If you ever meet my kids, please don’t tell them we put them to bed ridiculously early. I don’t think they know yet. On most nights we have them down by 7:00 or 7:30. Although they’re young, 8 and 10, we’ve so conditioned them to believe 8:00 is late that one night while driving home from a party at 8:30, L.E. exclaimed while looking out the window, “What are all these people doing up right now?”
Our early to bed plans usually go off without a hitch, until daylight savings time rolls around. Suddenly, it’s a lot brighter at 6:30. They can still see the sun above the horizon. They can hear kids frolicking in the streets and occasionally the ice cream man. It’s a problem.
I’m not the only one who has a hard time with the time switch. Lots of people miss church on Sunday mornings when it happens. You get up at 8AM, realize it’s actually 9AM and think “Ugh, I’m late, I’ll catch the podcast later” and then roll back over.
But despite the ample parking spaces at church due to daylight savings absentees, there are:
4 types of people who don’t miss church because of the time change
1. People married to efficient spouses.
Let me be clear about this: If I didn’t marry Jenny Acuff I’d be a starving artist. Probably a drifter who was great with pastels and rode the rails with a wolf named Noah if I had to guess. I’d also never make it to church on the morning the time changed without her. Perhaps this is your situation as well.
2. Church employees.
Sunday is the Super Bowl for people who work at churches. My friends who work at churches spend approximately 25 hours at church on Sunday. If this is you, you didn’t miss church because you’d never oversleep for the Super Bowl. And you were probably there at 4 in the morning because the volunteer who was supposed to build the graphics for the worship songs just Googled, “water fall stock photography” and you had to fix them all.
3. Saturday night service attendees.
If you go to a Saturday night service, congrats, there’s no way the time change messed you up. Then again, you still don’t have a t-shirt to wear jogging on Sunday mornings that says, “Stop judging me, I attend Saturday night services,” so there’s the rub.
4. Bjork.
I’m not sure if she reads this blog or not, but if the famed Icelandic singer is checking in from her wintry home, I know she’s not observing daylight savings time because Iceland doesn’t. Neither is Magnus Ver Magnusson, former world’s strongest man and native of Iceland. He’s probably throwing some absurdly heavy object over a wall or wearing a small car like a turtle shell right now but he’s definitely not moving his clock ahead.
If you’re not one of those four types of people, then maybe you missed service because of the time change. I know I have before and the funny thing is that it never works the other way.
I’ve never showed up to church an hour early when we move the clocks back. Interesting.
How about you?
Did the time change throw you off?
