The Clock

The worst night of the year will return in about five months; the spring version of Daylight Savings Time. After  two or three days, I'll be used to it. Actually, as a high school baseball coach, I loved DST as it dramatically lessened the chances of games being called on account of darkness. The following, which focuses on my struggle with clocks, is from April 9, 2006. 

I have three clocks in my apartment. One is ten minutes fast, one is eighteen minutes ahead, and one is an hour behind. (Guess which one was not reset Daylight Savings weekend?) All that might not make sense to you but it does to me, sort of. I like to have clocks ahead as a motivator to be on time. Is it motivation when you know they are ahead? That is matter for debate but I have followed the pattern for years. None of the three are accurate but I can determine the time of day from their readings. I still have issues. The one that is eighteen minutes fast is digital and the digits glow in the dark. It lets me see the time in the middle of the night.... but it has a problem. The alarm goes off at midnight, which is really 11:42 pm, and I can't fix it. So every night at 11:42, I am awakened from a deep sleep. You might ask why I don't just unplug it but I have to know what time it is when I roll over. The other clock in my bedroom is also digital but it doesn't glow in the dark. I don't use an alarm to wake up but I have this one set for 4:30 am, in case I oversleep on Monday through Friday. The problem here is that I forget to shut it off on the weekend when I sleep later. So, at 4:30 am, on Saturdays and Sundays, my sleep is interrupted. The good thing is, I can roll over and snooze for a couple more hours!

My system works fine for me. I automatically calculate the time differences whenever I glance at one of the clocks. Of course, should a visitor come to my place without a watch, they would be lost. Which of the three would they accept? How could they possibly know the time? You have to have the right information to have a genuine reading. I look for clues outside my apartment to tell time. (I don't wear a watch and my classroom has no clock, at my discretion.) In the car, I listen to sports talk radio and I know they do updates on the hour, as well as twenty/ forty minutes past. In Room 258, I tell time by listening to the bells at St. Thomas More Catholic Church, adjacent to our campus. The church bells chime every fifteen minutes. Maybe I put myself at a disadvantage by going watch-less and refusing to own a cell phone, the latest time keeping device, but I get by. It's funny how we can understand some things but not others. Jesus, in Luke 12, condemned the crowd for their inability to translate their surroundings. He wondered how they could interpret the weather but were unable to interpret the present times. Is our world any different? We have more intellectuals and the masses are more educated but we seem unable to grasp the plight of our world and this present time. The pundits blame the Republicans or Democrats, the dictators or the Communists, the capitalists or the socialists, but they are all wrong. The problem is sin, just like it was in Jesus' day, just like it was with Adam and Eve. Until we learn how to read the clock of the plight of this world, we will never figure out the time. Sooner or later, every grain of sand will have slipped to the bottom of the hour glass. In Genesis 1, we find that the Lord created heavenly bodies to help us differentiate the passing of the hours. In 2 Peter, the apostle ties in the judgment with the destruction of the heavens. Time will cease and eternity will clock in. It may be closer than we think.

Applicable quote of the day:
"Laws and institutions, like clocks, must occasionally be cleaned, wound up, and set to true time."
Henry Ward Beecher

God bless,
Steve
Luke 18:1
http://www.hawleybooks.com/
E-mail me at steve@hawleybooks.com