Act 1: Vapour
Life feels long when we are waiting.
For the job to come through, the child to sleep, the ache to ease.
Minutes stretch wide, and hours feel heavy.
But life feels short when we are looking at the past.
Oh look, the baby now walks.
The friend we meant to call, now is gone.
And the mirror holds a face we don’t fully recognise.
Life is a strange paradox
Both heavy and light, both long and fleeting.
The psalmist puts it best: “You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Everyone is but a breath, even those who seem secure”.
We rise like mist at dawn, visible for a moment, only to vanish when the heat comes. We are vapour, seen, then gone.
Our achievements, our carefully stacked schedules, our worries that feel so heavy in the night; they too dissolve.
What remains?
What remains?
Act 2: The Eternal God
Against our fleetingness stands the Eternal One.
The Ancient of Days who was before the vapour and will be after it.
The One who holds together both the seconds we waste and the centuries we never see.
He is unchanging,
Sustaining.
If we are grass, He is the soil that nourishes and outlasts.
If we are whispers, He is the Word that never fades
The psalmist prayed it plainly: “Teach us to number our days carefully so that we may develop wisdom in our hearts”.
Act 3: Numbering Our Days
To number our days is not to count them like coins but to weigh them like treasures.
To live with the awareness that our breath is brief, yet each one is of His grace.
It is to rise in the morning and say, “I may not have forever, but I have today. What will I do with it?”
It is to sit at the table, with food and family, and whisper thanks to Him.
It is to anchor every fleeting hour to the God who is not fleeting.
Act 4: Eternity in Our Hearts
God has “set eternity in the human heart.”
We know there's more than this transient life. Here, and then gone with the wind.
So let the vapour remind us.
Not of what we are losing, but of what we are heading toward.
Not of days that slip away, but of the Day that will not end.
Life is fleeting, yes.
But the hands that hold us are eternal.
And in Him, nothing truly vanishes.