Numbering My Days

As my Facebook memories keep telling me, it's been a year since I first wrote a blog post here about my metastatic diagnosis. One year of the (potentially) three left to me. Have I done one-third of the things I want to do before I die? Hardly. I feel like life goes on as if I never got this horrible diagnosis; time marches on, like it missed the memo that my lifetime will be shorter than most. I do my treatment and hope my body doesn't notice I am sneaking in more time.

My current treatment averages 20 months of positive response before the cancer spreads again. I'm over halfway there. One more year and I may have used up the effectiveness of this first drug. But maybe not. Maybe I will defy the odds and go much longer without my cancer spreading. No one knows.

You are probably thinking that you don't want to hear me say these things. But I'm afraid if I don't say them, if I don't stop to mark the days slipping past, that I may miss them. Like parents often say, "The days are long, but the years are short." How do I make each day matter? How do I "suck out all the marrow of life" - to quote Dead Poets Society quoting Thoreau - "to live deliberately [...] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived"?

One year has gone by. If I have two more years like this one, will I be content? Will I feel like I have fulfilled my purpose? Or have I squandered my days by filling them with meaningless, mind-numbing things? The psalmist asks God to "teach us to number our days" (Ps. 90:12). I don't know what that means or how to go about doing it. I struggle so much with wanting to do God's will but feeling like I don't know what it is. I think I want it to be more concrete than what it is.

I remember agonizing over choosing a major in college; literally crying because I didn't know what to do. It was my senior year (of college!) and I hadn't declared my major. I was so afraid I would choose wrongly and ruin God's plan for my life. I ended up settling on an English major. But have I ever worked in a field that required an English degree? For about one year in my whole career. I see now that it didn't matter what I picked! God had a course for my life and was going to fulfill that, even if I "messed things up" by choosing the "wrong" major. He is bigger than us. No matter what we do, He can work it for His glory.

You would think I would have learned from this lesson. But I sit here tonight worried that I might not spend the time allotted to me "correctly." That I would work when I should be at home, or be at home when I should be working. That I would miss out on some big thing God has for me to do. I thought the rest of Psalm 90 might have wisdom along these lines, something the psalmist might have learned from his request that God teach us to number our days:

Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
    that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
    and for as many years as we have seen evil.
Let your work be shown to your servants,
    and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
    and establish the work of our hands upon us;
    yes, establish the work of our hands! (Ps. 90:14-17)

It sounds like God's will for our days is not some specific task or accomplishment, but rather seeking Him first and delighting in His work in the world and His work in and through us. If I do those things, my days will count, regardless of whether or not I check off everything on my bucket list. Now if only I can remember this!