Count Our Days Rightly

"Teach us to count our days rightly, that we may obtain a wise heart."  Psalm 90.12, TANAKH

I've thought a lot about this verse lately - what it means to count our days rightly, what it means to obtain a wise heart.  At first blush, it reminds me of a science fiction story I read in high school.  At a meeting of scientists, one of their number presents a device he invented that can identify the exact moment of a person's death.  Being skeptical, the scientists ask for a volunteer to demonstrate the machine's capabilities.  After assessing the volunteer, the machine returns a date in the near future for the volunteer to die.  So the scientists table their meeting until the date predicted by the machine to see if the machine actually works.  Sure enough, on the prescribed date the volunteer is killed.  When the scientists reconvene, to a man they demand the machine be destroyed.

To count our days in this manner would mean living with a horrible truth.  I often wonder how I would deal with such knowledge.  Would I throw all caution to the wind and live hedonistically, trying every debauchery known, wallow in excess?  Or would I have a wise heart, allocate my time intelligently in order to accomplish something meaningful?  Or would I doubt the sum of days, deny that my time approached and die surprised?  If it were possible to count up our remaining days, would we do so and face living a daily countdown to our demise, or would we run from this terrible knowledge and deny its hold on our lives?

Happily, knowing the moment of our deaths is impossible, so counting the days between today and that day is also impossible.  The Psalmist recognizes this, so he (the Psalm is ascribed to Moses) offers instead of a particular count a generalized estimate of our life's span:  "The span of our life is seventy years, or, given the strength, eighty years."  Indeed, the Psalmist's estimate is good for men and (more so) for women in this country today:  each of us, if we want to play the averages, can consider our total span of days to be about seventy-five years.  By this estimate, I've got about twenty-two years remaining, so I could chart out a wise plan to spend these years well.

The problem is, as a depressive, counting my days like this just leads to regret.  On the one hand, I look back at over thirty years of being depressed without clinical or pharmaceutical relief (even today, I do not think I function as well as an undepressed person, I find myself limited and hobbled by depression) as time wasted, as life wasted by my not being fully functional.  Each morning I wake up and find I have to spend another day depressed (I'm not depressed in my dreams), so I count another day until I can begin to live fully, wholly, then I look at my remaining twenty-two years and regret that I will probably spend them much as I've spent the last thirty, that I will always be emotionally crippled.

On the other hand, I don't really believe that I'll last another twenty-two years.  Though I try to envision a new next thirty years, beginning today, if I'm honest with myself I expect I only have a couple of years left at most.  While the women in my family usually beat the average (great-grandmother mid-eighties, grandmother mid-nineties, mother going strong at early seventies) the men don't do so well (grandfather mid-fifties, father mid-fifties).  Further, I'm depressed, so I even fear that Nancy and I will buy it in a plane crash when we go see our son in New York in early December.  Or I fear I'm harboring some undetected cancer, or West Nile virus, or some other disease that will spring one me fatally any day now.  I wake up and count each day as my last, each day a depressed day like all those of the past thirty years, each day a day without redemption, and all this leads to a pervading regret for all the life I've missed.

All of the above are examples of counting our days in the sense of "numbering" them, of seeing our lives as having a particular sum of days and subtracting each successive day from that total.  Numbering our days in this sense leads to a focus on the diminishing number remaining.  And focusing on the total and our daily approach of one more day closer to it leads, as the Psalmist realizes, to a familiar feeling that even thirty years "pass by speedily, and we are in darkness."  We've all felt that, haven't we?  I just attended a thirty year college reunion, where it seemed not just to me but to those I spoke with that thirty years had passed in a blink, that it seemed like no time at all ago that we all were college students together.  And though my peers seemed to take a lot of joy in reconnecting so effortlessly with one another, I was left with a feeling of bleakness, of "darkness" that even should I make another twenty-two years, they, too, will pass as speedily as did the last thirty.

Perhaps this is exactly what the Psalmist has in mind.  The subsequent verses surely point to such a numbering when they demand the Lord turn and show mercy, when they beg the Lord to "give us joy for as long as You have afflicted us, for the years we have suffered misfortune."  And though as a depressive I'm way sympathetic to this sentiment, yet these verses seem to result from miscounting our days, not from counting them rightly.  The demand for God to "satisfy us at daybreak with Your steadfast love" so that "we may sing for joy all of our days," though an admirable ideal, seems to spring from an unwise heart, an immature heart, a heart that demands of God reassurance each morning that God loves us so that we can get on with our day.  Again, an admirable ideal, but wouldn't a wise heart embrace God's steadfast love without needing such daily reassurance?  Rather than demonstrating how a wise heart speaks, the Psalmist seems instead to show the demanding nature of the unwise heart.

Rather than "numbering," another way to "count our days rightly" has the sense of "account for our days rightly."  Whereas numbering our days is impossible (its only possible to estimate our days remaining), accounting for our days is certainly possible:  given that nothing is certain, that you or I could go out of this life unknowingly in our sleep, accounting for each new day we're given means seeing each time we wake up to a new day as a gift.  And accounting for our days as gifts leads not to regret but to gratitude.

Now, I'm a depressive, so this is difficult for me.  But recently I've been trying to wake up each morning thankful that I've woken up, that I have a new day in front of me.  And even if this new day is my last day, nonetheless I'm so thankful that I have it.  Further, I know I have it, I did not pass away unknowingly, I am not living this day oblivious to its graciousness.  I am counting this day, too, like I'm trying to count all my days with humble gratitude that, even though I've been depressed, nonetheless I've had these days to live and breathe and work and play.  To account for each day wisely, to realize each day is a gift, perhaps a gift from God, means to see a growing sum in the grace column of our balance sheet:  countless days I've lived (unless I want to break out the calculator), and each one has been a gift.

Further, accounting rightly only begins with early morning thankfulness.  Accounting rightly extends throughout the day.  Today I shared breakfast with Nancy, saw her off to work, visited with my brother, get to write this blog entry, will have lunch with my mother and dad, will prepare a sermon during the afternoon, will share supper with my extended family, will watch "The New Girl," will cuddle with Nance before we drift off to sleep ("I pray the Lord my soul to keep").  Each breath may be my last, so each new breath is also a gift, a very gracious gift (what "right" do I have to live?).  So I should greet each event in my day with the same gratitude I greet each new morning on waking up:  accounting for such wonderful events in my life means I'm overwhelmed by gratitude, by wisely recognizing that God is indeed so gracious to give me this life.

To have a wise heart is this:  to know we can go out of this life at any moment (we are like grass renewed at daybreak that withers and dries up by dusk, says the Psalmist), so we account for each moment we're given as a gift from God.  Such counting is surely "living in the moment" and also living in gratitude.  One day, our last moment will come, hopefully we'll recognize it when it does.  And hopefully, after being thankful for each moment of each day, after counting our days rightly, our last moment will be filled with gratitude long-practiced and the darkness and bleakness of regret will be far from us.  Then, truly, the "favor of the Lord, our God," will be ours.  Thank you for reading.