Psa 39:5   You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Each man's life is but a breath.

           

In a day when the media in its many forms pumps out the proud declarations of man, the psalmist's statement to God here, comes with a pleasing humility. There is an awareness here of the frailty of life and the shortness of life.

 

It has been said that the older you get the faster life seems to pass you by. I look back on over sixty years of life and wonder where it has all gone and rue its going. If only I had known what I know now, perhaps I would have lived differently. But that is the frailty of human life; we live with what we know today, and it is only when we look back from a distance do we realise fresh things about life.

 

Yet there is something different about this verse. Actually it is more about God than it is about us. The psalmist speaks about how our lives are seen from God's perspective. Our seventy, eighty or even ninety years are as nothing to God. Yes, they may rush by from our perspective or we may look back and they may seem incredibly long, but from God's point of view each of our lives lasts for just a breath. God is so great that if He did breathe, then He would breathe in and we are born and He breathes out and we are gone. Can you catch something of the enormity of God? He sees the millions of years of existence and they are very little to Him. Yet what is more wonderful, is that despite His greatness, He steps into our tiny piece of time and space. He's with you in this day, as short as it is to Him. Enjoy Him.