Fall back; sleep longer; what to do with an extra hour?

All time belongs to God who is not limited in any way by time.  Yet we human beings like to play around with time.  So every spring we go through the silly ritual of moving the clock forward one hour so we can stretch daylight in our part of the world to way past 8 pm and in other parts of this hemisphere even later.  Never mind that we force the mornings to be unnaturally dark to well past many of us leave for work or even before we put our children, vulnerable that they may be, at bus stops or on school playgrounds.

Yet the majority of us rejoice in this unnatural daylight even though we find ourselves running around in evening time like a chicken with the head cut off as we eat dinner later and later.  And as autumn drawers near we gear up for the big reversal of time.  We all know that happens to be later tonight.  In this time of fairs, festivals and footnball we prepare tonight to fall back; we move our clocks back one hour before we go to bed tonight.  And we all are happy about that, but many of us will grumble when Sunday evening brings darkness a little past 5 p.m.  Never mind that this would be natural.  And never mind that we can leave for work Monday or drop our kids off Monday in some daylight.

These two days are among my favorite Sundays of the year.  It's always amazing to the me that this is not news; we've been doing this spring forward/fall back thing for decades.  Still, tomorrow morning, while I spend my Sunday at Church, I will watch folks coming and going for Mass totally confused as to what time it is. 

How do we spend our time?  Do we give "time" to God?  Is this "extra" hour a time to give my time to prayer, spiritual reflection and worship to God?  The monks up at the Abbey not far from my home taught me something about blessing or consecrating the hours of the day to God.  Have we ever thought about that?  Each hour of every day; whether daylight savings time or standard time belongs to Him.

So I do highly recommend that we embrace tonights "fall back" as we now return to natural time.  And if that extra hour means extra sleep; by all means: enjoy!  But let's use this day of man made manipulation of time to realize that God is the God of time and all time belongs to Him.  May we give thanks to God the Father for the gift of time.