Time Thieves

Daylight Savings Time is misnamed.  They should call it Sleep Losing Time.  It seems like The Central League of Clock Keepers of America (CLOCKsA) always picks the least convenient time to make us turn our clocks either forward or back----Sunday mornings at 2 AM.  In other words, they pick a time when they know----or should know, that most law-abiding citizens are fast asleep, and a number of us have to get up and preach in the morning. They’re always telling us what to do with our time, and our clocks.  Would it be so hard for them to move the clock adjustment time forward or backward a few hours?   Why couldn't they tell us to jump from ten to eleven, or eleven to ten?  Every six months or so, when I have to set my alarm for 2, just so I can crawl out of bed and stumble around the house resetting our clocks, I wish I had someone from CLOCKsA on hand.  

No, I wouldn't (to resurrect a phrase from my dad) knock the living daylights out of him, although that would be fitting.  But I would give him a piece of my mind----for destroying the peace of my home. "But you gain an hour every autumn," you say.  Yes, but I invariably lose it right away trying to fall back to sleep.  It’s worse in the spring.  Then I lose an hour by springing the clocks forward, and another hour trying to fall asleep again, so I’m out a total of 2 hours every year that Daylight Savings Time is in effect.   

That doesn’t sound like much, but multiply it by a life span of 70 years (which is beginning to look attainable) and it comes to a almost a whole week of my life.  That might have been the week I was going to accomplish something worthwhile.  I’m pretty sure it was.  Then multiply that week by the total number of poor clock-adjusting-citizens in America, and it becomes clear that we’re losing a huge number of perfectly good weeks.  The question is, where are all those weeks going?  I suspect this whole Daylight Savings business is an elaborate time-stealing scam.  I haven’t figured out who is getting all these stolen weeks, or exactly how they’re doing it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re being auctioned off in Dubai to princes with too much money and too little time.  I’ll get to the bottom of it all.  I just need a little more time.  DOH!

Time is a strange thing.  When we call our son in the state of Washington, we are three hours ahead of him.  So as I understand it, what happened here in Maryland won’t happen there for 3 more hours.  When we visited there recently, I had an idea.  I asked my friend Pretty Boy Humphrey, who was back here on the east coast (I don’t think he’s permitted to leave the area---something about a jolt to his ankle if he approaches the state line) to call me and tell me the score of the Monday night football game as soon as it ended.  That would give me three hours to put some money on the game in Washington.  Three hours later, we would have made a profit, which I offered to divide, 70/30 (seventy per cent for me, because it was my idea, and thirty per cent for him, because we’d be using his money).  Pretty Boy didn’t jump on it (I suspect he's prohibited from gambling by judge's order).  It’s just as well, since I don’t have the slightest idea how to place a bet on a football game.  I think, for one thing, you have to be in Nevada.

Flying through time zones is a bit confusing.  As the jet flies west, we’re sort of following the sun, but the sun is not really moving (Pretty Boy, if you listen closely as someone slowly reads this to you, you may find it fascinating).   What’s really happening is, the earth is rotating (that’s just a fancy word for spinning, PB) west to east, which makes it appear that the sun is moving.   Now here’s what I wonder:  If the earth is in fact rotating, and we get in a jet, above the earth, why can’t we just hang out up there until the place we want to get to comes around, which it’s bound to do eventually.  Maybe we should all be traveling by hot air balloon (Why don’t you look into this, PB).

One of the interesting facts about our Self-existent Creator is that the Scripture makes it clear that He is not bound by time.  Time has to do with our planet’s movement through our solar system, but God is not bound by our solar system.  He is utterly uninfluenced by what we perceive as the flight of time.  To paraphrase CS Lewis, God has all eternity to hear the split-second prayer offered by a pilot as his plane is about to crash.  Surely this is why the Scripture says:

“...do not forget this one thing; that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (2 Peter 3:8)   

Tomorrow is as clear to him as yesterday is to me---more clear, in fact, because yesterday is already starting to fade from my mind, and what I do remember only relates to my own experience.  That’s why the Lord Jesus could tell his disciples not to be anxious about tomorrow.   His Father already has tomorrow under control.  

One thing I know; when I get to heaven, I’ll get that week back that I lost to Daylight Savings Time.  I’m thinking I might use it to take a long hot air balloon ride.  Yes, I know what you’re thinking, Pretty Boy,  “Your balloon will have a constant source of hot air, Rusty.”   Hearty har har.