I Have Started Counting The Mornings Left

You worked it out. Probably in the car, probably at a light.

Nine hundred and something. Or four hundred. Whatever the number was, you did the arithmetic, and then you sat with it for a minute and something in your chest went cold.

And the terrible thing about that number is that it changed nothing and it took something. The morning after you calculated it was exactly the same morning as the one before, except that you were standing in it counting.

That is what the sum does. It puts a person outside the day, holding a clipboard, watching a thing they are supposed to be inside of.

I am not going to tell you to make every moment count. That is the sentence that started this, and it has never once helped a person do anything except feel a low grade panic in an ordinary hallway.

And I am not going to tell you the number is wrong. It is probably about right, and pretending otherwise would be a kindness that lasted four seconds.

My times are in thy hand

There is a short line in Psalm 31 that hands the whole matter over, and it does it in six words.

But I trusted in thee, O LORD: I said, Thou art my God. My times are in thy hand. (Psalm 31:15, King James Version)

My times. Plural, and it is a wide word. Not my lifespan. Not my remaining years. Times, meaning the hours and the seasons and the whole distribution of them.

And they are in a hand. Held, not spent. Somebody else has the keeping of the whole quantity, which means the counting of it was never a task assigned to you.

You have times that are held in a hand, and the tallying of them has never once been your work to do. Psalm 31:15 says my times are in thy hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an arithmetic problem off a person who has been carrying it since the summer.

Notice who is speaking. David is being hunted in that psalm. He says his life is spent with grief and his years with sighing, a few verses later. He is not a man with a comfortable relationship with the passage of time.

He says the line anyway. Not because he feels settled about it, but because it is true and he needs something true more than he needs something soothing.

You are allowed to say a true thing before you feel it, and this has never once required the feeling to arrive first. It is written in Psalm 31:15 that the times are in God's hand, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a hunted man's sentence available to a parent in a parked car.

What the counting actually does

Let me be exact about the damage, because the sum feels like love and it is doing something else.

When a person counts what is left, they start pricing the present against a total. Every ordinary evening gets weighed against the number, and it comes up short, because an ordinary evening is not designed to be significant. It is designed to be Tuesday.

So the counting quietly makes every unremarkable hour into a wasted one, which is the exact opposite of what the counter intended.

Psalm 31:15 puts the total somewhere you cannot see it on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is doing you a kindness by keeping the number out of your hands.

You are free to have an unremarkable evening, and none of it has ever been scored against a number. Psalm 31:15 keeps the times in God's hand rather than on a ledger you can read, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the clipboard away.

And there is a plain thing to say here, because that number has started to feel like an accusation.

How you spend a Tuesday is not a verdict on you. It is not a score and it is not evidence about how much you love the person sitting on the other side of the room from you.

You have not been wasting the time you were given, and an ordinary evening has never once been a failure to use it. The written word gives the times to God's keeping in Psalm 31:15 without asking for an account of them, and the Spirit of God is the one who refuses to grade an evening.

The counting is a form of grief and it is allowed

I want to say something else, because I do not think the sum came from nowhere.

Underneath it is a real thing, and it is not neurotic. Something is genuinely going to end. The version of your household that exists this month will not exist in a few years, and there is no arrangement of anything that prevents that.

That is worth grieving and the grief is not a fault. What the counting is doing is trying to get in front of it, and grief does not work that way. It cannot be prepaid.

Psalm 31:15 does not tell David the trouble is imaginary. It gives him somewhere to put it, which is a hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the same thing with a number worked out at a traffic light.

You have somewhere to put this, and none of it has to be prepaid or braced for in advance. Psalm 31:15 puts the times in a hand rather than in a countdown, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries what a person cannot hold in front of them.