The Old Apple Came Down In The Storm

It was here before you and it has gone before you.

That is the sentence that has been sitting in you since the morning you came out and found it across the fence, and I do not think you have said it to anybody, partly because it sounds like the sort of thing a man says when he is being dramatic and you are not.

But it is not drama. It is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is what has hold of you.

That tree was older than you are. Somebody planted it who is long gone, it was standing when you were a boy, and it has been fruiting since before anybody now alive remembers it not fruiting.

And you looked after it for maybe thirty years, which is a long time by the standards of a man and a very short chapter by the standards of that tree.

You are allowed to grieve a thing that was never yours, and a tree older than a man has never once belonged to the one who tended it last.

And here is what I think has been going on since, and I will say it plainly because you would prefer plain.

You are not only grieving a tree. You are looking at a thing that was here before you and has now gone, and you are somewhere in the same sentence, and you have been standing at that fence with something in your chest that is about more than an apple tree.

Teach us to number our days

There is a line in Psalm 90 that is not a comfort in the ordinary sense and is far more use than one.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. (Psalm 90:12, King James Version)

Teach us to number our days.

Now, notice that this is a request to be taught something rather than a statement of fact. He is asking for a capacity. Numbering our days is presented as a skill that has to be given, which means it is not something a person arrives at by simply getting older.

You are able to ask for something rather than being expected to have worked it out, and the counting of a life has never once been treated as a thing that comes automatically with years. Psalm 90:12 asks God to teach it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that request land on a man standing at a fallen trunk.

And the psalm around it is entirely unsentimental. It says our days are threescore years and ten, and that they are soon cut off. It compares people to grass that is renewed in the morning and cut down by evening.

Nobody in that psalm is being consoled by being told they will last.

You are not being offered a longer count, and Scripture has never once comforted anybody about their days by disputing the number of them. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a psalm that looks straight at the length of a life, and the written word says soon cut off without any softening anywhere.

And then the purpose clause, which is where the whole verse turns. That we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

The numbering is for something. It is not morbid arithmetic and it is not resignation. It is asked for so that the days that are there get used rather than assumed.

You are being handed a use for the counting rather than only the count, and knowing the length of a thing has never once been asked for in order to make somebody sad about it. The Spirit of God is the one who turns an honest number into wisdom, and the word attaches the purpose in the same breath as the request.

It was never yours and that is the good part

Let me say something about ownership, because there is a real comfort in it and it is not the obvious one.

That tree was never yours.

Nobody alive planted it and it was never going to end with any one keeper. There was a line of people who looked after it, and there were others before whose names nobody has, and the tree did not know a single one of them.

Now, that sounds like a diminishment and I do not mean it as one. It is the opposite.

Because if it was never yours, then its ending is not your failure, and its ending is not your ending either. You were a chapter. Chapters do not conclude when the book does.

You are not the one that tree belonged to, and a man who tended something for thirty years has never once been the one it was finishing with. The Holy Spirit is the one who puts a person into a longer line than their own life, and Psalm 90:12 asks for a count precisely because the count is short.

And there is a second thing that I think will actually reach you.

You have spent thirty years doing something for a thing that outlived the man who planted it. That is not a small thing to have done with three decades. Very few people ever tend anything that was old when they got to it.

You are able to have been the keeper of something without being its owner, and a caretaker has never once been a lesser figure than a planter. The Spirit of God is the one who counts what a man did within his own days, and the written word asks for the numbering so that the days get applied to something.

Count the rings and stop at your year

So here is the assignment, and it is exact and it will take some doing.

Count the rings, out loud, and stop when you get to your own birth year.

Go out to the cut end. Start at the middle, which is the oldest part, and count outward, and stop counting at the ring that was formed the year you were born.

You are able to find your own year on the face of a fallen tree, and a man counting rings out loud has never once been doing something morbid. Psalm 90:12 asks for the numbering of days as a thing to be taught, and the Holy Spirit is the one out there while a man counts.

And then look at what is on either side of where you stopped.

Inside that ring, toward the middle, are the years the tree stood without any of this. Somebody else was there, or nobody was. And outside it, all the way to the bark, run the years of one life alongside it, most of them spent doing other things entirely.

That is the actual shape of it, laid out in wood, and you can put a finger on it.

You are able to see the whole of a thing at once, and a life laid out in rings has never once been more frightening than the same life carried around unexamined. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes an honest count into something a man can stand in front of, and the word asks for the numbering so that wisdom can be applied.

Count it out loud. Not in your head. The saying is what keeps it from becoming brooding, because brooding is silent and counting out loud is a job.