June 12, 2026

Near Death Experience

Psalm 90:12 – “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

A friend once described what happened to him after coming frighteningly close to death. The experience itself was terrifying, but what struck him most wasn’t the moment of crisis — it was what happened afterward. His thinking changed. Things that had consumed enormous amounts of his mental and emotional energy before suddenly seemed trivial. Relationships he had neglected moved to the front of his priority list. Conversations he had been putting off became urgent. The grudge he had been carrying for two years didn’t seem worth the weight anymore.

Nobody had to preach at him. Nobody had to convince him to reorder his life. A single brush with eternity did what years of routine living had not — it clarified everything.

The sobering reality is that most of us need a near miss to produce the kind of clarity that should be informing our everyday lives all along. We live as though time is an unlimited resource, treating the urgent as important and allowing the truly important to wait indefinitely. It takes something that shakes the foundation to remind us that the foundation was never as permanent as we assumed.

Moses understood this. His prayer in Psalm 90 wasn’t born out of comfort — it came from a deep awareness of human brevity and the weight of days that pass without intention. Numbering our days isn’t a morbid exercise. It’s the discipline of living with the kind of clarity that most people only find at the edge of losing everything.

You don’t have to almost die to start thinking like someone who nearly did.

Today’s Prayer: Lord, help me to number my days honestly, invest in what truly matters, and stop treating time as though I have an unlimited supply of it. Amen.

Reflection Question: If a near death experience clarified your priorities tomorrow, what would immediately move to the top of your list?