A Heart of Wisdom

Psalm 90:12 (NASB)
So teach us to number our days,
That we may present to You a heart of wisdom.

I get a "verse of the day" emailed to me every day from Biblegateway.com.  That verse from The Psalms was the one for today.  It made me stop and think a moment.

The first thing that jumped out at me was the idea of numbered days.  Generally when you hear someone say something about numbering your days, it's a cheesy line in an action movie and something's about to explode - it's a threat of death.  Numbered days are finite days.  They run out.  And this verse would encourage us to take note of that number - count our days and know they are finite.  We count so many other things.  We count our cars, our money, our friends, slights against us by another.  We have calendars for keeping track of our days - all 365 or so of them per year.  And then the new year comes around and we wonder where they all went!  Maybe we weren't doing such a good job of counting them after all...or, more importantly, making them count.

I have been trying to make it a habit in the last couple months to include in my prayers the request for wisdom.  (It worked for Solomon, right?)  Specifically, I have been requesting the wisdom to discern the correct path.  I wonder if I've not had quite the right idea in mind.  We tend to equate wisdom with the mind, not the heart.  I've been asking to be able to think and reason wisely.  I hadn't even thought about my heart.  The Old Testament says that Solomon's wisdom was "put in his heart" by God.  So, stands to reason, it wasn't so much Solomon's mind that people were coming to see in action, but his heart.  When's the last time you said that about someone or someone said that about you?

So, in looking at this part of a prayer in Psalm 90, my take away (at least in part) is this.  The wise recognize the finite nature of the time we have and make each day count by being wise in heart.  It's a cycle worth getting into I think...if I'm wise.