Life Means So Much

Every time I hear Chris Rice's song "Life Means So Much," it makes me pause and think about how I'm spending my time.

The song begins with a drumbeat that echoes like a heartbeat, reminding me how closely my life on earth is bound to moments in time. Chris begins with the metaphor of life as a journal page: every day is a page, "every man holds a quill and ink/ And there's plenty of room for writing in all we do and believe and think." Each day we have equal opportunity to bless or curse; in the next stanza he emphasizes that equal opportunity is given to everyone - "we get twenty-four hours each." I'm reminded that time is indeed a resource that I can invest but cannot hoarde, and a gift that I appreciate by using it well.

As with many songs, the theme is expressed most clearly in the chorus:

Teach us to count the days,
Teach us to make the days count.
Lead us in better ways
Somehow our souls forgot.
Life means so much.

The chorus, I later realized, was a restatement of Psalm 90:12, "So teach us to number our days,/ That we may present to Thee a heart of wisdom."

Thanks, Chris, for "filling the page with rhyming verse" to make me wiser.

The song "Life Means So Much" is on Rice's Smell the Color 9, released by Rocketown in 2000.