I Saw The Scoreboard Plainly At A Funeral

Four people spoke and not one of them mentioned the house.

You noticed it about halfway through the second one, and once you had noticed it you could not stop noticing it, and by the fourth you were counting.

His brother talked about a road trip in nineteen eighty four and a tire that went outside a town neither of them could pronounce.

The woman from his work said he was the only person there who ever remembered to ask about her son, and that he asked by name, every time, for eleven years.

His daughter said he was a man who did what he said he was going to do, and then she could not go on for a bit, and everybody waited, and then she said one more sentence and sat down.

And his neighbor said something about a fence they had built together and about how he could not be hurried.

Four people. Eleven years of asking about a boy by name. A tire in nineteen eighty four.

And that man had a house that you have been in, and it was a good house, and he worked for it for thirty years.

And nobody mentioned it. Not once. Not in passing.

What a room actually reaches for

Let me say what you saw in that room, because I think you saw it clearly and have been trying to hold onto it since Thursday.

When people reach for a life, they reach for the same things every time.

They reach for how somebody was in a car. What they remembered about you. Whether they did the thing they said they would. How they were about being hurried.

They do not reach for square footage. Not because it would be crude to mention it at a funeral, though it would. Because it is not the material a life is made of, and the room knows that automatically, and nobody has to be told.

You have watched four people reach for the same things without one of them being briefed, and a roomful of people has never once had to be taught what a life is made of. Psalm 90 asks for teaching about days rather than about totals, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put the request at that size.

You have been counting a material that no room anywhere reaches for, and a house has never once turned up in what people actually say about a man. The Holy Spirit is the one who was standing in that room with you on Thursday, and it is written in Psalm 90 that we are to be taught to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

And now I have to be careful, because there is an obvious version of this that would waste what you saw.

The obvious version says go and be a better man. It sends a person home with a resolution, and the resolution lasts about eleven days, and then the pricing of houses comes back and there is a failure on top of it.

That is not what a funeral is for and it is not what Thursday did to you.

What Thursday did was show you a measure that is already operating, independently of you, in every room, all the time. It is not a target. It is a description of what is actually being recorded.

You have seen a measure that runs whether anybody adopts it or not, and what gets said about a man has never once been decided by what he was aiming at. Psalm 90 asks for a teaching about days rather than for a resolution, and the Spirit of God is the one who framed the request that way.

So teach us to number our days

Here is the verse, and it is a request rather than an instruction.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. (Psalm 90:12, King James Version)

Teach us. The man is asking to be taught something, which means he does not have it and knows he does not have it.

And what he asks to be taught is how to number days. Not years, and not achievements. Days, which is the smallest available unit and the one a person actually lives in.

Eleven years of asking a woman about her son happened one day at a time. Nobody planned it. It was not a project. It was a man asking a question on a Tuesday, and then again the Tuesday after, for eleven years.

You have been handed the actual unit, and no life anywhere has ever once been built out of anything larger than a single day. The Holy Spirit is the one who put the request in that size, and the written word asks for teaching about days rather than about outcomes.

And notice the purpose clause: that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

Apply. It is a word about putting something to use, about attaching the heart to a thing. The numbering of days is not for producing solemnity. It is so that a man knows what he is spending, and can therefore decide where to attach himself.

That is not a resolution. It is closer to a change in what you can see.

You are being offered a change in sight rather than a new target, and a man who can see what he is spending has never once needed a resolution to spend it differently. Psalm 90 asks for teaching and attaches it to the heart's application, and the Spirit of God is the one who does that teaching.