Time Change!

One of my very few recurring nightmares comes this time of year when we adjust to Daylight Saving Time.

We've all seen people nonchalantly arrive at church at the end of the service, having forgotten to move their clocks ahead the night before, only to suddenly realize they are an hour late.  Probably more than a few of us have been the person arriving late, which makes us check and re-check the clocks in our house and worry about the one on the car dashboard.

But what makes my nightmare is when I arrive at church just in time for the benediction.... which I am supposed to be pronouncing.  I wake up in a panic that I am the one who is late.  Mercifully, with the cable box and my phone and computer adjusting automatically, time changes are much easier on me now.

Of course, the whole Standard and Daylight Saving thing is a human construct, a human-made way of delineating time.  For eons time was local and solar; the sundial in the town square set noon, and people just worked with when the sun came up or they popped awake and did things until it got dark and they got sleepy.  With the invention of hourglasses you could break the day up into watches or for hours of prayer, and mechanical clocks became useful.  But the town clock was still regulated by when the sun was highest in the sky, keeping the rhythm of nature.  We started imposing human constraints on "God's Time" in the 1840s with British railways, and in the U.S. in the 1870s with standardized time zones.  Changing an hour ahead to use longer summer days began during World War I, and now we have our vast, interconnected, international, atomic clock system.
 

Yet we cannot forget that it is a pretty much artificial system, designed by humans to impose human "control" on the natural progression of life through time.  And the "adjustments" like DST that are necessary to make it all work out only seem to be making the sun conform to our wishes.  We are only inventing ways to get our rigid system to fit better with planetary motion, whether you describe it with astronomical calculations or the stories in Genesis.  We happily like to believe we are in charge of time.  But in our better moments we realize time does its own thing!  It still snows after the groundhogs see their shadows.
 

Something like this happens between called pastors.  We have constructed all sorts of plans and calculations for calling a new pastor, but in reality, many of those are just labels we like to put on the Holy Spirit's true sense of time.  Self-studies and profiles and searches happen "in their own good time," even if we like to solemnly write things solemnly on a church calendar.  That is fine if we remember that, like the flowers coming up in the spring are responding to nature's time, that we are not really "in charge" of this time in between.
 

So we will be doing both, setting our watches and planning dates and times, yet like the ancients, we still need to look at the skies, watch stars, watch the way the wind moves the trees, and wait for the crocus and  daffodil to emerge.  God will look out for our time together.  The whole time!  I trust that.

 

Still......... my first Sunday here at FCCI is, ironically, the day we spring our clocks ahead... hmmm...

Come to worship and see if I make it "on time!"

Peace,

David

 

Texts For Sunday Worship:
Joshua 5:9-12
Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
*Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Note: The texts in bold type will be read in the worship service and the one with an asterisk will be used as the focus for the proclamation of the word.