Day 63 – Daylight Savings

Day 63 – Have you ever wondered why we started the whole Daylight Savings time thing? I decided to look it up since it is such a horrid practice in the spring having to move ahead an hour and lose sleep. What's that about?! I know we get more daylight in the afternoon – but I don't like messing with the whole sleep thing.

I looked up in Wikipedia (not the greatest news source – I realize) and this is what it said:
Although not punctual in the modern sense, ancient civilizations adjusted daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than modern DST does, often dividing daylight into twelve equal hours regardless of day length, so that each daylight hour was longer during summer.^[12] For example, Roman water clocks had different scales for different months of the year: at Rome's latitude the third hour from sunrise, hora tertia, started by modern standards at 09:02 solar time and lasted 44 minutes at the winter solstice, but at the summer solstice it started at 06:58 and lasted 75 minutes.^[13] After ancient times, equal-length civil hours eventually supplanted unequal, so civil time no longer varies by season. Unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as some Mount Athos monasteries^[14] and some Jewish ceremonies.^[15] During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, author of the proverb, "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise", anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight.^[16] This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise.^[17] Franklin did not propose DST; like ancient Rome, 18th-century Europe did not keep precise schedules. However, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklin's day.^[18] Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist
George Vernon Hudson, whose shift-work job gave him leisure time to collect insects, and made him aware of the value of after-hours daylight.^[2] In 1895 he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift,^[19] and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch, New Zealand he followed up in an 1898 paper.^[20] Many publications incorrectly credit DST's invention to the prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett,^[21] who independently conceived DST in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day.^[22] An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk.^[23] His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later


I don't know exactly why we are following the practice of someone that in his spare time – collected insects and noticed how great the extra sunshine was in the later hours. Nor do we utilize candles as our primary source of light – so no need to conserve those. Am I supposed to pick up golf so that I can appreciate that time change more?

 Ok – the truth is that I am whining about having to move my clock ahead. We are very blessed to have every minute of breath and in Ohio – every minute of sunshine. I will suck it up and deal with the time change.
Time will not always be available for us to complain and our focus should not be on ourselves. While we lose an hour tonight, we still have time to help others around us. We have time together and time to appreciate and praise God. So while I don't always understand these goofy practices – I know that ALL things are worked for good.
Romans 8:28
"[More Than Conquerors] And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."-