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.

Daylight Saving

Just when we get to sleep in until the sun actually catches up to our circadian rhythms, just when we reach the point where we can be gently nudged awake by singing birds and warm sunlight that has penetrated the darkness, just when the soft scent of flowers golden in our minds meld in perfect unity with the golden morning sun that is appearing at just the right time in our dreams..... daylight saving time invades our peace.

I hate the springing forward, especially when we have a busy and early weekend. I don't mind the falling back as much. In my ongoing quest to learn as much about the world I live in in its meaningless minutia, I researched daylight saving time, and found out some very interesting facts. First of all, half of the entries on the internet incorrectly call it "Daylight Savings Time" as though it were a bank deposit. I would laugh heartily about this except that I too call it daylight savings time and am being constantly corrected by my children.

It has been a source of controversy since being instituted in the early 1900s. It was concocted as a way to save on energy costs, but most studies seem to indicate it probably has little if any net effect on energy cost. So why do we do it?

It has many unintended consequences. Since Amtrak must always run on time, do you know that at 2 a.m. when the time changes, the trains just stop, and sit where they are on the tracks for an hour so they will still arrive on time in the time change of October? So what do they do in the spring, when they have to leap ahead? They all open the throttle as far as they can go and whiz across the country, smashing cows and chickens all along the way, trying to make up the time. This is not a lie!

However, I love how daylight saving time messes with the minds of terrorists. In 1999, the West Bank was still on standard time when the rest of Israel switched to daylight saving time. Someone forgot to inform the terrorists however, and they set their bombs to detonate on standard time, then sent them over to the terrorists receiving the bombs on the Israeli side. The terrorists misunderstood the timing on the bomb, and the bombs exploded while the terrorists were transporting them, instead of killing innocent Israelis on the morning commute bus. The last words of the terrorists as they saw the spark ignite was, "Spring forward, fall back!!!!! Fiddlesticks!"   That last word may have been more harsh but it is hard to know with precision what phonemes are uttered during sound waves of 180 decibels of exploding dynamite.

I suppose I should be thankful. This useless practice will not occur til Sunday morning. This is a blessing since Saturday morning we have to leave the house at 7 a.m. to go fly helicopters and fling projectiles in our Science Olympiad competition. On the other hand, we will be robbed of our last morning of what the Amish call "slow time". And really, it isn't daylight that needs saving. It is us. I am with the Amish- it is us, our souls, our feverish march into a frenzied , earlier day that needs saving..

The book of Matthew reminds us that worry is useless since none of us can add a single hour to our life by worrying. Yes we can.... we can add an hour by abolishing Daylight Saving Time! I think as soon as we have finished flying our helicopters and flinging our projectiles at the Science Olympiad contest, we should all  march onWashington and see if we can retrieve that stolen hour. First, synchronize your watches. Let's all meet at the Amtrak station at 6 a.m. but be careful near the tracks. The trains will be flying at the speed of sound to try to make up that hour so be sure you have put on lots of hairspray.


Matthew 6:27, 33-34
²⁷ Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
 ³³ But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴ Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.