This Sunday, November 4, will be the greatest day you’ve had thus far in 2018. I know what you’re thinking; you’re panicked because you’re thinking you forgot your anniversary. Don’t worry! It’s not that. It’s much better than that. It’s the day you get to “fall back” and sleep in an extra hour! (unless you have children—they don’t care what time does. Those monsters wake up at first light no matter what time they go to bed.)
Now. Contrary to popular belief, American farmers did not lobby for this interval change to have more time to work in the fields. Daylight saving time (notice there is no “s” on saving—stop saying savings! It’s infuriating!) was a wartime measure first implemented on March 31, 1918.
In fact, going back to the farmers, the agriculture industry was deeply opposed to the time switch because historically the sun, not the clock, dictated farmers’ schedules. With this change, farmers had to wait an extra hour for dew to evaporate to harvest hay, and hired hands worked less hours since they still left at the same time for dinner and cows weren’t ready to be milked an hour earlier to meet shipping schedules—they’re cows; they can’t tell time.
The fact of the matter is, agrarian interests led the fight after WW1 for the 1919 repeal of national daylight saving time—which passed after Congress voted to override President Woodrow Wilson’s veto.
WAIT-- if it was repealed, why are we still doing it? Nobody knows.
National daylight saving time returned during World War II, but was repealed AGAIN three weeks after the war’s end. However, states and localities kept up the tradition, a system that Time magazine (an aptly named source) described in 1963 as “a chaos of clocks.”
In 1965 there were 23 different pairs of start and end dates in Iowa alone, and St. Paul, Minnesota, even began daylight saving two weeks before its twin city, Minneapolis. Passengers on a 35-mile bus ride from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, West Virginia, passed through seven time changes!
Order finally came in 1966 with the enactment of the Uniform Time Act, which standardized daylight saving time from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October, although states had the option of remaining on standard time year-round.
This all changed, AGAIN, in 2007, to our current “spring forward” the second Sunday of March and “fall back” the first Sunday of November.
Why am I telling you all this?
Because my wife has limited my amount of useless fact regurgitation at the house and you’re the only ones who will listen—plus we’re starting a brand new series on Sunday and I don’t want you to be an hour early, or late, or however that works out mathematically.
Plus, it’s a good reminder for all of us to do as Paul writes in Ephesians 5:16 and make the best use of the time, because the day(light saving time) are evil. I mean the days are evil.
In other words, God wants you maximizing your time for His glory and your joy. We’ll talk about how to do that practically throughout this new series, “It’s All Greek To Me.” See you Sunday!