The Hour We Didn't Earn

The clocks fell back Saturday night, which, if you have little kids, means nothing happened except that everything got harder.

Sunday morning, at what the stove clock called 5:10, my twin girls were standing at the end of our bed, fully awake, fully convinced it was 6:10, and fully prepared to explain this to me at volume. My son wandered in behind them dragging a blanket and a half-eaten fun-size Snickers he had apparently slept with. Everyone online had been promising me an extra hour of sleep. Nobody had mentioned it to the three-year-olds.

So I did what any rested, grounded, spiritually mature father would do. I lay there negotiating with God for six more minutes, lost, and shuffled to the kitchen in one sock to start the oatmeal. Somewhere between the first bowl and the floor, I noticed the light coming in over the sink. It was gray and soft and a little strange, because it had no business being there yet. For about ten seconds nobody was crying, including me.

I’m not going to pretend I handled the morning well. I didn’t. But I have been chewing all week on the word everybody keeps using for this weekend: extra. As if an hour could ever be extra.

Current events through a biblical lens.

The Hour We Didn’t Earn

This past weekend most of the country turned its clocks back an hour, and every news outlet I saw ran the same two stories: enjoy your bonus hour of sleep, and here is how to keep your kids from wrecking their schedule because of it. Underneath both is the old argument about whether we should keep doing this at all, and a lot of tired parents have strong feelings on the subject.

What caught me this year was the language. We call it a gained hour. A free hour. And then, almost in the same breath, we start spending it: laundry, getting ahead on the week, finally answering that email. I know, I know, the hour is a bookkeeping trick and nobody actually gained anything. But notice the reflex. We were handed sixty minutes we didn’t earn, and our first instinct was to put them to work.

Mark 4 has a picture I can’t stop looking at. Jesus and his disciples are crossing the Sea of Galilee when a storm comes up hard enough that seasoned fishermen start bailing for their lives. And where is Jesus? ”In the stern, asleep on a cushion.” (Mark 4:38) Not praying through the night. Not pacing the deck. Asleep. A man with a real body, worn out from a day of teaching crowds, letting that body do what it needed.

The disciples shake him awake and ask, ”Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” I know that question. I have asked it at 3 a.m. over a feverish toddler. And I am not going to tell you Mark 4 means your kids will sleep through the night, because it doesn’t, and the storm in this story isn’t tidy. Neither is yours.

But look at what Jesus does next. He gets up, and with the same voice that was just asleep, he says to the wind, ”Peace! Be still!” He is the one who slept and the one who stills the storm. He isn’t indifferent to our exhaustion; he has been exhausted. And he isn’t helpless inside it, either.

Maybe that’s the quiet gift under the whole clock-change fuss. Rest isn’t a prize for people who have finished their lists. Jesus slept in the middle of an unfinished crossing. So maybe the hour isn’t a bonus to be spent after all. Maybe it’s a small reminder that our days were never ours to hold together, and that the One who is holding them doesn’t mind us closing our eyes.

A family devotional for this week.

Scripture: ”Peace! Be still!” — Mark 4:39

For the little ones: It gets dark so early now. Turn off a light and sit in the dim together for a minute, then tell the story: Jesus was so tired that he fell asleep on a cushion in a boat, right in the middle of a storm. Then he stood up and told the wind to stop, and it did. Ask: Who is bigger, the storm or Jesus? Let them answer however they want (and let them make storm noises, because they will).

Discussion Questions:

Activity: At bedtime tonight, have everyone name one thing they are putting down for the night (a worry, a grumpy moment, a toy that got broken). Then pray together: ”Jesus, you know what tired feels like, and you are bigger than every storm. We’re putting this day down. Goodnight. Amen.”

Oliver Hollis found the old lamp on a Tuesday, buried under a horse blanket in the back corner of Grandpa’s barn. It was made of dented brass, about the size of a lunchbox, with a small glass window on one side, grimed over with dust.

“What is this thing?” he called.

Grandpa set down his coffee and walked over slowly, the way he walked toward anything he wasn’t sure he wanted to look at yet. “That is a lamplighter’s lamp. Or it used to be. Nobody’s lit it in fifty years. A man walked the streets every evening with a light like that one, and a long pole, and lit every lamp on his route. That way nobody had to walk home in the dark.”

“Funny thing about a lamplighter,” he said. “He spends his whole life walking toward the dark parts of the street on purpose. That way other folks don’t have to be afraid of them.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very fun job,” Lilly said.

“Fun’s not the only good thing a job can be,” Grandpa said.

That night, the old well starts to hum again, and Oliver slips the brass lamp over his wrist without quite knowing why.

That’s the opening of The Lamplighter’s Gate, Book Four in the Tales from the Well series, a story for the kids who ask big questions at bedtime and the grown-ups who don’t always have the answer ready. If your reader has already met Oliver and Lilly, this is the next stop on the path. You can find it, and the rest of the series, on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/W.C.-Davis/author/B0H9MTCN9M

May the dark come early this week and find you unafraid of it. May you take the sleep you can get, forgive yourself for the sleep you can’t, and trust that the One who stilled a storm from a boat cushion is not bothered by your tired.

Peace! Be still!

See you next Thursday.

— The Well & The Word