This is Pastor Tim’s Article published in the Evening Leader on Monday, March 22, 2021
By the time you read this article, we will already be one week into this delightful experience known as Day Light Savings. This is that wonderful experience where we all get up an hour earlier in the morning so that the sun can stay up an hour later in the evening. All in all, it results in messing up my precious sleep schedule and I have to confess, I absolutely hate it. Yes, I know, I am not supposed to be hating things. Too bad, I hate Day Light Savings Time.
I am a morning person. I like being able to hit the tow path, Snap Fitness, and the Row machine at my house before I end up at the office at Wayne Street. I usually follow that with dishes, laundry, and straightening up. By the time I get to the office mid-morning, I usually have already put in 5-6 hours. I like that morning time and I like it better when the sun is up. I don’t like running in the dark. It is nice to wake up with the sun, but this demented and masochistic practice of moving the clocks earlier just as the sun is starting to greet me in the morning is nonsensical to me.
Couple that with the fact that I usually go to bed around 9:00. It won’t be very long before it won’t even be dark at 9:00. Do you know why it won’t be dark at 9:00? Because we changed the clocks to make sure it is still light at 9:00 because of Daylight Savings Time!
I have done some research on why my schedule is so thrown off, and what I found makes me more aggravated. The first person credited with coming up with this brilliant idea was a man from New Zealand named George Hudson. Now, you may wonder what it was that George did that gave him the idea to disrupt the space/time continuum. George Hudson was an entomologist. What is an entomologist? It is a person who studies bugs. He was frustrated that his shift at the local factory didn’t allow enough hours of daylight to collect his specimens. He presented two papers to Wellington Philosophical Society on why the clocks should be changed to give us one less hour of morning light and one more hour of evening light. This cause was also championed by William Willett, a golfer who was frustrated that he couldn’t finish a round of golf before the sun went down.
There you have it, folks. Your schedule was completely altered based upon the great idea of a bug scientist and a golfer. I know that many people think we are saving money on our electric bills because of the shift in time. I don’t believe that. The world today runs on a 24-hour clock and most of those lights and machines never shut off no matter what time of the day or night it happens to be.
We will be living on the wrong time from now until November 7, at which time I will like it much better because the sun will move back into the morning. That is great, but given how short the days are then, it will start getting dark around 4:30 in the afternoon. That is admittedly not fun, but it will be on the right time.
As frustrated as I am with the sun and my internal clock no longer matching up, I will take consolation in this. Day Light Savings coming back means that we are close to spring, which in fact began over the weekend. That means the warmer weather will be coming soon, and all the fun things of summer will be upon us. To all of you who enjoy that sun later in the day, I am happy for you (even though you are wrong).
Take this opportunity to be outside and let God’s beautiful sunshine shine on you even if we have no idea what time it is.