Tinkering with Time
It's that time of year again, when we "fall back" and turn our clocks back an hour. Officially, this Sunday, Nov. 3, will be the end of Daylight Savings Time, at least for those states which practice it to begin with, including Alabama. Any way you slice it, since the time change comes in the middle of the night on Saturday night/Sunday morning, we get an extra hour of sleep. And from my observation lately, it seems like most people could use a little extra rest.
You have probably heard those advocating to make Daylight Savings Time permanent. Even one of our state's U.S. senators has been actively waging a campaign to do that. Some say it would save on fuel costs while others warn that changing twice a year is disruptive of work and education and dangerous to our health. I think I would be happy to settling on a time, leaving the clocks alone, and eliminating both time changes altogether.
I have always thought that it is kind of silly that we think we can actually change time itself by adding or subtracting an hour from our clocks. It's like the old Native American adage that compared Daylight Savings Time to the man who cut an inch off of one end of his blanket and sewed it on the other end, thinking that would make his blanket bigger. It doesn't actually change things--we still have the same amount of daylight each day--but it always seems to be a radical adjustment when it gets dark so much earlier when DST goes away.
The reality is, clocks were supposed to just represent what the sun is already telling us about the movement of time throughout the day. In primitive times, old time-telling instruments like the sundial were effective in measuring time, unless of course you had a cloudy day. But with our current time-change schedule, you can call it 1:00 pm if you want, but if the sun is in the middle of the sky above you, it's noon. Always has been, always will be.
It reminds me of the old Abraham Lincoln story. Someone asked the president, "If you called a dog's tail a leg, how many legs would a dog have?" Lincoln famously answered, "Four. Because it wouldn't matter what you called it, the tail would still be the tail, and the dog would still have four legs." That simple wisdom could be applied to a lot of things in our double-speaking world today, including our attempts at manipulating time.
Of course, in our modern world, it doesn't require a lot of effort for us to change the time, since most of our devices will change it for us automatically, in the middle of the night. I never know whether I can trust that it will remember, and get me up on Sunday morning at the right time. Thankfully, I don't have a VCR any more, because I remember how difficult it was twice a year to try to reset the time on it.
In some ways, I think if we are going to do a time-change, we should at least try to do it a little more creatively. For instance, if we are going to add an hour to our week, how about on Friday night, or maybe Sunday afternoon? Extend that nap an extra hour for free! Likewise, when they steal an hour from your life in the spring, why not do it at 4:00 on Friday afternoon? You move the clock up an hour, and just like that it's 5:00,and it's time to go home from work!
How many times have we talked about what we would do differently if we had it to do over again? Well, we get to repeat an hour--almost like a mini-Groundhog Day--this coming weekend. Unfortunately, for most of us, at 2:00 am, we'll sleep right through the whole thing.
With all this tinkering with time, and changing of the clocks, I keep hearing echoes of the old 1970's Chicago song "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" If you remember the song, you remember the next line of the chorus: "Does anybody really care?" Well, I think God does. He created time, and allows us to live in it.
And He answers that question, for all of us, in Hosea 10:12: "It is time to seek the LORD." That is true for you, and for me, right this very minute. I hope you will do just that.
I am praying for you, as I hope you are for me, and I look forward to seeing you on Sunday.
--Pastor Ken
