As I write, I’m sitting outside my home, basking in a verdant, cloudless midsummer day in Minnesota. The sun-drenched landscape around me is lush and green, except for the colorful interruptions of flowers in full bloom that draw the eye as well as the bees and hummingbirds. And from the trees, a virtuoso wren leads a choir of birds, providing a perfect seasonal soundtrack in surround sound.
And as I sit enveloped by this world flush with life, I’m thinking about how brief life is. I recently turned 59. One more quick trip around the sun, and I’ll be 60 — if the Lord wills and I live, that is. Given how fast the decades are speeding by, before I know it I’ll find myself at “seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty,” which both Moses and modern demographers say is the average span of a human life (Psalm 90:10) — if the Lord wills and I live, that is. The end of my earthly life now feels less like someday and more like someday soon.
Which is why, in recent years, I have increasingly returned to what has become one of my favorite psalms: Moses’s prayer in Psalm 90. I share Moses’s deep desire for God to “teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). I want to know what it means to grow wise as we grow older.
And learning to number our days begins by coming to terms with how few days we are given.
Like It Was Yesterday
When I was a young man, the phrase “I remember that like it was yesterday” usually referred to events that occurred just a few years prior. Now, I find myself saying that about things that happened three, four, even five decades ago.
A fun grade-school overnight with my closest childhood friends, Brent and Dave.
Riding in a car with high-school friends, belting out “American Fast Food” to a Randy Stonehill cassette.
That moment in the Wayzata Perkins parking lot at age 18, when I knew deep in my soul that Pam was the one I would marry — and we weren’t even officially dating yet! Now we’ve been married for 36 wonderful years.
That first time I heard John Piper preach, and I knew deep in my soul that somehow my future would be intertwined with his — and we weren’t even part of Bethlehem Baptist Church yet! Now we’ve been serving in ministry together for more than 30 years.
That overwhelming moment in the hospital room 28 years ago when I held our first child for the first time. Now that child is nearly the age I was then.
I remember these events like they were yesterday. And they leave me wondering where all the time went. How did it go by so fast?
Like Yesterday When It Is Past
Moses felt this kind of bewilderment too, and even more when he compared our brief lives to God’s life:
Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God. (Psalm 90:2)
Given how prone we are to see ourselves as lead characters in the drama of existence, it does our souls good to sit and prayerfully ruminate on what it means for God to exist “from everlasting to everlasting.” It boggles our minds. It’s supposed to. It’s meant to reframe our exaggerated perceptions of ourselves and our lifetimes so we see them from a realistic and humbling perspective — God’s perspective. It’s necessary that we, who experience time in terms of decades, keep in mind that our experience is not like God’s:
For a thousand years in your sight
are but as yesterday when it is past,
or as a watch in the night. (Psalm 90:4)
Moses is using metaphorical language here. If anything, he’s understating the reality. But God gives us this metaphor in Scripture so we have something comprehensible to help us get some idea of the incomprehensible.
So, if we imagine that God experiences a thousand years like yesterday when it is past, how does he experience the lives of creatures like us, who (“even by reason of strength”) don’t live much beyond eighty years? It means that, for God, the longest human lives don’t span even two hours of yesterday.
Two Significant Hours
How should this observation land on us? If we come away with the impression that we’re insignificant and don’t really matter in the great divine scheme, then we’re missing the point. God doesn’t measure significance in terms of time duration but in terms of what he values.
Think of something you did for two hours yesterday. Were those two hours insignificant? Some of the most significant things in our lives occur in minutes and hours. They may have lasted a very brief time compared to how long we live, and yet we consider them priceless.
So, what are we meant to glean from Moses’s description? Simply put, our lives are very brief — briefer than we tend to assume, and far too brief to waste.
Teach Us to Number Our Days
What this glorious but fleeting midsummer day in Minnesota is preaching to me is that my life is too brief to waste. And at 59, I see it as a metaphorical picture of my past, not my present. I’m now in the autumn of my life and, like any Minnesotan, I know that winter is coming. And it is not merely coming someday; it is coming someday soon, almost before I know it.
So, I find myself praying with Moses, “Teach me, Lord, to number my days that I may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). Because I want to grow wiser as I grow older.
And a heart of wisdom recognizes that while each day of mortal life is very brief, it is profoundly significant because its minutes and hours are priceless. Each brief day of mortal life counts, not just for an earthly life well-lived, but for eternity. “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10) — and all of our good or evil happens during the ordinary, precious minutes and hours of ordinary, precious, and brief days.
Desiring God