Week 6 Psalm 39
I know a guy whose mom lived to be 104 years old.
Which seems like a very long time.
She would have been born at the end of World War I and lived through the roaring-Twenties
great-Depression
world-war-2
Hiroshima
Chinese-revolution
decolonization
cold-war
space-race
collapse-of-the-Soviet-empire
climate-change
9/11
globalization
decline -of-the-American-empire
cryptocurrency…like that (plus a lot more).
It all seems like a very long time.
Lord, remind me how brief my time on earth will be.
Remind me that…my life is fleeing away.
An entire lifetime is just a moment to you;
Human existence is but a breath.
We are merely moving shadows…
Human existence is as frail as breath.
When it comes to Time it’s kind of crazy comparing Human Time with the Lord’s Time (104 vs. 1 Trillion+ doesn’t even register).
So I don’t really think David’s main point was to compare Time with – basically – Eternity. I think that’s why he ends up focusing on the (very few) years he does actually have:
O Lord…I am your guest – a traveler passing through…Spare me so I can smile again before I am gone and exist no more.
This sounds to me like an I-Don’t-Have-Too-Much-Time Psalm.
Note: quotes from Psalm 39:5-6, 11, 12-13 (NLT)