During his lifetime, Benjamin Franklin made eight voyages
across the Atlantic Ocean. He had a lot
of time on his hands. So, he put his
natural curiosity to work and, as a result, he managed to invent quite a few
things. Like bifocals. And a more
efficient wood burning stove to provide heat – and the first fire company and
fire insurance company, just in case something went wrong, I suppose. He invented that famous lightning rod, of course. On his way to starting the postal service, he
invented an odometer to measure the routes.
And, in the middle of all that inventing, he found a little time to scatter
some seeds of the American Revolution. Unfortunately,
dear old Ben also came up with the idea of daylight saving time during one of
his trips to Paris. He wrote and published an essay titled “An Economical
Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light” where he proposed to save on the use
of candles by rising earlier and making the most of the morning sunlight. And, as far as I am concerned, that cancels
out all the good stuff. Daylight Saving
Time is what my grandmother would refer to as cutting off one end of the
blanket and sewing it on the other end to make it longer.
It has been a month since we began Daylight Saving Time
again. My body is still in rebellion mode.
I do not like it. I do not like it at all. That extra hour of sunlight in the afternoon
doesn’t mean anything good to me. It
messes up my life. By the time it is
dark and I want to sit down and read, it is time to go to bed. When it is time to get up and get ready for
work, it is still dark. My dogs don’t understand
it. They don’t seem to like getting up
two hours before the sun, but they do it because I get up and they seem to be
of the opinion that I cannot fix breakfast without their supervision. I whine and complain about Daylight Saving
Time until I get that hour back. I want
to be like the Free State of Arizona.
They have the good sense to ignore Daylight Saving Time. They do not fiddle with the clocks and try to
fool themselves into thinking they have more than twenty-four hours in a day.
The first week of that dreaded DST is always the hardest for
me. I am all out of whack and out of sorts and out
of patience. It is uncommonly
difficult. On my way to work during that
appalling first week, God sent me a reminder to count it all joy. I looked in the mirror on the way to work and
guess what I saw.
This.
Yep. God sent me a
sunrise. It felt like He was saying, “Enough,
already!” I had to smile. That’s just like God to care about my
bad-tempered, crabby self enough to send me a sure-fire cure.
The whole earth is
filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you
call forth songs of joy. Psalm 65:8
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