Mathing Your days

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Psalm 90:12 (KJV) So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

What it is speaking to me:

Perhaps you have heard the phrase, "The days are long but the years are short." More importantly, you probably can identify with that statement.

People have postulated for centuries why this effect exists, and according to the never-wrong internet there are two popular explanations. I will get the one involving math out first, as I don't like math and want to move quickly past it.

It's called the "Log Time" Theory or more mathematically "logarithmic time scaling". It is a simple concept despite its complex mathy name. Yes mathy, its not a word. Except I wrote it, you understood it, so...I invented a word. I did it in the title too. Welcome to the new world. Anyway...A year to a 5-year-old represents 20% of their entire life, while a year to a 50-year-old represents only 2%, meaning the same 365 days feel roughly ten times faster. That is why the summer of my 8th grade year is emblazoned in my memory as an endless summer at the city pool, but the last 3 summers of my life are a complete blur.

The other popular explanation is "The Novelty Effect" which is also relatively simple. We are creatures wired for information, and we love NEW information coming into our noggins. When we are young almost everything is new. Learning, relationships, developing skills, new environments constantly, and our brains encode all of it richly. The older we get, the less new things happen, we have experienced many things so our framework of experience is much larger, and our life gets more routinized. Our brain stops expending energy on experiences and information that it recognizes. So even if something is novel but familiar (the third beach vacation in the last ten years) our brain stops encoding those memories as richly and so there are less real landmarks in our memories to anchor our sense of time. Things start to blur together.

The sum total of this is that regardless of the explanation, time is fleeting. That is what the psalmist is saying. It can seem rather morose to number our days, especially depending on our age. The thing is, there is wisdom in it. Almost every person I know that is north of sixty is numbering their days, considering how many they think they have left, and what is the best way to use them. There is something about realizing that time is our most precious commodity, and we have a finite amount of it that makes us consider how we use it. That is a good thing. Young folk don't often consider it because they think they have so much time left. A wise young person will think like the 60 year old, and be all the better for it.

We will live eternally with our Father in heaven, but our reward is based off how we invest our time on earth. (Refer to the parable of the talents for application).

I have taken enough of our time in the reading of this devotional. So lets apply our hearts towards wisdom by considering what time God has given to us.

What is it saying to you?

Consider your time left:

How are you spending it?

Are you investing your most precious commodity into things and people that really matter?

Or not?

What are we going to do about it?

Write down a concrete goal you want to achieve this week, and do it as a reminder that time is finite.