24 March
Dear Friends,
On this coming Sunday (27th March) 02:00 hours will become 03:00. The clocks go forward while we are sleeping so if you turn up at church without changing your clocks you will arrive just in time for coffee and the AGM but will have missed the service!
You don’t want to miss the service this Sunday for lots of reasons:
1. You really don’t want to miss church at anytime
2. You won’t get to hear an interview with Gillean MacLean the new moderator of the vacancy
3. You will probably spend the rest of the day kicking yourself that you didn’t put your clocks forward.
Changing the clocks may be a bit of a nuisance but as long as we remember that the routine is ‘spring forward and fall back’ we won’t get caught out. Having said that, I remember travelling to the United States on one occasion around the time of St Patrick’s Day and feeling that I had lost an hour of my life forever as the time difference between the UK and the USA was an hour greater than usual. Then I realised that in the USA the clocks change two weeks earlier, in the middle of March, so by the time I got back home in April the time difference was back to normal.
Nuisance or not, having to change our clocks, watches or devices twice a year, at least makes us more conscious of time, of how we measure our days, divided as they are into hours, minutes and seconds. It reminds me of the wisdom in Psalm 90. The Psalm is attributed to Moses and while we do not know the circumstances that give rise to it, there is a strong sense of lament in the Psalm. It begins by contrasting the everlasting faithfulness of God with the frailty of our human lives and expresses a sense of despair, if not injustice. Near the end the writer prays: Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. That seems to me to be a helpful prayer to pray as we rotate the hands of our clocks forward. May God grant us grace to know how to live wisely and well for his glory, however many days we may have ahead of us.
David McMillan
(Locum minister)