When The Clocks Go Back

He gets the key in the door at twelve minutes past five, and it has been fully dark for half an hour.

Sunday night the clocks went back. That is all that happened. Nobody died, no letter came, nothing was found on a scan. An hour of afternoon was moved to the morning where he is asleep and cannot use it, and now the streetlight outside number nine is already on before he is off the bypass.

He puts the bags down in the hall. He does not take his coat off. He stands there with the light still off and the car keys in his fist, and the weight comes down over his shoulders like a second coat pulled on over the one he is wearing.

He knows this weight. That is the strange part. He is not meeting it for the first time and he is not exactly frightened of it. He is tired of it in advance, because he could name the two weeks it owns the way a farmer can tell you when the ground goes hard.

Last November he wrote himself a note, and he came across it again this morning, dated the eleventh: it does lift. it lifted last year as well. He remembers writing it. He remembers meaning it. Reading it now, it is a note from a stranger who happens to have his handwriting.

Nothing is wrong. He has been asked twice this week what is wrong, and both times he said nothing, and both times it was true, and both times it came out sounding like the thing people say when there is something. Work is fine. His wife is fine. The boy is fine.

He simply cannot get the kettle filled.

He is standing at the sink holding it, tap not running, looking at his own reflection in the black window with the garden he cannot see behind it, and the whole of him would like to sit down on the kitchen floor and not speak to anybody until March.

He will not do that. He will fill the kettle in a minute. He will get his coat off and put the hall light on and be perfectly pleasant all evening, and nobody in that house will know, because he has had a great deal of practice, and the practice is its own kind of tired.

That is you.

Coat on, hall dark, hand on a kettle you cannot fill, in the same two weeks of the year it always is.

And before we go one sentence further I want the ground clear under your feet. This is not a failure of faith. It is not evidence that something has gone wrong between you and God. Nobody in heaven is looking at a man in a dark hallway at ten past five and shaking their head. A body that answers to light is doing what a body was made to do, and I have never once heard God treat it as a fault.

The light did not lose anything on Sunday night

Here is the whole of what happened at two in the morning on Sunday. The planet kept doing what it has done since the fourth day, and a clock in your kitchen was moved back one hour so the daylight lands where more people can use it. That is the entire event. The sun did not dim. Nothing was taken off you.

Worth saying out loud, because your body does not know it. It opens that season whether you prayed this morning or not, whether you came to this new or forty years in. It is weather in a body. It is not a verdict on a soul.

Now hear what the word says about light and dark, and notice where it puts the weight, because it is not where we usually put it.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.John 1:5

Two tenses in one short sentence, and both of them are carrying something.

Shines is present and it keeps going. Not shone, back at some brighter point on the calendar. Not will shine, in March. Shines. Right now, at twelve minutes past five, in an unlit hall, over a man who still has his coat on.

Then has not overcome it, and that is finished. Darkness has had every night since the beginning of the world to put that light out, and the score has never moved by a point.

So hear it where you are standing: you are not living in a darker world tonight than the one you lived in during September. You are living in a shorter afternoon, and those two things are not remotely the same. John 1:5 says the light shines in the dark, present tense, and it is the Holy Spirit carrying that sentence into your hallway, not the sentence carrying itself.

The verse does not tell the dark to stop being dark before the light counts. It puts the two of them in one room and reports the result.

Your two weeks are not a stretch where God's word goes quiet and picks up again at the end of the month. You have His light in you at half past four in November on exactly the terms you had it in June, because His word does not run on daylight saving, and His Spirit did not move an hour back on Sunday along with the clock.

That matters, because of what heaviness whispers. It rarely says anything as clear as God has left. It says something smaller and far more effective. It says this is what you are really like, and the summer version was the pretense.

That is a lie, and I want it out of your hallway before it gets any further in.

Even the darkness is not dark to You; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with You.Psalm 139:12

You were seen in every one of those Novembers. Not watched from a distance and marked down: seen, held, and known, in a dark where God's own eyes have never needed the lamp on, and Psalm 139:12 is written down so you would not have to guess about it. The same Spirit who was with you at the bright end of the year did not go dim at the dark end of it.

And because none of this is a technique, let me say the ordinary things plainly, the way I would say them on a porch. A lamp that comes on early helps. Getting outside in the middle of the day, wrapped up warm, helps. Talking to your doctor about a heaviness that arrives with the season is a good and sensible thing to do, and if a doctor puts medicine or a therapist in your hands, that is provision, not a demotion in your walk with God. He gave us light and He gave us doctors, and taking what He hands you has never once been a shortage of trust.