I studied Criminal Justice in college, partly because it required no math. The arithmetic part of my brain doesn’t function as I would like, so I avoid it. Criminal Justice, therefore, sounded like the perfect major. In almost four decades of police work, only a few circumstances required that I do math. Those events, however, were significant.

One time, an overconfident K9 handler made us follow his dog for miles, tracking a suspect who had escaped in a moving vehicle. He said the dog smelled the suspect’s scent coming out of the open car windows. That didn’t seem very reasonable, and it didn’t take long for me to do the math. I remembered this type of equation from high school. If a suspect is traveling 50 mph in a car with open windows and a SWAT team is following on foot at 3 mph, how many millennia will it take for the SWAT team to catch up? “Hold it, fellas,” I said, “this ain’t gonna work.”

Another event where math briefly crossed my mind occurred on a night time warrant service. I found myself inside a suspect’s backyard fence with his pet tiger. It wasn’t a small tiger either. I didn’t know why it was in his yard or how it got there. I just remember plotting my escape. I used math to calculate the distance to the fence gate and how fast a tiger could close the gap. I’m pretty sure math saved me that day.

That’s about it for math in my world. I spent a lot more time learning it than actually using it. Ironically, I found some math in the Bible. In Psalm 90, Moses wrote,  “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” (Psalm 90:10) That’s an ancient way of saying, “Do the math.” Life is short. We don’t know how much time we have. Perhaps we should spend it on something that will outlast it, and prepare for what’s next.

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12)