What does it mean to live wisely?

It started in January when I read Moses’s words again, “Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12) As a wife, mom, and writer, I figured it was important to know what he was talking about—I don’t have life to waste, so I want to know what wise-living looks like.

As a wife and mom, I need to spend less time seizing the day and more time living wisely. But how?

Moses is telling us to think about the fact that we’re not here forever, which is a concept that 0% of us want to think.

It sounds terrible because:

There are more uplifting things to think about. Why think about our impending death when we can think about what we’re having for dinner or how in the world Grey’s Anatomy is still on the air?
Thinking about death is really about reflecting on life. Numbering our days asks us to meditate on how we’re living life. As John Mayer croons, “Am I living it right?”
Introspection is hard and time-consuming, and it may require change. As we think through how we’re living life, we may not like what we see. Introspection takes time, and change takes energy to implement… two things that seem to be in short supply.

Numbering our days has one, and only one, purpose.

The purpose of Moses’ counting exercise is not so that we can “carpe diem” or “be all we can be” or cry “YOLO” to the heavens. His reasoning is clear: to gain a heaping helping amount of wisdom.

What’s wisdom and why do I need it?

Wisdom isn’t IQ or EQ. It isn’t about our degree or street smarts. Wisdom is more than knowledge—it’s the information we know in our heads. However, knowledge can become wisdom when we allow the information to sink into our hearts, desires and actions.

In Moses’ perspective, wisdom is accepting the reality that God is God and using that truth to navigate well in the world.

Wise living means getting into alignment with the reality that God knows what’s best, He’s got a plan, and we’re not God. Timothy Keller writes in Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, “Seeing and embracing God as He truly is makes us wise, for it gets us in touch with reality.”

Living wisely is applying what we know about God to our right-now life.

Living wisely takes the knowledge in our head and moves it to our heart so it can influence our actions. But how in the world do we move from information to application to transformation?

It starts by letting go of the muscle memory to simply react to our emotions, thoughts, and self-constructed, unreliable narratives. We must take our circumstances and hold them up to the truth we know so that we can pause before we react. And in that pause, we:

We let Jesus in on what we’re feeling. We let Him in on what’s stressing us out, what’s confusing us, all we think we should be doing, and how nothing is working out. We take our cares to Him, and we don’t squirrel away the hurt. Instead, we bring it all to the light to be healed.

I love what author Christy Black Gifford says, “Quoting Scripture to your heart to behave does nothing to heal the wound. Feel the feelings and keep them tethered to perfect love.”

We let God’s Word and our prayers seep into our current reality to see what we need to do next. According to Keller, we can move truth from our head to our hearts by “revisiting many of the truths we have known in the abstract but that we’ve never connected to lived experience… In other words, we find that biblical and theological reasoning can and does become important to the sufferer, but only after a great deal of hard inner heart work.”

I can know in my brain that God will meet my needs out of His abundance. However, this promise stays in my brain and doesn’t become a reality until I’m in a situation where I’m dependent on that promise and the One who made it.

I’ve been thinking and praying about what it means to live wisely for months. I’ve researched and listened to sermons, and here’s what I’ve found: We have a choice to put our faith into action through trust, obedience, and stepping out in faith even when we can’t see how it will work out. Wise living makes His promises our security. Wise living looks like faith in action. Wise living means that we apply what we know to be true to our right-now lives. And the good news is that wise living is available to all of us.