"I Am On God's Time"

Today's date is November 6th, 2011, and it is the day when the time changes from Daylight Savings Time to in my case Eastern Standard Time. When I awoke this morning, as is almost always the case my clocks are off by exactly one hour.

I never ever seem to have the foresight to "spring forward", or to "fall back", when the time changes. Now why is that? Perhaps I am just lazy, perhaps it just matters little what time the clock says it is when on a Sunday morning, things are so laid back at my home that I just do not worry about what the time is. The one thing I did know was that it was time to brew a pot of my freshly ground coffee!

Now while sipping on the morning brew, I checked the weather report on the TV, and as I had suspected it was a delightful, but somewhat cool  morning in the heart of North Carolina. As soon as I had finished my coffee I quickly dressed, and pulled my Nikon D7000 Camera body, and attached a wide angle lens, and put my camera strap on it. All prepared, I went out into the early morning light to capture the show.

Cool and brisk, the sun cast its warm glow down on me, and the brightly colored leaves on the trees. The thought came to me that it was a gloriously beautiful morning, and it felt great to not only be alive, but to be witness to the beauty that was about me. It seemed to me to be a real sin to have 5 or more cameras, (if I do not count those that I do not even use, or cell phone cameras), and to not make good use of one of them on this morning.

As I began to snap away at the scene that was before me, I remembered the words of my deceased father-in-law had once told me perhaps twenty-five or more years ago.  You see, I once had asked him about daylight savings time, and I asked him if DST really helped him as he was a farmer.

The words that he said were simple, and elegant "I am on God's time!" 

You see he had been a farmer most all his life, and as such, under normal circumstances he would arise early, before daylight, and as soon as the sun started to rise, he would already be at his job. He had animals to feed, he called them his "dumb brutes". After the feeding of the cattle, and the hogs, and chickens, he had hay to cut, and rake, or bail, corn to plant, or soybeans, or wheat to plant. He had farm equipment to repair, or to maintain. 

He always kept to the same schedule, up before dawn, and work until it was too dark to see anymore. This schedule he kept seven days a week, 365 days a year. The fact that Congress enacted a law that sprang forward the clock by an hour in the spring, and fall back an hour in the autumn, was without meaning to him, for he worked from daybreak, till dark.

Those words rang out in my head on this morning, as I too no longer care what time it is. I do not punch a time clock anymore, and as I will soon be 61, it dawned on me on this morning that I too, was on God's time.