And pop pop, I fixed Gio's backpack zipper too

Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God. 

Psalm 90 is about perspective.  Viewing life with right perspective is humble wisdom, but tangled up in it as well is joy and beauty.  A good place to stand.  Or kneel.  In every sense of the word “good.”

For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.

So does this not happen every single day with me? Pop out of bed, drink a couple glasses of water, quick fold the clothes, empty the dishwasher, scan the New York Times headline articles, answer gmails from Lisa and Andrea and Manuel, glance at Office Outlook and an email from Jackie White, the director of the Victory Montessori PreK I am visiting tomorrow while the expresso pot comes to a slow boil. Then settle in the quiet of the Morning Office and the next psalm.  Ooops, snatch a towel and out the door to Hillenbrand swim pool: 100 s, 100 k, 200 p, 100 k, 100 s, 300 s, 3 100 k, 6 50 p, 3 100 s, 6 50 k, 300 p and pop pop into the shower, oatmeal and banana and Selah, and lunches in a row, pop, pop and out the door.  Does anyone doubt that story about the time I pop popped a can of beer into my first grader Andrea’s lunchbox?  But luckily Mrs. Rhodes the lunch monitor didn’t notice smart little Andrea slide it quietly back into the paper bag. Forty-three emails and fourteen phone calls and a quick stop at Sprouts for double discount Wednesday, and at the end of it all, when Alan comes in all sweaty from reffing a mentor soccer game and queries, “So how was your day; what did you do,” I have absolutely no idea.  

I was really really busy and I worked really really hard, and there was something about making a SurveyMonkey about the Admin Conference.  And, uh, that is what a thousand years is like in the sight of the LORD God, a momentary blur and done.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

I might have done one thing that really mattered yesterday. JinCheng slid into the car after school yesterday with that texting and dangling ear pod slump that announces that life is pretty darn awful and there is no hope.  Our little drive home guessing routine of “Name two interesting things that happened today,” never got past, “Nothing.” He sipped his chicken noodle soup straight out of the bowl so he didn’t have to lift his head.  Or look at the rest of us.  But after a phone call with wonderful Mr. Winslow, his English teacher, I dumped his cram-packed bag upside down on the dining room table. And for two and a half hours we went through every single paper, one by one. And talked about every single one, and how great he was doing in Physics even though it was really hard and then, then there was Macbeth and All Quiet on the Western Front and page after page of undone homeworks and tests with one tiny answer written for one of the twenty questions and a stapled-together handout of How to Write a DocArg paper and the Six Traits of Writing Rubric and absolutely no idea of what any of it means. So paper by paper we talked, and punched holes with my grandfather’s heavy duty holepuncher and found an old binder on the bookshelf and wrote labels and assignment pages and explained how to write a topic sentence and discussed ten of the possible fifty choices to research and he decided on music piracy and I wrote a pro topic sentence and a con topic sentence so he could choose  which one and showed him what Times New Roman 12 point font double-space was, and just answer these five questions on Chapter Four and do this compound sentence punctuation sheet and memorize just these ten How to Increase Your Vocabulary words and look, I am crossing out all this other stuff, and by the way, I am so glad you love your art class.  

And Jincheng was no longer slumping.  And this morning he had the biggest ever smile on his face. Absolutely the biggest.

O satisfy us early with Thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish Thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish Thou it.

Let Your beauty be upon me and establish Thou the work of my hands. That I may rejoice and be glad all of my days. My so very like-grass-that-withers days.