Monday, October 31, 2011

Victory in Truth

My friend just won the Siberian National Agility Dog show. Won! First place in the nation! She is one of the nicest young ladies I know, so I am very pleased for her. She posted many scenes of her Siberian husky playing in the snow, the first snow that particular ambassador of the ancient breed of snow dogs had seen. Snow even before Reformation Day! That is early! (We don't celebrate Halloween so I prefer to try to marginalize it as much as possible and note instead that it is indeed the anniversary of Martin Luther's brave posting of the 95 thesis on the Church door to protest church abuse. He was a lone voice, finally excommunicated for his persistence, but he refused to not voice what he believed was right.)

However, this post is not about Reformation Day, but about being early. All over the northeast, people were saying it was too early for snow, especially snow in this amount. My friend's pictures showed her Siberian frolicking in drifts a foot deep!

While reading about the snow, I found an allusion to Daylight Saving Time ending on Saturday night. I was surprised the paper hadn't mentioned it, but nonetheless, told my family we could all sleep in an extra hour on Sunday morning. Then I went about setting all the clocks back an hour. On Sunday morning, I got up a little later than usual and noticed the atomic clock in the kitchen, a gift of my gadget crazy Dad, still thought it was an hour later.
"That's odd," I thought. I found the set time button, and set it an hour back. It registered the new time, and I made coffee. Then I glanced back at the atomic clock. It had reset itself to an hour ahead. Doesn't it recognize Daylight Saving Time, I wondered?

Then I looked at my phone. It also, like the clock, was still an hour ahead.
"You were supposed to fall back an hour!" I laughed at my phone scornfully, "And you think you are so smart!"
Next, I settled at the computer to write my blog, and noticed the computer also claimed it was still an hour ahead.
"This is strange," I said, in the cold dark morning, "Why don't the machines automatically register the new time?"
I went outside and got the paper. No headline about the time change. Had the reporters forgotten to warn their readers about the time change? This was a first!
Now, a little worried for my sanity, I did an internet search of time change in 2011. I saw again the chart that had told me it was Oct. 30, 2011.
"Is this 2011?" I asked myself, "I think it is...in fact I am almost certain it is."
I turned on the television. The little clock in the corner of the screen, like all the deluded machines in our home, had forgotten to fall back an hour. The news people, uncharacteristically on this day, were not chiding their audience for getting up early and forgetting to fall back and get that happy extra hour of sleep.
I was frantic by now, certain I had lost my mind.
I woke Arvo up.
"I think we missed church," I said.
"Why?" he mumbled.
"I don't think we were supposed to set the clocks back."
He did a quick internet check and told me, "They fall back next weekend."

We didn't make church worship service, but we did get there in time for the adult class afterwards and Asherel's youth group. Our teacher is doing a fascinating and well considered study on the logical basis for faith. He is an extremely intelligent and well read man, and I am loving the class. One of his points he made yesterday is that a common mistake of proving anything is that we often start with the premise we want to prove, and only see "facts" that support that premise, or even worse, manipulate facts to support that premise. Sometimes we become so caught up in believing the truth of a false premise, that we refuse to relinquish our position, even in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise. I thought of my morning fighting the clocks in our home, trying to reset them when they knew they were not supposed to fall back for a week. I was completely convinced the clocks all over the world were wrong, and I was the only poor soul who was going to know what time it was that day.

My teacher was demonstrating how the theory of evolution, despite insolvable flaws and evidence to the contrary, continues to be the dominant theory of how life evolved. It is always hard to believe that intelligent, dedicated masses of people could be so wrong, but from my research and study of the evidence, it sure looks wrong to me. Where are the transitional fossils, how does one explain "irreducibly complex" structures like the Krebs cycle or the mammalian eye which had to appear all at once intact or have no possible way of working? How did matter arise out of nothing if the universe had a beginning (Big Bang) and if it didn't have a beginning, why haven't the stars all burned out?  I sat in the class, and remembered my morning spent convinced that Daylight Saving Time had arrived, despite all the evidence that it had not.

When I was finally ready to concede that Daylight Saving Time would not arrive for a week, I had a new dilemma. Should I set every one of our multitudinous clocks in our home back to the correct time...or just let them be wrong for a week? I decided to set them to the correct time. I thought it was important that there be victory in truth.

Psalm 25:5

5 Guide me in your truth and teach me,
   for you are God my Savior,
   and my hope is in you all day long.

2 comments:

  1. Believe it, say I.

    One memorable trip from VA to NY years ago, my then-husband was driving as I slept late into the night. When I awoke, he said, " The signs are wrong." Wrong signs? "Yes, they say we are going south but I know we are going north." "The freaking HIGHWAY signs are WRONG???" Well, it seems that Harrisburg and HarriSONburg are oppostie directions and he had chosen the road less traveled (being, of course, the wrong one) but refused to believe the evidence of his own eyes. We had driven an hour the wrong direction, which was a small price to pay for this amusing anecdote.

    Your beloved sis,
    Amy

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