My family recently had the pleasure of taking a vacation to the beach with some dear friends. It was especially meaningful because these days, with both our sons working and doing the college thing, it can be hard to get us all in to the same place for 30 minutes, much more so for several days. I'm grateful for every such opportunity we have.
Because our trip spanned a Sunday, we did as we've done for years in such situations and planned to have our own Sunday worship session. Usually one of us Dads will prepare and share a devotion, and we spend a little time in prayer and musical worship. This time around, I volunteered the lead the devotion, and set about praying and considering what might be of particular relevance to our families in this season. "This season" is more than just another milestone along the course of our collective aging. We've recently endured quite a bit of heaviness between our families, including the death of a mother/grandmother and the wildly destructive Hurricane Helene (which is what brought us to the beach in the first place, since the mountain vacation we'd already planned became a non-option).
It's a bit challenging to convey all that went into my consideration of a text to focus on, but there were several key things. It started, of course, with the weight and near reminder of how close death can be. But beyond that, I'd had recent conversations about how the more melancholy worship songs (some of which are musically lovely!) always feel out of place in a Sunday morning service, at least in my denominational context. The book of Psalms has such songs, so songs of sorrow are completely relevant and legitimate for congregational worship. I recalled that the Church has had for many years a mechanism for touching on all the various valid emotions of the Christian life: cyclic, planned liturgies. On a whim, I looked up the Anglican liturgical calendar to see what readings were scheduled for our Sunday away. Almost unsurprisingly, they were all readings focused on sorrow.
Two other things happened while at the beach that narrowed my search into a decision. While walking in a beach souvenir shop, the overhead radio program (featuring John Tesh) was musing about midlife crises. I was only half paying attention, but I heard Tesh saying something about age 40 being the halfway point of the average lifespan. Then the following day, I took a solo side quest up to Southport, where I spent some time poking around an interesting cemetery. (In a fun plot twist, I later went off to find a multi-stage geocache that led me around town picking up clues, and the final destination turned out to be none other than that same cemetery.) There I noted the ages on many of the headstones — people dying at age 60. 40. 21. 18. 7. 1. Even a trio of three-month-old children laid in a row. My thoughts kept returning to just how fleeting life is for us. And that was all I needed to secure a text for our Sunday morning devotion. Without yet knowing where the study would lead, I chose Psalm 90.
I won't attempt to recount the whole devotion here, but as I studied the text over the next half-day, I couldn't avoid seeing phrases and themes that reminded me of the Genesis accounts of Creation and the Fall. Themes of toiling, day after day; literary hints such as the morning and evening cycle; an eventual return to dust — all point to Genesis 1-3. A Psalm that at first glance might appear to picture an arbitrarily wrath-filled God is reminding us that because of the first sin, the earth and its inhabitants are under a curse. God hates sin. It was sin that introduced death into Creation in the first place. And the Psalm (with a bit more authority than Mr. Tesh) reminds us that life is roughly 70 years long — 80 if you're lucky.
After reading and commenting a bit on the Psalm that Sunday morning, I employed an unconventional analogy in order to help our families consider what "80 years" looks like. If life is a pizza with eight slices, our family members' ages fell pretty neatly into clean "slice counts". My daughter is 10 — one of her slices is already gone. The older boys' ages hover around 20 — two slices gone. Jason and Cassandra (the parents in the other family) have consumed half of their pizza. And Amy and I are down to just three slices left. This is a sobering thought, and is surely why Psalm 90's final section asks of God, "So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom."
Father in Heaven, teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. Have pity on us. Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Amen.
