Well, on Sunday morning, we moved the clocks ahead an hour.  

Apart from the curiosity of why we do such a thing, do you ever wonder, what happened to that hour?  Did we just skip it and jump forward in time simply by changing our clocks?  If I changed my watch to 1pm right now, would that magically erase five hours of time from my day?  But then, what about your day—would you lose five hours too, or do we all have to change our watches for it to work?  And what if you refuse—is time then different for each of us?  What’s really going on when we change the clocks?

Well, of course, now is now no matter what time we call it.  And the sun will rise and the sun will set at exactly the moment God has established for it today, regardless of what we do with our clocks or our watches.  Just the same, the seasons will come and go regardless of how we mark the calendar…or even if we have no calendar at all.  

The reality of time and the conventions by which we mark it are clearly not the same.  But it is still a bit of a puzzle, isn’t it?

Indeed, in light of all of this it is fair to ask, as Augustine famously did, “What then is time?”  I especially like his answer: “If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

What I do know is that we’ve got until 3:10pm today to get some learning done.  And no, we won’t be advancing the clocks seven hours in the hopes of getting there any quicker. 

Have a wonderful day.