"You return man to dust and say, 'Return, O children of man!' For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night."
How many days have you been pulled through lately?
You know those days. The day seemed to have an agenda before you engaged yours. The list you woke up with as the day’s map didn't survive past the morning. A meeting ran long, a conversation went deeper than expected, one errand became three. By dinner you'd traded most of your plans for whatever the day decided to put in front of you.
Three verses into Psalm 90, Moses tells us what to do with that day.
Two returns
"You return man to dust, and say, 'Return, O children of man!'"
The first return is unmistakable: he's been returning us to dust since the day we were born, the way Genesis 3 said he would. The second is the same verb, said this time to us. It could be another way of saying what he just said, or it could open into something wider. Scripture uses this verb for coming back from exile, for turning back from idols, for the slow walk a prodigal makes home.
The first return is something done to us; the second is something said to us.
The scale of the call
The voice saying it doesn't use the same scale as us.
A thousand years is over 365,000 days. Look at verse 4: "For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night."
To God, those 365,000 days are like a single yesterday, or a three-hour watch in the night. If a millennium is one of God's days, your seventy or eighty years is less than two hours. If it's one of his overnight watches, your whole life is fifteen minutes.
How would you spend fifteen minutes?
What to do with the brief
The brevity isn't the message.
Moses doesn't put the dust verse and the watch verse together to tell us we're small. He puts them together to tell us we're called. We're returning to dust on a timeline that, to God, is overnight. And inside that overnight, the call is being made.
You don't figure out what to do with a brief day by looking at the brevity; you answer the call being made into it by eternity.
How would eternity inform this meeting, this conversation, this errand, this chore?