3 Practical Ways To Number Your Days
It’s the end of the month, which means it is time to utter the over-used phrase “I can’t believe the month is over, it flew by.”
All of us can relate to this, either because we say it ourselves or we hear it from others. For some reason, even in 2020 when life hasn’t gone how anyone would have expected, time still seems to fly by.
But why is that? Even if our day to day lives don’t seem to move very fast, we look up and all of a sudden a week, or a month, or a year has already passed. Is there anything we can do about the quickness of life?
A quick life isn’t a Biblical one
In Psalm 90:12, Moses writes a compelling and convicting verse.
“Teach us to number our days carefully so that we may develop wisdom in our hearts.”
But how can we actually do that? What does it look like to develop the wisdom of numbering our days? What can we do to make our days count. After all, busyness isn’t a virtue.
In fact, Jesus did this quite well. Jesus was never “busy” and he lead a movement that changed the world. So what can we do to number our days? Below are three practical steps you can take. But fair warning, reading them without doing them what be much help!
1. Create a weekly rhythm of rest
The biggest reason life can seem to move fast for us is because we have no consistent rhythm of rest. When you’re always going and doing, of course everything blurs together.
In our culture today, life is fast because we don’t do anything to make it slow down. We move from one thing to the next and even our down time is full of things we are doing or consuming.
From binging a TV show, from a quick scroll of social media which turns into an hour, to having a day off but not feeling rested or energized, our problem isn’t that we are always working but that even our days off a don’t give us rest.
To create a weekly rhythm of rest you must do two things. First, you have to plan to do this every week. It could be a day on the weekend, or if you work a non-traditional schedule, planning to do this on one of your weekdays off.
Once you commit to a weekly rhythm of rest, you then have to be intentional about what your day will look like.
Do you like to sleep in or get up early? What gives you energy and refreshment? Is it reading a book on the couch or having a day of multiple activities? The goal is to have some things on your weekly rhythm of rest that energizes you.
For me, relaxing at home all day is not restful. It actually puts me in a bad mood. I want to be around people or out doing something. For my family, Saturday is the day where Christina and I avoid doing any work and try to rest with our family. Which means I can’t wait until Saturday to think about what I/we might do.
A weekly rhythm of rest takes work and intentionality. To number our days we must remember that our days are numbered. Pastor Rich Villodas puts it this way,
“The Sabbath prepares us for death (there will come a time when all our work will cease) and protects us against death (i.e. death from overwork).”
2. Spend less time online
One of the greatest stresses and time wasters today is the internet. We are inundated with tons of information (99% of which we can do nothing about) and we spend more time on it than we realize, particularly on our phones.
In fact, according to Deloitte’s 2018 Global Mobile Consumer Survey, people on average pull out and use their phones 52 times a day. That’s 104 minutes a day if you only use your phone in two-minute increments. And my guess is that’s a conservative estimate. Our phone usage is one of the biggest reasons we think we never have enough time.
The truth is that we do have enough time, we simply don’t spend our time well. Numbering our days reminds us that our time is finite which encourages us to spend our time better.
I’m not much of a fan of the word “busy” because it implies a lack of control. Personally, I have found that busyness is often synonymous with laziness. The truth is busyness is a choice. More often than not we are “busy” because we don’t plan well enough how we are going to spend our time.
All of this to say, if you reduce the amount of time you spend online, you’ll have more time. The two best ways I have found to do this is by checking my email less and limiting the amount of times per day I allow myself to check social media.
This isn’t easy because most of us are addicted to checking our phones and being online. But numbering our days well reminds us are time is limited. When we remember our days are numbered, we will use more wisdom in how we spend our time.
3. Think about what happens to you when you die
You are going to die. You will also die much sooner than you think. Because of the “busyness” of our lives, even if you live a long life, without numbering your days your number of days will go by quick.
When you think about your death, it encourages you to live in a way that matters. This is why losing a loved one is such a big reminder to us about what’s important in life. When someone close to you dies, it shocks us back into the reality we don’t think about much in our culture today; death is real.
Imagine how differently you might live if you told yourself everyday I’m going to die sooner than I think.
Perhaps this would cause stress, anxiety, and depression to fall over you. That’s not my hope with this exercise, but if you haven’t spent much time reckoning with this thought it could scare you.
But hopefully it will cause you to live with much more intentionality. Thinking about our death may not be fun, but it does give us perspective. You will die one day, and what do you think will happen to you? Since you’ll die sooner than you think, not is a good time to think about that.
For followers of Christ this isn’t depressing news. Instead it encourages us to live lives that count because we know that our lives do count. Everyone matters to God, and through Jesus we are given the grace and love of God himself. This encourages us to
Knowing we will die helps us focus on what is important. Do we have a weekly rhythm of rest that reminds us we are not God? Do we spend too much time online and not in the real world? Do we ever think about the fact that our days are numbered?
Living in wisdom
One of my favorite definitions of wisdom is skill in living. Numbering our days helps us develop the skill of living well. Wisdom not just knowing about something, it’s living out what you know.
Numbering our days helps us live in a way that matters. The above three ways help us practically do just that.
