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Key Bible Verse: "Lord, remind me how brief my time on earth will be. Remind me that my days are numbered, and that my life is fleeing away" (Psalm 39:4). Bonus Reading: Psalm 39:5-7, 11-12

The death of a parent not only confronts us with the truth about death, but also with the truth about life. We mutter, "Where did the years go?" "It seems like just yesterday," and other telling phrases.

The idea of a "long life" touches on a misconception of youth about the length of a year, a decade, or a life. For a child, a year seems very long; for an adult, it seems like an instant. That's because as a person ages, a year represents an increasingly smaller portion of his life. If a junior-high history teacher says, "That happened only ten years ago," the students think, Only ten years? That's more than two thirds of my lifetime! But adults, especially those older than 50, feel as though the events of a decade ago occurred just yesterday.

As a child, you may have thought something like this: Let's see, in 2010, I'll be ___ years old, and in 2020, I'll be ____. Most young children have trouble imagining themselves older than 25 or 30. And 40 seems ancient.

Well, you're there now. It didn't take very long did it?

—Dave Veerman & Bruce Barton in When Your Father Dies

My Response: How has grieving the loss of a loved one adjusted my perspective on life?

Thought to Apply: After 60 years, the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it. —Oliver Wendell Holmes (physician and author)

Adapted from When Your Father Dies (Nelson, 2003) by permission.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.
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Prayer for the Week

Give me a heightened awareness of the next life, Lord, so that I may strike a truer balance in this one.

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