Whose idea was this? I grumbled to myself as I looked at the clock yesterday morning. It's later than you think when the clocks spring forward -- I imagine them all, all the old Big Ben alarm clocks and square clock radios, all the ugly digital bedside monitors, all the watches leaping forward in stupid unison. I certainly don't spring forward in the spring. I just lie there.
But I am over it by evening. It is six o'clock, and I can still be outside, able to see clearly the brush I'm stuffing into a large leaf bag, able to see the flowers coming up. This is great. We should do this all the time.
They don't change the clocks in Arizona. They don't really need to save daylight in that sunny state, where the road crews begin work at six in the morning to avoid the heat that's already building by eight. The Hawaiians don't feel the need to save daylight, either. In Indiana, they do three different things with the clocks, and I don't understand any of them.
But mostly we spring forward. And just lie there, on that first morning, wishing we didn't have to.
Time is so important to us that it's hard for us to imagine that God doesn't have it. That there is no past and no future -- an eternal present, everything there, all at once. Everything that has been and will be. That God doesn't live the linear life we imagine for ourselves, a line marked by the events of our lives: that was before the war, we say, or that was after my mother died.
In Christ, all things come together. The dead live there, those we love but see no longer. Everything we have lost remains there; it is lost only to us, not to God. And someday, when we ourselves are lost, we will be found there.
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