“Your statutes have been my songs in the house of my sojourning” (Psalm 119:54).

To really see my life, every day of my life, as a pilgrimage, and to not keep getting seduced by the deceptive dependability of the No. 22 bus, or the regular hours of Daryl’s Pastry Shop, is a constant prayer request: “Teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). As often as I manage to hold this truth, it pays substantial dividends, for all manner of problems, mourning, covetousness:

“From now on let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods” (1 Corinthians 7:29-30).

“Truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag,” said Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Was even the Son of God fighting hard for perspective when he fended off the disciples’ seductive rhapsodizing over Herod’s magnificent temple: “You see all these, do you not? Truly I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be torn down” (Matthew24:2). I think it not blasphemy to suggest that Jesus had to struggle. Why else would he have been so viscerally upset with Peter’s worldview, and its potential to infect his own, that he brusquely removed the virulent leaven: “Get thee behind me, Satan!” (16:23).

God sends his little hints. Last week the dog died. My friends’ parents are beginning to die off. The first few deaths are seen as an anomaly, and then it reaches a point where there are more that have passed than who remain, and you realize your generation is on deck.

But the statutes of the Lord have become my song, just in the nick of time, too. I don’t know how people face all this without that song.

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