Like an Evening Gone

For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past and like a watch in the night. -Psalm 90:4

Psalm 90 inspired a very well known hymn, “O God Our Help In Ages Past. “ You might be familiar with the last three verses of the hymn:

A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.

Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be Thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home.

Time is once again mentioned in our readings this week - another sure sign that Advent is around the corner. Advent asks us to be awake, ready, and intentional in how we use our time. Advent is kind of like the church’s version of making a new year’s resolution, and as the first Sunday of Advent approaches, (Nov 29 this year) which marks the start of the new liturgical year, our readings get us thinking about what we’re going to resolve when the new year begins. But it’s more than just giving up chocolate or something superficial. Advent and the weeks preceding it remind us to examine the ways we’re spending our time - spending our lives - and to make deep adjustments.

Psalm 90:4 points out how God’s time is different than our ttime. A thousand years is just like the blink of an eye to God, and God’s perspective of time is eternity instead of just a few decades. And to God, a thousand years gone is a mere drop in a bucket. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of living through something that seems to be dragging on forever, but when it is over, it suddenly seems so much shorter in retrospect. The psalmist is reminding us that we will look back on the few years we’ve been given and think how very brief they really were. So we’re urged to embrace the days we have more fully and mindfully so that we don’t carelessly let them slip away “like an evening gone.'“

Psalm 90 ends with these words: “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” Yes, help us, God, to notice each day and use it to apply our hearts to what really matters, before time has passed us by like a rolling stream.

This Sunday’s readings are HERE. Ordinary time offers many readings to contemplate each Sunday. Track 1 will lead you through certain Old Testament books week by week more in depth. Track 2 provides an Old Testament text that is meant to compliment the Gospel of the week.