Spring has finally sprung, which means it’s that time of year when sunlight sheepishly begins to peek out from behind heavy clouds, and piles of snow adorning lawns and driveways begin to melt away. But as the birds once more begin to sing and chilly days gradually give way to warmer ones, one dreaded event looms on the horizon: setting ahead the clocks for Daylight Saving Time.
Daylight Saving time, first federally mandated in 1966, was established to allow more daylight to be used in the summer months so that nightfall fell at a more acceptable late time. Now, it also ensures earlier sunlight during the winter months to make commutes to school safer for children. While setting the clocks back to gain an extra hour for the wintertime is often looked forward to, springing the clocks forward an hour in spring and losing a bit of extra rest is often dreaded.
But when it comes to the value we put on rest, Daylight Saving Time is oftentimes more of a scapegoat than the real enemy. It’s easier to blame the hour of rest we lose this season as the reason we’re drained or tired during the spring rather than confess that overall, we seldom put enough value on rest and its role in stewardship of our health. This spring, it matters that we get enough rest the night our clocks spring forward. But it matters even more that we take a serious look at how we view rest as the weather warms up.
With the longer days spring and summer bring, it is far too easy to “load up our time,” cramming in as many errands, activities, and responsibilities as we can. But when we approach our time with this mindset, even if it may be subconsciously, we start viewing our time as a currency that must be spent on getting us other things instead of viewing it as a gift to cherish. When this happens, rest no longer becomes something valuable; it gets regulated to the “game over” state that resets our currency for the next day.
The greatest issue with this approach is that if we adopt it, we often fail to see the natural rhythms God has woven into His Creation. The seasons themselves are designed to hold unique and distinct rhythms of life for us, with purposes imbued within them, such as the renewal of life in the spring and the season of harvest in the fall. Just look at the order of our days that God determined within the Creation week, setting aside a natural time of day and night, and even setting aside a specific day designated for rest! These created rhythms were made with care and with our well-being in mind, and they contain deep spiritual and physical importance that we risk losing if we adopt a “currency” view of time.
For the spiritual component, a glance at the Old Testament reveals the value of why the Sabbath, the day of rest, was respected by Israel as a time to quiet one's life and reflect on God and His provision. The physical side, however, is one often ignored by our current culture. When we care more about what our time-currency can buy us, and rest becomes a necessity instead of a virtue, we set both our bodies and our minds into a state of “do-or-die.” In short, we go until we can’t go anymore, until we crash or burn, and then repeat the whole process all over again.
This is not stewardship of our health. Worse, it can even be a form of idolatry where our bodies and minds pay the price.
Rest isn’t just about resetting our clocks or our bank of time to invest, it’s about giving our minds and our bodies reprieves from work. Rest is about being still, about consciously investing our time into stewarding our health by allowing ourselves to “catch up” from the busyness of daily life. When this is neglected, the need doesn’t go away; it just gets reassigned. Every day or week without proper rest only increases what our bodies and minds will require to catch up. Eventually, the load can get too great, and we either physically crash or begin to rest when it’s too late to catch up to the debt that we’ve already accrued.
We may be tempted to claim that we don’t have the time to rest, or that we’re simply too busy, but this is only shifting blame away from a greater issue of priorities. Jesus, during His earthly ministry, demonstrated for us how important rest was to His physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. Even during the highest points of His ministry, when he was pursued by crowds everywhere He went, Jesus still made it a priority to find rest and to give His mind and body a break. (Mark 6:31) When rest came, so did a time to be still and listen to God’s voice as body, mind, and soul became renewed.
So, is Daylight Saving Time really a cause for our exhaustion, or is it the beginning of a pattern that follows us well into the fall of not prioritizing rest as stewardship of our health?
If we follow the biblical examples we’ve been given and learn to see rest as a focus and a priority, we begin to reverse the narrative that rest “takes away” from the other activities we want to accomplish with our time and begin to see it as the very foundation that equips us to use our time better and in healthier ways. Prioritizing proper rest has been proven to positively affect immune systems, mood, cravings, heart health, and a myriad of other benefits. Perhaps that’s one of the many reasons that a day of rest was created into our weekly schedule, and that night hours were designed to give us a natural resting time!
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