Number Our Days

We count from the end we already have. We know our age to the year, and the anniversaries, and how long since the diagnosis or the funeral or the move, and every one of those figures runs forward from something that has already happened. The number Moses asks for runs the other way, and not one of us has it.

So teach us to number our days. That so at the front is pointing backwards, and what stands behind it is not gentle: we are consumed by thine anger, and two verses later, we spend our years as a tale that is told. He has already done the arithmetic that is available to anybody. 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. Which is what makes the request strange enough to sit with. A man who has just printed the average is asking to be taught how to count.

So what is he asking for? The psalm opens on a scale that makes the question worse, a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. And it never prints the lesson. He asks to be taught, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom, and what he says next is Return, O LORD, how long? Nobody in the psalm is ever given the number, including the man who asked for it.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 298 is Peace Beyond Understanding (Philippians 4:7).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two