Teach me to Number my Days

“A person’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed.” Job 14:5

There are so many seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years I wish I could go back in time and change, but God knew those days would happen and He knows those days still yet to come.

Job acknowledged the wisdom and sovereignty of God. He realized that there are things we will never understand like when a person is to be born, what they will be like, the choices they will make, and the day that they will die. But Job also realizes the heart of God and that it is undeniably good. So with one breath Job is asking “Why God?” and in the other he is saying “Because you are Sovereign and Worthy to be Praised.”

Job finds himself stuck in a place of distress, somewhere between judgement by his friends and his desire to be with God. And in the midst of his confusion, Job comes to the realization that everyone’s days are numbered including his own. So, instead of agreeing with the ideas of his friends, Job focuses on the sovereignty of the Lord.

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Relent, Lord! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble. May your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children. May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us; establish the work of our hands for us— yes, establish the work of our hands.”
Psalm 90:12-17

Job experienced all life had to offer: the good, the bad, and the ugly. He realized to grow in wisdom He had to grow closer to God. And that meant keeping his thoughts on God and his ways, not focusing on the why of the past but on the why not of the present.

We all have only so many days in our life, and many of those days have already been spent. When we focus on the past and the why, we will drown in the sorrow of it all. But when we choose to focus on the present and the why not, we can run forward with the mission of His love.

There is no way to turn back the hands of time or make time stand still so we can change the future. We can’t fix the past or understand the ways things turned out, but we can live out the rest of our days knowing the heart of God.

God loves us so much that He sent His Son to live in this sin infested world. He didn’t come to erase what happened, He came to heal what happened. We witness the heart of God through the life of Jesus on earth. Jesus loved. He loved the neighbor, the orphan and the widow, the downcast and the outcast, the poor and the needy, the beggar and the bling, the tax collector and the prostitute. And Jesus told us to do the same.

Jesus showed us in His days on earth how to number our days on earth, by walking the path He laid out before us. Taking each day as a new day to show His love.

We may never know the reason why things turned out the way they did or what we could’ve done differently, but we do know what we can do moving forward. We can love.

Teach me to number my days, filling them with only your ways.

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