Ichabod, Snow, and Daylight Savings

What’s that line about time rolling on like an ever flowing stream bearing all our cares away? Except when it rises up and smacks you in the teeth, like it is this morning. Messing around with the clock has not only got to be the idea of Satan, but it must also be an anti Christian conspiracy. Ever notice how the time is always changed on a Sunday? That’s because Hitler hated the church, and so do all bureaucrats.

I am so upset about losing this hour that if Trump just got rid of this stupid twice yearly habit I would probably vote for him. You think I’m kidding, but really, I would seriously think about it. My pen would hover over that oval a good long time.

It’s the inevitability of DST that kills me. You see it coming up on the calendar and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t move to another country. You can’t petition the government for sanity. You just have to cope. Which I guess makes it like every other realm of life, including death, which is also inescapable.

It’s the illusion of control that I prize so highly. First I’ll do this, and then I’ll do those things over there, and then I’ll do this other thing, and nothing bad will happen, and I will be perfectly happy. That’s my self talk, my chattering inanity as I go through the day trying to keep the reality of my powerlessness in time snd space from interfering with my mental landscape.

Every time I catch myself thinking about the stupid choices of other people, and saying to myself, “How deluded do you have to be?” I know in my heart that the answer is, “Not very deluded. Just the usual amount.”

No, I like to believe I’m in control. But then terribly bad things happen, like the government taking one of my hours, and I’m forced, however briefly, to bow my head to the truth that I don’t really have power. All the words that I spoke over DST, all the curses that I invoked, all my blog posts over the years have come to nothing. I was powerless to effect change.

I’m like the mother of Ichabod, foolishly hoping that the ark wouldn’t be captured by the Philistines, and then, upon hearing that it was, dying. Ok, well, maybe that’s not exactly a one to one correspondence with me dying because of DST. But really, pick any random story from the Bible and you’ll find that all the people in the story are helpless and can’t do anything. They stand around freaking out and then often some of them die. But then sometimes God miraculously intervenes to save others of them, and always at the eleventh hour.

And then there’s the bit where that guy says, “As rain and snow fall from the heavens and return not again but water the earth, bringing forth life and giving growth, seed for sowing and bread for eating, so is my word that goes forth from my mouth, it shall not return to me empty.”

In other words, it’s inevitable. You can control it just as well as you can control the weather. Sure, you like to build in illusions of control about the weather. Like maybe if we could just use a little more CO2 the temperatures in New York State would become bearable. I kept thinking we had reached that moment this winter. So many balmy and warm winter days lulled me into hope. But now the rain is giving way to snow and we’re supposed to have lots of that in the next three days. And the only thing I can do about it is decide never to leave my house again. That’s the level of my control. Read Zero.

The Word, on the other hand, is powerful in the way of both time and weather. It goes out and doesn’t ever come back empty. It defeats evil. It brings new life. It even literally destroyed Death where all other means had failed. The Word, in fact, has so much power that it, or rather he, holds the universe together in himself.

That’s part of my despair. I know that God, in his great mercy, is actually going to give me the grace to get through this morning without my hour of sleep. And that he’s going to give me so much grace that I will actually be able to make the coffee and teach the Sunday school. But that’s not what I wanted. I wanted an apocalyptic solution to the dumbness of DST. I didn’t want enough grace to endure my circumstances in the moment. I want to be able to effect some catastrophic change.

And even there God is better than me. Because however inevitable the rain and snow, it’s a lot gentler in its monotonous intrusion into my life than, say, fire and earthquake. The time does just keep going on. And God’s mercy is new every morning. Even the morning when Satan, trying to beat me down under his feet, steals my hour.

Alright, I’ll get up and try to go to church. But I’m not going to stop complaining for about three weeks. That’s the time it usually takes to adjust to all this daylight being saved.