The Days of Our Lives

I took one of my children to a birthday breakfast this week. Except, in reality, she's not much of a child any more. Technically, she can have her own library card now, and order things off of television too, so I guess she's an adult. Or at least pretty close.

As best I can calculate it, this was somewhere in the neighborhood of my 90th birthday breakfast as a dad. It's a pretty big deal in my family, starting when the kids are around three years old. They get to go anywhere they want for breakfast with their father, but most often it ends up just being a fast food stop. And then we talk.

We won't get into all that is discussed, but usually it includes a recap of the past year, and talk about what the upcoming year may hold. Often times there's reminiscing about years passed, and even a recollection of their original birth-day. And then that leads to pulling out a napkin and pen, and doing a little math. Number of years x 365 days + leap years = days they have been alive.

I'm not sure when and why we started doing that little exercise, but it's almost expected now. We did the math again this week, but not on the back of a Chick-Fil-A napkin. This time we used a calculator from a cell phone. The times, they are a changin' I guess.

It may be a silly family tradition that doesn't mean much to you but for some reason it's come to mean something in the Letson household. At this week's breakfast pow wow, when the count reached more than 6,500 days, we discussed the reason why we count our days.

I brought up a familiar verse from Psalm 90:12: "Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom."There it is, right there in Scripture; a call to number the days of our lives. It even gives the reason: so that we can get a wise heart. But what does that mean?

I would suggest that we count our days--whether literally or figuratively--so that we live our lives in such a way to make our days count. Recognizing that our time on earth is limited and our days are numbered helps remind us that we are stewards of the life God has given us. Life is short, "like a vapor" as another Psalm tells us. And we don't want to waste a single precious moment.

Have you done the math lately on your life? Not so much with a napkin or calculator, but maybe with a look in the mirror. Have you pondered whether you are making your days count--in your family, in your work, in your service of others, in your walk with God? You'll never get those days back. Make the best of them now, while you can.

My prayer for each of us is that we will invest our time here on earth into things that will count for something eternal, so that we'll never look back with regret when we count the days of our lives.

I'm praying for you and I look forward to seeing you on Sunday.

--Pastor Ken

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