Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel:
“Sun, stand still over Gibeon,
    and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.”
So the sun stood still,
    and the moon stopped,
    till the nation avenged itself on its enemies,
as it is written in the Book of Jashar.
The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the Lord listened to a human being. Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!

• Joshua 10:12-14

The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there.

• Revelation 21:23-25

Thinking of this post’s title …

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I’m thinking!  I’m thinking!

Note: For those who remember Jack Benny, picture him posing a question.  Then he places one hand holding his opposite elbow, the free hand next to his chin.  The silence is finally broken by someone in the audience laughing, and then Jack Benny says, “I’m thinking!  I’m thinking!”  In other words, the question that he poses is against his basic nature.

Nope!  I cannot think of a single shift to daylight savings time that I enjoyed.

Going the other way?  I love getting that extra hour of sleep, but getting one less hour of sleep and then going to Sunday school or worse teaching Sunday school when you have brain fog?  Yikes!

It’s like jet lag.  Going a few hours to the west and you stay up a little later and still get a full night’s sleep – if it’s just a few hours.  But if you are a night owl and you fly from New York City to Frankfurt, Germany, you are just ready to go to sleep when the sun comes up.  That wrecks your entire week.

Now God can truly give us daylight savings time.  He made the sun stop so that Joshua could win the battle.  Yes, I have heard that if the earth quit spinning so that the relative position of the sun did not change, everything not bolted down on earth would fly off into space.  I think it was the glory of God that shown through that night so that it appeared to still be the middle of the day, but let’s not quibble.

And in the New Earth, there will be no night.  We will be in the presence of God.  Our new bodies will be incorruptible.  We will need no sleep.  We will want to worship God forever.  Why sleep when in the presence of God?  You would not want to miss a thing.

But I do have an amusing story about going back to standard time.  I was with my parents, and we had gone to Sunday school and church.  It was noted in Sunday school that the judge’s daughter was the only absentee.  Our church was so anal, we did not just have unofficial assigned pews, we had unofficial assigned parking places.  My Dad parked the car immediately across from the entrance to the church on the opposite side of the road.  The judge parked right behind us.

As we left the church to go home, the judge pulled into his usual spot.  The district judge and his family, in full Sunday clothing, got out of the car.  The judge said, “Oh, we must have turned our clocks the wrong direction.”

I guess I have mentioned that I have a mathematical mind, a logical mind, and not much of a filter.  I think I was in high school at the time.  I said, “But if the judge ran his clock the wrong direction, he’d be coming to church two hours early.”

My mother hissed, “Hush!  You never argue with a judge!”

Sorry, that’s all I have.  I am still suffering from the brain fog of losing an hour of sleep – even though I went to bed early on Saturday night.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.