Page 3 of 7
How can we make sure our lives will count, not only in this life, but beyond?
The answer, says the songwriter, is to number our days—to count them, to value them. Verse 12 is the turning point in the psalm, where the song shifts from lament to hope. "Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." Everybody counts something.
Wise people count the things that really matter.
I was on an airplane this week and was working on this message. They showed a movie called Mr. 3000. I was too cheap to rent the headset, and I had work to do anyway, but I glanced up enough to get the gist of the story. Bernie Mac plays a baseball slugger who retires when he gets 3,000 hits, earning the nickname Mr. 3000 and assuring himself of a spot in the Hall of Fame.
He parlays that nickname into fame and fortune, only to discover a few years later that there was some sort of mistake, and he really only had 2,997 hits. So at 40-something he comes out of retirement in order to try to get three more hits and recapture his title and his happiness. But on the way to that 3000th hit, he discovers that maybe the things he's been counting may not be so important after all.
We all do that. We all go through life counting things that we think will make us happy, or significant. We measure our happiness or significance by the numbers that mean something to us. When I was a kid, I counted baseball cards. We all did. We'd shoot for them and trade for them and save up our allowance. And if at the end of the day I had more cards than I did the day before, I was happy. I was cool.
I don't know what kids count today—video game scores, or the number of A's on their report card, or the wins and losses of their team. Teenagers count the number of friends they have, the number of colleges they get into. College students count grade points and credit hours—at least I hope some of them do. Others count how many beers they can drink in a night, which somehow proves their manhood. Adults measure their happiness and success by the number of bedrooms in their house, the cars in the garage, the degrees they have, their golf score, or the yield on their investments.
Psalm 90 warns us not to go through life counting the wrong things. If you want your life to count for something, number your days. Count the days and hours and minutes; value them, make the most of them, and measure your life by what you do with them. It seems to me that three things happen when we number our days.
We Realize How Few We Really Have
First, when we number our days, we realize how few of them we really have. Most people live like they have an unlimited number of days. We expect to live long lives, and figure we have so many days we can't even count them all. But the songwriter reminds us that we have a limited number of days—70 or 80 years by his reckoning. That may sound like a lot, especially when you're only 15. But when you do the math, when you actually number the days, you find out you have something like 29,200 days if you live to be 80.
And when you put it that way, it's not that many. Just 30,000 days to live. Think about it in terms of money. It doesn't take long to spend $30,000, does it? That's a nice car, or a year or two of college. That won't even get you a down payment on a decent house around here. $30,000 isn't a lot of money. And it's not a lot of time, either. When you number you're days, you realize how few you really have.
