What?! Your life in jelly beans! Perhaps this would be better to post on Easter instead – you know, with all the jellybeans? But, it’s Halloween today and I’m tying to tie together some thoughts about candy, death and life! I don’t know what you’re favorite Halloween candy is? Probably not jelly beans?! But in the midst, not only of Halloween, with reminders of skulls, skeletons and ghosts roaming around our consciousness, but on any day – it’s helpful and wise to be mindful of our death, of our life and of our days. Rather than being a morbid reminder that someday we too will die, it can be a wonderful reminder to make the most of the time we have.
This video wonderfully illustrates this Psalm:
“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
PSALM 90:12
And here’s a practical thought about how to keep track of our days…
DIARY
Even the most cursory of diaries can be of incalculable value. What the weather was doing. Who we ran into on the street. The movie we saw. The small boy at the dentist’s office. The dream.
Just a handful of the barest facts can be enough to rescue an entire day from oblivion — not just what happened in it, but who we were when it happened. Who the others were. What it felt like back then to be us.
“Our years come to an end like a sigh . . . ” says Psalm 90, “so teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (w. 9,12).
It is a mark of wisdom to realize how precious our days are, even the most uneventful of them. If we can keep them alive by only a line or so about each, at least we will know what we’re sighing about when the last of them comes.– FREDERICK BUECHNER
Leave a Reply