A Prayer about Living Like We’re Dying

So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. Psalm 90:12

Heavenly Father, 

In the novel I just read, 

a professor gives her English 101 students a short essay question: 

“What would you do if you knew 

you only had forty days left to live?”*

At its core, this is what Psalm 90:12 asks us to do, 

to “number our days,” 

to recognize that our earthly days have a limit, 

that our life has an expiration date. 

This is the way to “get a heart of wisdom,” 

to become loving, discerning, 

knowledgeable about the things 

you are knowledgeable about.

So today we ask you to help us think or to journal, 

if only for a few minutes, 

about how we would want to spend our days 

if we only had forty of them left.

I like what theologian J. I. Packer wrote at age 87,**

First, wake each day with the question, 

“How do you want me to glorify and enjoy you today?”

Second, “Live practicing the presence of God in Christ”

 — yes, Lord, help us to have less of this world’s noise 

so that we may rest in the gentle and lowly presence 

of our Savior.

Third, may we finish the course well: 

“Our last sprint should be a sprint indeed.” 

May we not waste our four or forty or four hundred or four thousand days 

on trivialities 

but may we spend each of them 

sharing the good news 

of our hope of glory 

in Jesus Christ 

by setting our affairs in order,  

by serving friends, family, strangers, and enemies, 

by speaking and writing 

the many stories of redemption 

God has written in our lives.

In Jesus’ living and dying and resurrected name. Amen.

Read Psalm 71, Psalm 90; Psalm 92.

*This was in Book 3 of the Sensible Shoes Series by Sharon Garlough Brown.

**I highly recommend Packer’s little book, Finishing Our Course with Joy: Guidance from God for Engaging with Our Aging