Tip of My Iceberg

It takes me a good week to get over the start of Daylight Saving Time, when we lose an hour, so the sun sets later than it really does. I resent the lost time, taking it more personally than I should. After all, it didn’t just happen to me, but to the majority of the people in the US. It happens in most of North America and, as I discovered, in many places in Europe.

I don’t think I’m the only one who resents that lost hour.

I have two sisters living in Arizona, and the time there doesn’t change. It’s only a nuisance when I have to remember that there is now three hours’ time difference between us instead of two.

My husband takes it very matter-of-factly. He refused to change the clock in his car, so it now registers the correct time, having been a full hour ahead for the past four and a half months. His rationale? There’s more of Daylight Saving Time than Standard Time.

Time to many is a fickle friend or a fierce foe. The American poet, Carl Sandberg, said it well: “Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.” We’ve each been given 24 hours every day. Some of us spend it well, accomplishing much. Others tend to fritter it away as if it has no value. Leonardo da Vinci, a man who accomplished much in his sixty-seven years, worked as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. His view is for anyone who seeks efficiency and effectiveness: “Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.”

Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk, theologian, mystic, and poet, understood the pressure time puts on us all. “We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have–for their usefulness.”

We are far more than what we accomplish or what we have. We are all made in the image of God, who has existed from eternity past and will exist forever outside the framework of time as we know it. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” Revelation 22:13. For God, time isn’t linear but more holistic; He controls time yet is not limited by it. “But you must not forget this one thing, dear friends: a day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day” (2 Peter 3:8)

It’s easy to panic about time when we think we don’t have enough of it, or to become bored when it’s not moving as quickly as we’d like it. But God can’t be dwarfed by time issues; He gives us exactly what we need each day, each season, to accomplish what He intends.

I may be bothered by losing an hour now, ignoring the fact that we’ll get it back come November. What I need to remember is that God didn’t give me time to hoard or hide within. Time is the gift He’s given me to live to the fullest each day, enjoying the small blessings of time that I sometimes overlook, often with people.

As Benjamin Franklin once said, “Lost time is never found again.”