Psalm 90 has traditionally been used in funeral services and while it is about death, I think that use might miss the point. Eugene Peterson says this psalm teaches us to “pray our death” and I think that is much closer to the mark. It is a meditation on the relative shortness of human life when compared to God.

We moderns haven’t defeated death, but we’ve made ourselves feel like we have. Technology, medicine, entertainment, and our inveterate addiction to distract ourselves from what is painful keep the reality that we will all die on the cloudy margins of our consciousness. This psalm acts something like smelling salts, jerking us from that fantastic stupor. We must wake up and smell our death.

You’ve got seventy, maybe eighty years. That’s it. Yes, from time to time folks make it beyond that, but it is still a pretty reliable average. That means I personally have twenty five or thirty five years to go. That, of course, doesn’t account for what state my health might be in during that time. The point is, death is supposed to teach us. Our mortality is supposed to be a kind of stress test; what reaction will it produce in us?

One reaction to our imminent demise is to live it up. I haven’t got long and I’ve got a bucket list. What haven’t I experienced yet? This psalm, however, challenges us with another response: “teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” This crucial turn in the psalm goes from a kind of lament about how insignificant human lives seem to a plea for God to lend meaning to our lives. Hobbes famously said that life can be “nasty, brutish, and short.” But notice what the psalmist asks for: “satisfy us,” “make us glad,” “let thy work appear,” “let the beauty of the Lord be upon us.” It is a plea for God to rescue our short lives from futility and meaninglessness.

Do you think about your death much? How does that make you feel? It is not a morbid exercise, but one that can transform our lives. When we face our limits, embrace them, and offer them up to God they can be transfigured into something beautiful. The poet George Herbert said that the intention “for thy sake” could make drudgery divine. When we live, and die, for the sake of the one who died and lived for us, we can participate in his light, beauty, and glory.