Happy 100th birthday to a what?

Several times a day, graffiti-marked trains rumble through the middle of my town, carrying farm produce and high-tech goods like cars. For hundreds of feet, the tracks edge our nearly-two-mile-long nature preserves walking trail. For most of that length, a grassy greenbelt separates rails from trail. They almost merge, however, near a hundred-year-old landmark. The date 1912 is still visible at the top of one cement culvert set under the tracks. A couple times during our walks, we were startled by deer bounding up the steep sides next to the culvert on their way to the grassy part of the wildlife area.

A hundred years this year! It’s hard to think back to life in 1912. Nine years earlier the Wright Brothers celebrated a wobbly “flight” of 120 feet in their great invention, the “airplane.” In 1912 several wars were going on (no surprise), notably one in the Balkans. Women were campaigning for the right to vote. Henry Ford was sketching plans for automobile assembly lines. The electric refrigerator was a year away from the market. It would sell for $900—about $14,000 in today’s money. Some Victrolas (wind-up phonographs) cost as much, limiting their market to the wealthy. The average person earned $1,033 a year. Gas was seven cents a gallon. Oh, and a new car cost about $941.

Thinking about history comes naturally as one year ends and another begins. So does thinking about the future—and how much time we have left to live on this earth. Believe it or not, in 1991 a New York inventor received patent 5,031,161 for a “life expectancy timepiece.” His “watch” tells people how much time they probably have left in this world. It’s based on actuarial tables like those used by insurance companies to guess at life expectancy based on age, health, and lifestyle factors (smoking, drinking, stress). He remarked that his watch “is to make people realize how precious time is, that each day is just here and you can’t get it back.”

I don’t know anything about this man’s faith walk, but he seems to echo the wise words of a man who lived to be 120, about a third longer than most folks. His name was Moses and in the only chapter in Psalms attributed to him, he puts out the facts about how short life really is. From him we have these words of timeless counsel: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).

In our lifespan, we may support a lot of emotional loads (as opposed to the weight bearing of the 1912 culvert). We may be a place of shelter or transition for family or friends (recalling the culvert’s role with deer). But maybe the better analogy from it is this: are we supporting the things that really matter for eternity? For which we will give account to God?