In Good TimeIsampula

Time’s Wisdom

For many of us, January lifts like a sailboat in strong wind. We are launched into the New Year with the resolve to be kinder, eat cleaner, exercise more, and shore up our spiritual practices! To help us, there are a host of digital apps, planners, and webinars that promise to manage our time so that we can capitalize on our ambitions.

But despite the earnest resolution of January, February usually follows close behind with bitter resignation. For all our good intentions, we don’t make good on our plans. It seems there’s never enough time to live and love well.

To make the days count, we will need more than resolution. We will also need more than the latest time-hack. As Psalm 90 reminds us, time really is a scarce resource. Our lives here on earth are brief, even if we’re afforded the privilege of seventy or eighty healthy years. We are made of dust, and to dust we will return. To read Moses’s words here, as he considers his own mortality, is to hear sadness and grief.

And yet, Moses offers us a prayer that moves us beyond the despair of time-scarcity. It’s also a prayer for more than short-term productivity. It’s a prayer for wisdom, the wisdom required to take the proper measure of time. “Teach us to number our days,” he asks. Moses makes himself a student of the God who is not bound by time, the God who is older than the mountains, the earth, and the world. Wisdom, he knows, begins by acknowledging who God is. He is the Maker and Giver of time. For God, a thousand years are like the passing hours of a night watch. He never suffers time-anxiety.

Imagine the freedom of living in time with this kind of wisdom. For one, it means we can hope in God’s time-plenty. We don’t have to be unusually clever to multiply our minutes. We don’t have to worry about the work we will inevitably leave undone in our impossibly brief lives. We can rest in the knowledge that we are not God. We can even believe that with God’s favor, we might do lasting good work as he “establishes the work of our hands.”