Yesterday is the longest day you will ever live, and it’s getting longer all the time. No matter who you are, no matter the number of days the expanse of your life will ultimately contain, Yesterday happened.

Of all the days God has given us, Yesterday is the only one that grows with each passing moment in time. You may not have given it any thought lately, but on the day each of us was born, our Yesterday began. Before that — before the day we were born — there was no ‘us’, and there was no “Yesterday” for us. Yesterday is where we’ve been all our lives.  Every breath we’ve ever taken. Every idea we’ve ever conceived. Our tears. Our joys. Our successes, and our failures. The record and recollection of all our moments prior to this very moment in time — all of these are held in the repository of Yesterday. And, it is the connection of all of those moments and events that represents the plot and course and story of our journey: the life God has allowed us to live.

Yesterday is the only day that grows longer with the passing of time. It’s the day preachers talk about most when they officiate at the memorial services of people who have died.  When pastors reflect on those lives, their focus invariably revolves around memories and accomplishments, words spoken, acts of kindness rendered, events that happened … Yesterday. Often, family members bring pictures of the deceased to memorial services; awards and plaques and memorabilia and “rememberings.”  But, what those loving family members are really doing is organizing and presenting life’s journal entries and recollections of their loved one, things written down and duly noted in the documentation of life lived Yesterday.

Yesterday is an easy day to recognize, really. As our lives move along that road and race that has been marked out for us, in the rearview mirror of our journey, God has given us the ability to see a reflection of what we’ve been up to all our lives. Without Yesterday, there would be no day for us to look back upon. And if we couldn’t look back, an important part of our understanding and appreciation for life would go wanting. As we live the moments of our lives, our Yesterday lengthens; our memories deepen and expand. And the experiences we have lived through, somehow, change us at a very deep and visceral and “profoundational” level. The wrinkles in my brow, the decreasing number of hairs on my head, the halting gait in my step, all of these represent the reality of time marching on, in spite of all I can do.

And all of us are in the same parade of days. The older we get, the more Yesterday is filled with the remembrance of the minutia and mania of the journey. An interesting fact, I think: Researchers have discovered that infants smile as many as 900 times a day, while those of us who have lived to be sixty-years and older smile, on average, three times a day. I wonder? What happened along the way to living ‘life’ that caused the frequency of smiles to change, do you suppose?

Perhaps, we don’t give enough thought to the hilarity and sobriety of the happenings contained within the day we call … Yesterday.

I read it again, a few days ago in The Book. One of the writers of Psalms wrote,

“For all our days pass away under your wrath, our years come to an end like a sigh. The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong;”

Ps. 90:9, RSV

All my life (and especially during my twenties and thirties) I thought that anyone who made it into their sixties was really old.  Now, I’m thinking, “Bummer. Where on earth did the time go?”

Yesterday isn’t a day we refer to in the present; yesterday isn’t an ‘is’ day; It’s a ‘was’ day. Yesterday was.