By the time you read this, it might be too late!

If you went to church this morning, you may well have noticed some regular congregants sneaking in at the back about an hour after they would normally have arrived. They’ll have been looking quite sheepish, I’d have thought.

In fact, you may even have been one of those sheepish people yourself; you’ll know by now why this happened, and this post is indeed too late for you!

My apologies for being completely unhelpful. 😉

Last night, (or, more accurately, this morning at 02:00), daylight saving time came into effect here in the UK; the clocks went forwards by an hour. This means that everyone who forgot about this annual event^[1] will have been running an hour late today until they realised what was going on. Spring Forward, Fall Back. In the Spring, you move the clocks forwards an hour. In Fall (autumn) you move them back an hour. Nice and simple, or so you’d have thought!

When I led Sunday worship on a weekly basis, at my old church in Leeds, on that last weekend in March there were always some people who came in an hour late. Always! I was usually strongly tempted to welcome them by name, as they tried to sneak in unobserved at the back^[2], and even maybe invite them to come and sit at the front like naughty schoolchildren 🤣 Believe me, the temptation was almost irresistible!^[3]

Despite the ‘lost’ hour, depleting our precious weekend by sixty irreplaceable minutes (you’ll see why they were ‘irreplaceable’ in a minute!), we were never once treated to an hour’s shorter sermon^[4] on one of these Spring Forward weekends. Or even no sermon at all! But of course that never happened either.

And what makes it even funnier is what happened at the other end of the year, in the autumn, (usually the last weekend in October) when the clocks go back an hour so you get to spend an extra hour in bed if that’s what you want to do. Or, maybe you might want to take things a little easier on the Sunday because, if you think about it, you’ll actually be going to bed an hour later that evening and you’ll be wondering why you feel tired!

But not with our church. Oh, no. In our church, on the ‘Fall Back’ weekend, we were ‘invited’ to turn up an hour early for church, so as to be able to engage in an hour-long prayer meeting before the main service. The idea was to ‘redeem the hour in the Name of the Lord’, for goodness’ sake^[5]. You’ve got an extra hour to spare (a huge assumption at the best of times!), so, then, why not come and join our prayer meeting!

Now in some ways that would be fair enough. Spend an hour in the presence of God, in the company of fellow believers, and all that.^[6]

But my problem with it was that yes, let’s spend that hour in a prayer meeting, but then why not return the favour in six months’ time by, as I said above, reducing or even removing the sermon so as to pay us back? Now there’s an idea! That really appealed to my sense of fair play, if I’m honest; at least, it would have done had they actually done it. But they didn’t, of course! 😂This is Religion we are talking about here! Novel, inventive or original thought is not, generally, a feature of the Religious mindset.

Still, at least in a sermon of over an hour’s duration, and considering that we’d all had one hour’s less sleep on the previous night, we still might have got the chance to recover that lost extra hour’s sleep that we’d forfeited those six months previously….

As long as the beady-eyed pastor doesn’t spot you, anyway! 🤣

Grace and Peace to you!