number your days
You know the days can slide right by—Monday becomes Wednesday becomes Friday becomes Sunday, routines going by like a blur of houses armored clapboard-neutral outside the dusty car window. I can flat out miss the extraordinary in my ordinary, moving way too fast, slipping over a stretch of asphalt.
This morning, I snagged, caught on a line of Biblical poetry—we’re moving shadows, and all our busy rushing ends in nothing.
And then I looked again, found the line paraphrased another way, exclamation marks grabbing, jerking and pushing at my shoulders, sending me hither and yon:
Oh! we’re all puffs of air. Oh! we’re all shadows in a campfire. Oh! we’re just spit in the wind. We make our pile, and then we leave it.
Just spit in the wind? I got in my car to leave, remembering John Mark Comer, that snatch he wrote about how, “In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you give your attention to,” and as I pulled out of the driveway David Crowder crooned slow, singing his own song to God through the car stereo. With all this weariness, can we shine like you?
My friend and I, sitting now at an outdoor café table beneath a wide, bluest-blue sky, holding our steamy cups, laugh about childhood warnings of slippery slopes, how we each thought we lived on a plateau with slip n’ slides descending recklessly down every side. One wrong step could mean a precipitous fall, could mean hurtling down, arms beating the air. The wind, dragging its fingers through new leaves fresh fluttering on the trees, sends delicate petals, bridal-white, falling like confetti. I feel smooth trunks flat, warm against my bare fingers, even though my other hand rests still in my lap.
Later, remembering, I will think of the beautiful sound of my friend’s laughter flying through that breeze, and I will want to add, parenthetically, that this kind of slide, this rumbling numbly through our days, happens to be real, and dangerous, although I don’t remember any early warning against losing my childlike freedom to slow and taste the goodness of God.
In my own childhood, I had often heard that as you get older, time flies faster and faster, and in my immaturity, I wondered how that could really be. Time is always just time, isn’t it? Turns out—I’ve discovered—it isn’t time that moves faster at all, not really, but rather that I just keep moving faster through it, with less attention, less celebration, less stillness and fascination, less curiosity and wonder as the years go by. No one really teaches a child, maybe because no one must, to pray Moses’s prayer about learning to number days, that is, to pay attention enough to weigh out each one, knowing they will be few, to gain chokmah, the powerful creative wisdom of God. No one really must teach a child that holy creativity is something worth pursuing, but I’m only just learning that Moses prayed not merely about attaining chokmah but entering it, like a child begging to take a running leap into a sparkling pool.
For that child, there will be more than intellectualizing about the water. There will be splashing and coolness, water droplets glistening on the skin, the taste of refreshment on the tip of the tongue. And there will be playing.
Baby-soft girl, running through the outdoor patio and past our chairs, suddenly squats, gaze narrowing as she reaches one stubby finger down, slowly down toward the industry of some tiny crawling insect, an ant maybe, scavenging for errant crumbs.
Later, I will want to venture also that we humans don’t much like to think that the life we long for, rather than just one step away, begins when we practice being still to pay close attention, because, as another psalmist poet put it, in stillness we experience God and begin to understand His identity. Be still and know that I am God.
Sabbath, that stillness to trust, that resting fixation on God, began as a practice of freedom for a people long enslaved, a people oppressed with the pressure, beating angry fisted bruises into their tender skin, to make more and more bricks with less and less straw. Ever feel like that’s what’s biting at you too, the pressure for more and more out of less and less?
Quiet with a kind of awe over that bug, little girl just a short stretch away from us seems oblivious to the way the wind sweeps through her downy hair, ruffling the ruffles on her seersucker, strawberry-studded top, and her dad, striding on ahead, seems oblivious to the fact that she’s no longer following.
My friend leans forward in her chair, watching, grinning wide, says, “Wonder if we should—”
Wonder. I sip my coffee, exhaling above the rim of the mug, feeling grateful for her friendship, that she willingly dives into the river with me, and us maybe holding hands as we jump. She makes time–or, to say that another way, gives attention–for me.
Just as my friend moves to rise, to call after the man striding on, the child glances up, eyes like bottomless pools, and then launches forward, bounding, calling, “Dad, dad, dad I saw a,” her voice fading away on the wind. Dad, sunlight bending in his glasses, stops at the edge of the patio to wait, extending a hand toward his daughter. Probably, knowing her so well, he’d known she’d stopped anyway, his awareness of her never broken, no matter how it looked to us. He had maybe wanted her to feel that she could slow down, could stop suddenly like that just to look, trusting he could keep her safe.
