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Rule

             “Show me, Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is.. (Psalm 39:4)

This is a good verse for today, since today ends a year in my life and tomorrow begins another. There are times when I consider my age and want to get anxious, because I only have “a few” years left and who knows how soon dementia or physical disability will reduce my ability to do what I want to do. But the real reason for this verse today is because some of the translations use the words “Teach me…to measure my days.”

The homework assignment for the Bible study I’m in is to work on a “rule of life.” The founders of various monastic orders wrote a rule of life for their abbeys (monasteries.) It wasn’t so much a set of commandments as it was a constitution for their order. It described how they would function as an entity, in its relationship with God, with the outside world, and with each other. We all have rules of life, but we may not have decided what we’ll do. It’s just whatever happens. The goal for the Christian is to make room for God, other people, and ourselves, and protect that time.

I’ve been working on mine since before the study began – maybe for the past several years, without imposing the name “Rule of Life” on it, but as I try to consider it for the study, of course my mind goes blank and/or screams, “I don’t have time for this!”

The one thing that has emerged from this is an idea. What if the word “rule” doesn’t refer so much to “one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct or procedure within a particular area of activity”? What if, instead, it refers more closely to “a strip of wood or other rigid material used for measuring length or marking straight lines; a ruler”? What if “rule” refers to the means we use to measure our days? A good day is one in which we do or don’t do certain things.

One of the things that comes to mind is that monasteries limited things that could expand to take all the time of the monastics – they only worked during certain hours. They only slept, ate, etc., certain amounts at certain times. This gave them time to  focus their attention on God and prayer. If we limited things that separated us from God, we would be able to focus on God and be able to measure whether we had a good day or a bad day based on our activities – not in terms of salvation, but in terms of participation

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