The Life Behind the Number
Listen to me, descendants of Jacob, all you who remain in Israel. I have cared for you since you were born. Yes, I carried you before you were born. I will be your God throughout your lifetime—until your hair is white with age. I made you, and I will care for you. I will carry you along and save you. — Isaiah 46:3–4 (NLT)
My mother turned ninety this past weekend. She spent a portion of the evening dancing, which is not the sentence I ever expected to write about a woman who once looked me dead in the eye more than forty years ago now and told me plainly that she did not expect to see the far side of fifty. She had her reasons. There were ailments and surgeries and a list of things her body was not going to do for her, and she said it with the kind of seriousness that does not invite argument. I was young enough to believe her and old enough to be frightened by it. Ninety was never on the table. And then this past weekend it was, and there she was as we sang her accolades, moving like someone who had been handed a different set of instructions than the rest of us were given.
Ninety is a number, and a number by itself is not much. Plenty of people reach an age without a great deal happening inside it, and plenty of people never get near one and still leave behind more than the rest of us manage in twice the time. What makes a life full is not the length of it. If you asked my mother how she got here, she could give you a list — the surgeries she came through, the odds she outlasted, a stubbornness I am told runs in the family. But she would not lead with any of that, and she would not stop there. She would tell you it was faith. Not as a slogan, and not as the tidy answer you give company. But as the plain accounting of what actually happened. In every one of those stories there is a moment where she was not the one doing the carrying.
There was a season in her life when her life seemed like a recital of the poem Footprints in the Sand the way you would repeat one side of an argument. Needing the reassurance, working it out loud, asking the question the poem asks. At ninety, that is all but a memory. She does not wonder anymore whose footprints those are. That is what a long faith does to a person: the question quiets down, and what is left is thankfulness. Isaiah said it to a people who had every reason to believe God had moved on from them. “I have cared for you since you were born. Yes, I carried you before you were born. I will be your God throughout your lifetime—until your hair is white with age. I made you, and I will care for you. I will carry you along and save you” (Isaiah 46:3–4). Notice the span of it. Before birth, through the middle, all the way to white hair. God does not describe Himself here as someone who shows up for the emergencies. He describes Himself as the One who has been carrying the whole way.
What I carried home from that evening was not amazement at her years. It was a reminder, one I clearly still need, to go ahead and learn what she has already learned. My own gratitude has a habit of arriving late and attaching itself to outcomes. I thank God when a thing works out, which quietly means I am thanking Him for the result rather than for the company. But the result was never the gift. Anyone who can recall a hard season ending badly and still comes through it with their faith intact knows the difference. She is not thankful because she got ninety years. She is thankful because she was not walking a single one of them alone, and the ninety is simply how long she has had to notice it. “Teach us to realize the brevity of life, so that we may grow in wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12) The point of counting our days was never to accumulate them. It was to pay attention to who has been in them. That is a lesson available at any age, and I would rather not wait sixty more years to accept it.
You may be nowhere near ninety. You may be in the stretch where the odds have already been read to you, and you are not sure you believe the better version. A full life is not something handed to you at the end to be totaled up and graded. It is being built right now, out of ordinary days you may be too tired to count as much of anything. So, before you go looking for something to be thankful for, it may be worth looking back at what you have already come through and asking who was carrying you then. He has not set you down since.
When you look back at what you have already come through, where can you see now that you were being carried? Is your thankfulness attached to how things turned out, or to the One who stayed with you either way?
A PRAYER
My prayer is that we are thankful for God carrying us long before we knew enough to notice, and for staying with us through the parts we never expected to survive. Teach us to count our days honestly, and to find our gratitude in Your presence rather than in how things turn out. For the life You have given us, all of it, the hard years included, we are grateful. Amen.