“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” -Psalm 90:12
“He has a fever and there is a high probability that it could be the beginning of an illness that will prove fatal.” These were the words of our team leader as we encountered a sick four-year-old boy in a remote Nepali village. A little over two years ago I was there on a short-term mission trip. Our mission was twofold, give away water filters and tell people about Jesus, the living water. At the time of our trip, the statistics were that 44,000 children under the age of 5 die every year in Nepal due to unclean water. Knowing this information only raised our concern for the young boy.
We, in modern America, have known an uncommon privilege. On the whole, for the majority of parents in our country, their first thought when one of their children has a fever is not, “will this prove fatal.” No, our first thought is “where is the over-the-counter fever reducer” or “let me call the pediatrician.” I call this an uncommon privilege because not only do parents in many parts of the world today not have this privilege, but most parents throughout human history never knew such privilege. A child spiking a fever for most parents throughout all history would raise anxiety and be a reminder of the fragility of human life haunted by mortality.
COVID-19 has been a reminder of how quickly sickness can come upon us and overwhelm our best medical science and technologies. If a loved one were to spike a fever during this season, mortality probably wouldn’t be far from our thoughts. One important thing we can learn (relearn) through this pandemic is what God’s Word instructs: “teach me to number my days that I may get a heart of wisdom.”
Recently, Matt Smethurst posted an excerpt from C.S. Lewis’ On Living in An Atomic Age. Smethurst was pointing out how Lewis’ counsel to his contemporaries is very appropriate for our current moment. Lewis said:
…do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
Those are sobering and humbling words. In his book, Living Life Backwards, David Gibson speaks of dying well and living in light of our certain end. His comments are helpful:
Dying well doesn’t mean that when death touches your family you do not have a broken heart. It doesn’t mean that you do not experience suffocating grief. To die well means that you realize death is the limit God has placed on creatures who want to be gods. (pg. 109)
He continues:
To die well means I realize death is not simply something that happens to me; it happens to me because I am a sinner…(dying well) means I have been heading for death from the moments I was born. It means I have been laying up treasure in heaven, and that is where my heart is. To die well means everything I have in this world I hold with open hands because I love Jesus more than anything and anyone else, and I am happy to go home to him. (pgs. 109-110)
Notice what the Psalmist says, he wants us to learn to number our days so that we many gain “a heart of wisdom.” Learning to understand our mortality produces wisdom in us so that we will know how we ought to live. As Gibson succinctly says: “Preparing to die means thinking about how to live” (pg. 110).
Written by Matt Baker