On a quest to understand what it means to fear the Lord, I came across this verse and got super excited.
“Come, you children, listen to me:
I will teach you the fear of the Lord…”
Apparently it was something to be learned. Ok! I thought. I can do that. I love learning! So I continued reading.
“…Who is the man who desires life,
And loves many days, that he may see good?” (NKJV)
Ohhhhhhh…. and then I realized, here I am – one who doesn’t want to get older. What I see with more days added to my life is more gray hairs, more lines on my face, and more saggy parts. This verse, though, is telling me to delight in each day, to have pleasure in them and want more and more days, so that I “may see good“. And guess what the word good translates to in Hebrew? BEAUTY!
It seems to me that I just got schooled in what beauty is. I was thinking that beauty was something that faded and that more days equaled less beauty. But this is telling me that with a God fearing perspective, more days mean more opportunities for beauty.
It looks like I need to change my way of looking at getting older. It’s about being beautiful rather than looking beautiful; it’s about looking for beauty rather than mourning it’s loss. And it’s not actually about getting older at all. It’s about getting to have that many more days to experience God’s goodness. His beauty never fades!