Number Your Days

Moses wrote the oldest psalm in the Book surrounded by funerals.

Psalm 90 carries the title A Prayer of Moses the man of God. Set it where it happened. A whole generation had been sentenced to die in the wilderness, and Moses walked with them while the sentence ran. Forty years of graves in the sand. The man was not writing poetry from a porch. He was writing arithmetic from a funeral procession that never fully stopped.

Here is the math he left.

“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” Psalm 90:10

Seventy years. Twenty-five thousand five hundred and fifty days. Eighty if the frame holds, and the Book is honest about what the bonus decade costs.

And then the request. Of everything Moses could have asked for, standing in that graveyard, he asked this.

“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” Psalm 90:12

Teach us to number. Counting days does not come natural to a man. We count money, followers, square feet, everything except the one number running out. It has to be taught, Moses says, and God has to do the teaching, because left alone a man will keep that one ledger closed his whole life.

This series started with one question. Ready or not. The fear got named and evicted. The casket got its true word. The record got read. The door stayed open late. One piece is still owed, and it is the piece that touches Tuesday.

What does a ready man actually do differently at breakfast?

This is the final piece I owed you. It is late. I do not get to teach that later is not promised and pretend the delay does not count. The math is free. What the math does to a regular Tuesday is below the line.

The Count

Below the line: the difference between morbid and numbered, three ledger moves for the man who knows his count, and the last thing I will say about being ready.