How Frail I Am

LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is: that I may know how frail I am.

Notice what he had been doing right up to the moment he said it. I was dumb with silence, I held my peace, even from good; and my sorrow was stirred. My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue. He had bitten his tongue until it hurt, and the first sentence out of him afterwards is a request to be told how little time he has.

He asks for the measure of the days he has, and then answers his own prayer in the next breath: Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth. Four fingers held up against the light.

Moses prays the same thing in a psalm of his own and adds a purpose clause. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. The counting is for the sake of the spending.

James takes it to a man with a business plan. Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. Every one of those three is addressed to somebody in the middle of arranging things, and Psalm 39 has the same man in view two verses on: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.

That is the warning, and it is not the one usually preached off this text. The danger is not that death arrives without notice. It is that you will spend the whole handbreadth heaping, and be very busy, and know this verse by heart.

Peace is not where it ends, either. O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more. He asked to be told how frail he was, and did not enjoy the answer.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 97 is The Logic of Generosity (Romans 8:32).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two