10 Mar

Passing the Time

posted by Winn Collier

One afternoon, when our youngest son Seth was two, he loudly declared, in broken toddler English, “I God.” Seth does have a strong sense of self - and for that, we are thankful. However, if he makes a life-habit of such pronouncements, he will, of course, be living the grandest delusion.

According to Psalm 90, citing a prayer of Moses preserved for us by the author of the Psalms, if there is any one reality (and there are many) that delineates us from God, it is how vastly different we relate to time. We humans forever live under time’s heavy heel; God doesn’t.

Moses’s prayer tells us that God exists from “everlasting to everlasting.” (Ps 90:2) That’s quite a line; but frankly, I don’t have the foggiest clue what it means. My entire frame of reference is bound to days and years and seconds and centuries. I can’t even begin to account for a reality that essentially pays the calendar no mind.

To further punctuate our humble situation, the psalm reminds us that when our days are done, our body merely disintegrates back to dirt, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Worse, Moses suggests that seventy or eighty years are about the most we mortals can hope for. How do we respond to this bleak picture?

Do we let fear overwhelm us, believing that our life is meaningless and empty?

Do we live for the moment, grabbing whatever of life we can stuff down our face?

Do we worry? Do we deny? Do we just turn off our brain and do whatever we like?

Moses responded differently. Moses prayed.

Here, we face the temptation to roll our eyes and mumble, “Well, of course, what a nice Christian cliché. Pray about it.” I have these feelings myself. However, my dismissive reaction reveals that my understanding of prayer is neutered and tame and dull.

For Moses, his prayer was not a trite plea to God mumbled without any authentic grappling with the dire situation. Prayer was his way of reordering himself to God’s reality, of seeing his world and his life for the mess they truly were at that point in time – and asking God to do something about it. Prayer is the posture of asserting that we are desperate for God’s redemption – and that if our God does not move on our behalf, then we are truly doomed.

So Moses prayed: God, teach us to number our days. (Ps. 90:12) To number is to take inventory, to sum up the reality of our predicament. And I love Moses’ motivation for his prayer: so we may gain a heart of wisdom. He wanted to rightly assess his earthly time not so he could hoard it but so he would know how to use it, how to live from his heart, how to live for causes and truths that deeply mattered. Moses wanted to know how to give his days away with a wise brand of recklessness.

We do not count our days like a miserly geezer stuffing all our minutes in an old coffee tin and shoving them under our mattress. We take stock of our days so we will recognize our days are too fleeting to spend our time wrapped in an illusion. We count up our days so that we will live prayerfully, hopefully trusting in God’s power to use our hands and our voice and our short stretch of time to join God’s redemption of his world.

As we live this prayerful way, we stay attuned to the hurt and the pain all around us and attuned to the many ways God is working against those evils. Some pray while painting. Some pray while feeding the hungry. Some pray while nursing a malnourished orphan. Some pray while loving their neighbor or giving themselves to their job, working with honor like Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. Some pray while writing poetry (like Moses in Psalm 90). And some pray with plainspoken words.

How we pray and how we do God’s work in the world is not the primary concern. That we pray, that we spend our days doing God’s work in the world – that must grab our full attention.

Filed in: Prayer, Responding to God