Reflective question:What do you think of the idea that the ability to number our days aright (Psalm 90:12) has to do not with counting how long we have lived, but with remembering that our remaining days on earth are limited and not many in the light of our mortality? What are signs that a person has not learned this wisdom to number his days aright?