Living Your Dash: Numbering Your Days in Light of Eternity

What if you could know the exact day you'd die? Would it change how you live today? This powerful message takes us into Daniel chapter 5, where a mysterious hand writes three haunting words on a palace wall: Mene, Tekel, Parsin. These words carried a sobering message for King Belshazzar—your days are numbered, your life has been weighed and found wanting, and this will cost you everything. That very night, the king lost his life. But here's where this ancient story becomes deeply personal for us: we may not control the first or last number on our tombstone, but we absolutely control the dash in between. The Hebrew worldview offers us something profound—the urgency of living our one life combined with the peace of knowing it's part of an infinite story. Viktor Frankl discovered in Auschwitz that people who maintained an eternal perspective could find meaning even in unimaginable suffering, while those who lost that perspective lost themselves. The challenge before us is sobering: when we don't count our days with eternity in mind, we become unbalanced, and it costs us. Yet here's the liberating truth—if this were just about trying harder to live a good life, we'd all fail. We'd all be Belshazzar. But Jesus lived the perfect life we couldn't live, paid the cost we couldn't pay, and offers us forgiveness and purpose we could never earn. We're invited to stop striving and start surrendering, to live not for something but from something—from the security of what Christ has already accomplished for us.