“For you, a thousand years are as a passing day, as brief as a few night hours.”

Today is the “Winter Solstice” and from here on out, the days feel longer because we get more sunlight.  It’s my favorite day of the year.  But, actually the days are really getting longer…daily.  Advanced technology is setting new standards for a number of measurements we have always taken for granted. The Kilogram just got a new way of preserving its standard weight and the Second is getting another look too.  It was in the 1940’s that the standard for a second was 1/86,400th of an average day.  The Earth’s rotation is slowing enough that each day is getting a little, tiny bit, longer, like a millisecond a century. So, that means that about 1.4 Billion years ago the day would have been only about 18 hours long.  This should definitely make us all wonder, “Where has the time gone?”.  By the way, the second is now calculated by an atom that radiates radio waves inside of a vacuum.  To win your next trivia night, know that 9,192,631,770 cycles of these waves make up a second.

How do we make the most of our days, which in the largest scheme of life, are shortening for each of us. We have choices on how we spend our lives, years, days, hours and seconds and God gives us that direction in his Word.  For Him, it is not the hours, it is in what we make of the time we are given. As our current sunlit days expand, let’s think of what we can do with that increasing bit of extra light!

Reference: Psalm 90:4 (New Living Translation)