God's Time

I did the usual family call to the US Sunday evening and spoke to my brother before I called my father. He had just called Dad, and said that he was raging against Daylight Savings Time, the US had just turned the clocks back an hours, we have a few more weeks in Europe.

I normally call Dad at around midnight, and Sunday was no exception. I said "Hi!" when he answered, and he immediately started in. "So are you still on God's Time?" I answered "No", because I was always under the impression that I was on Middle European Standard Time.

He began a diatribe against the senselessness of changing the time, made sense for those city folk maybe years ago although it was a pain on the farm because the cows had to be milked every 12 hours and they didn't care about DST so as a kid he had to get up an hour earlier to milk the cows.

My brother had noted that there was a study just published that going to DST does not save any money any more. That used to be the case, when electricity was only used for lighting, and coal for heating, like when DST was adopted. But now that people have air-conditioners, they have them on when they are awake, so no savings there.

I began pondering the concept of "God's Time". I suppose this means the way things were when my Dad was a kid, but actually, that is not God's Time. There used to be lots of local time-keeping schemes, using solar time to figure out if it was early morning or late in the afternoon. It was only after transcontinental railroads had to publish timetables that the whole idea of a standard time zone was codified. This is man-made, not something God created :)

Oh dear, the discussion of "God's Time" seems to be a hot one in the US, according to the number of search machine results. I used "God's Time" daylight savings time and got 850 hits. Reminds me again why I am much happier in Europe than in the US......