Hello, Bridgetown and all of you joining us online. I'm Bethany Allen and this is the

Bridgetown Daily for Friday, May 29th. Have you noticed how time right now is a very

strange thing? Most of us aren't asking for more. In fact, many of us are asking for less,

thinking of all your parents out there. Our days now somehow have this distinct ability

to feel both long and short at the same time, and our planning for the future feels at

best permanently unhold, at least until further notice. Maybe it's some sort of pandemic

butterfly effect, but whatever it is, it has for better and worse forced me to see and

embrace time in a new way. To me, it feels both newly fragile and short, and yet at the

same time robust and intricate. Laced all throughout the Scriptures is this concept of time.

From Jesus who said, my hour has yet to come to Paul who says, today is the day of salvation,

to the great King Solomon who said, there's a time for everything. As I've been reflecting on time,

and maybe more specifically, the time we have been given in this season, I keep coming back to a

verse of Scripture from Psalm chapter 90. This verse is set right in the middle of a prayer that

Moses offered on behalf of the people of Israel in response to their crisis of exile, and it centers

around time. Now leading up to the verse, there's this beautiful and sharp contrast drawn between

humanity's limited time and God's enduring time. God being an eternal and limitless creator,

and we, being creation, with limits. The first 11 verses of this text seem to crescendo

as they list and call out the might and the power and even the wrath of God, and then,

in what feels like a moment of both clarity and breath, the author writes this simple prayer,

teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Scholars say here that this line

is not as much about the petition, as it is the meaning and sentiment behind it. Notice the language

the author uses, teach us to number. To number something is to count it as important or to market,

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