Devotional:

Psalm 90.12

So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.

These are frightening words. We can read through the Psalms and discover just about every human emotion under the sun; we can dance with joy and weep with sorrow, we can raise our fists and anger and fall to our knees in gratitude. But confronting our mortality? That’s a challenge.

When I was in seminary one of my professors told me that the hardest thing about being a pastor is that I have to remind people that they are dying when everything and everyone else tries to claim the contrary. I have been given the unenviable tasks of proclaiming the deep truth of our mortality in hospital rooms, in church offices, and always at the grave.

Most of us are tempted to believe that we are invincible and that life will never catch up with us. We are tempted to believe that death isn’t real. Countless commercials and products are advertised with the sole purpose of prolonging our inevitable end. Even in church, we spend so much time talking about the joy and hope of God in the resurrection from the dead, that we fail to spend adequate time reminding ourselves of our own earthly finality.

I received a phone call yesterday afternoon from our church secretary informing me that there had been an accident on the church property. A man was driving under the influence and lost control of his vehicle, smashed into our church sign, and eventually flipped over until it came to a stop. The man was quickly rushed to the hospital where he was treated for relatively minor injuries. And when I spoke with the police officers on the scene they kept saying the same thing over and over again, “He’s so lucky it wasn’t worse.”

Death is a frightening thing. Contemplating our finitude is by far one of the strangest things we do as Christians. But in the end, we do it so that we may gain wiser hearts, so that God might sustain us in the midst of our sinful lives, and above all so that we can appreciate the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and take solace in the glory of the resurrection.

It is my prayer that the man who crashed his car into our church sign yesterday will count his days and gain a wiser heart. Through God’s grace I hope he see’s his life for the tremendous gift that it is, and he gives thanks for all that has been given to him; including one more day.