Considering how much can be crowded into a single day—appointments, phone calls, errands, meals, sleep and so on—and then multiplying all of that by the tens of thousands of days we have been allotted, it could make a person wonder what David must have been thinking when he talked about his entire life span being “nothing.”
He certainly must not have written this when he was a young man and his life seemed to extend on endlessly in his future. Very few young people ever consider the prospect of death because it seems to be such a remote experience. He must not have written this when he was in the prime of his life, when he was conquering kingdoms and building a nation. Who could have time to think about death when in the midst of all of that activity?
No, he must have written this toward the end of his life when his days seemed to rush by, hastening him on to his deathbed. At that point in life, the years of a person’s life can seem like a mere passing vapor. Where did all of that time go?
It seems that David’s prayer is that he might live his daily life with a greater awareness of the value of time. We have all been allotted a certain amount of this precious commodity and we should treat it as a gift from God.
“What will I accomplish with the time afforded to me that will hold any meaning in eternity?” David seems to be asking himself. He wanted to live his life with the sobriety that question provokes.
Perhaps a good gauge of my life can be seen by the way I lived my life yesterday. That 24-hour period gave me opportunities to live for self or live for God; to live frivolously or to live soberly; to redeem my time or to squander it. What will that day look like from the perspective of eternity?
Chances are it was a fairly accurate picture of my lifetime. For what is one’s life but an accumulation of yesterdays? Not many people consider such deep subjects but I believe it is a worthwhile question to ponder.