A Virtual Church

It's about time

19 minutes ago

On November 1, 2026, we will “fall back,” setting our clocks back one hour to end Daylight Savings Time this year. Daylight Savings Time began globally July 1, 1908. It gave more daylight for fighting WWI.

The Uniform Time Act of 1966 established Daylight Savings Time by an act of Congress, setting the method for when DST would begin and end. Arizona and Hawaii are the only states who do not participate in the time change.

Get ready to fall back. Get ready to be early for church, meetings and work at the wrong hour. Remember everywhere you have a clock and give thanks for those sources that update time automatically for you.

Attempted manipulation of time is folly. The sun rises and sets, seasons change, and the world turns on its axis regardless of how we want to manipulate it.

Animals are our best time tellers. Roosters crow at dawn. Dogs stir in their crates as the sun rises, waggy tailed and eager for food and potty time. We are created with a circadian rhythm that provides an internal clock. Daylight stirs us from sleep, beginning our new day ready or not. And like many a.m. radio stations we start to rundown at sundown.

Going against the rhythm God created is swimming upstream.

We get sun blocking curtains and wear sleeping masks, but the dogs still shake their collars and rattle. Turn the coffee on.

When you read the creation story in Genesis, there is such thrill in hearing a pre-scientific people observe and give thanks for the movement of God in creating light and dark, calling the light day and the evening night.

I remember summer nights as a child. Lightening bugs came out at dusk. Mosquito feeding time was both early morning and dusk. All creatures moved like clockwork.

It was thought that farmers and field workers benefitted from the earlier daylight. I took driver’s education that began in the dark and moved to dawn’s light.

Winter nights were dark early. Great for high school football. Great for fireworks. Great for dating.

Our president is advocating for DST to be the standard all year around. Arkansas Republican Senator, Tom Cotton, opposes Trump’s Sunshine Protection Act.

With so many serious things happening that cry for our response and care, why waste time on this. Trump is using it as yet another distraction but here is one issue on which I agree with him.

Perhaps Senator Cotton could turn his attention to the war in Iran, or high prices at the gas pump and in grocery stores. He has saddled himself to a lightweight cause that matters little in the world.

If the US moves to have Daylight Savings Time year-round, we will gripe about how it gets light too early but the world will turn exactly as it has for hundreds of thousands of years. It is human hubris that wants to improve what God has created. It isn’t going to happen.

Whether it is DST or standard time we need to set one time practice year-round and I don’t care which one we choose; let’s just choose one.

Congressmen who grandstand and present themselves as populist leaders get absurd in the things on which they focus.

We need serous leaders to solve the serious problems that plague us. Where are they?

Lib Campbell is a retired Methodist pastor, retreat leader, columnist, and host of the blogsite Avirtualchurch.com. She can be contacted at libcam05@gmail.com. 

 

 

 

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