Stop Sexting and Get Wisdom

One of the best ways to be happy, I have found, is to sometimes meditate on the imminence of death. I know, I like to be a cheerful presence here in my small corner, and to spread sweetness and light. I always endeavor to give satisfaction.

The last couple of weeks with my small Sunday school class, we have read and talked about that starkly beautiful verse,

So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. – Psalm 90:12

I’ve used it to introduce my big long, and still incomplete, timeline. It sits up there on the wall, some of the dates and events and people there, but more still missing. Every Sunday I walk in and kick myself for not getting in there and spending just some time, just a few moments filling it out. And then I stand there and examine my whole week and ask when exactly should I have had those few moments.

“How old was the oldest person ever to live?” I asked my little group. They made some guesses. “How old do you want to live to be?” Someone thought hard and thought she’d like to live all the way to thirty. You know, really old. Everyone agreed 120 was too old.

“Don’t you want to live forever?” I asked. Because death didn’t seem to be a looming cloud over anyone in the room, and everyone seemed fine with it arriving eventually. “Do you look forward to dying?”

Well, no. No one did. Much to my relief. So then we looked at the timeline and tried to contemplate eternity. Of God never having a beginning or an end. And that was too much as well. “So what,” I asked, “does it mean to number our days? How should we go about it? And what is a heart of wisdom?” My own child smirked, “A heart that has wisdom.” “Wow,” I said, “you’re clever.”

We talked for a while more about wisdom and if it was even possible to have it, and did any of us know anyone who did. And finally they agreed to think about it more and they went away to eat cookies and sing in the choir.

But the verse has carried on helping me over the weeks as I’ve read it to the children, asking them the same questions again and again. “I wonder how I could go about numbering my days?” “And what about death?” And so on.

The fact is, we don’t live very long. In the balance of eternity, an individual human life is but a breath. One brief moment and then it’s gone. Moses meditates on this fact, he whose life was one of the weightiest in biblical history, whose years and words formed and shaped the entire rest of the scriptures. You could have said he was wise. And yet he was not so wise that he could enter the promised land on his own power. Even he in his body went down to the dust, to Sheol in judgement. If he couldn’t get there by himself, what hope have any of us?

The thing about staring into the capacious expense of eternity is that it clears the mind. The immense foolishness of the moment right in front of you can be illuminated and put into focus for what it is. Not to drag down and wreck your Sunday morning, but I was trying to understand, somehow, how a man in public life with such an awkward name would repeatedly text pictures of himself to other people, even though it was never going to end well for him. To do it once is amazingly foolish. To do it again and again seems incomprehensible. He must have some sort of mental and emotional disability, I kept thinking. He can’t help it. But oh my word, he should get some help.

But he’s not the only one. Plenty of people are stuck in patterns of behavior that are completely toxic, sometimes outrageously so. Watching someone act in time and space in every way that will destroy himself and his family, to repeatedly injure, to ignore everyone’s plea that he get some help, someone outside of himself and his own pain–it is heartbreaking, it is foolish, but it is also the human condition.

Our gaze is so fixed on the earth, on the present, on the troubles of the immediate moment that we can’t possibly do other than repeat the foolishness of our ancestors, and indeed our own foolishness, again and again and again. We do the same thing over that the previous generation did, and are surprised to find the same result. We don’t number anything, except the thing we desperately think we want and need right now. That we value heavily. We carry it around as if it is gold, and all the while the things of greatest worth fall away.

To stop the insanity, Moses says that we should number our days and get wisdom. Take stock of how important our lives really are and how long they’re really going to last. Not very long. Not very important. This is a great gift. My chance to contribute to the various sins and mental illnesses of humanity isn’t that great. I can’t ruin that much. But neither do I have very much to endure.

This election is only a week away. And then after that? Only a few years of there being one of them as president. And then we all die. And God is still God. You can dig in and endure. Or you can look at eternity and enjoy yourself. If it’s all passing away anyway, shouldn’t you be pretty cheerful? First of all you don’t have that long to wait. And second of all, if God has already rescued you, you can rejoice and be glad. You can spend everything that isn’t worth that much anyway, pointing your whole self towards the vast wisdom and riches of God’s divine and perfect plan.

As for me, later this morning I will walk back in my room, kick myself for not doing more, and then turn around and go up to the sanctuary, to walk down the long aisle to stand and eat of the one whose wisdom confounds the world, whose death undid my sin, whose life bears the weight of eternity. It’s going to be the best thing ever.