THE DAYS ARE GETTING LONGER

What I should say, I guess, is that the daylight hours are getting longer. (Days are still just 24 hours. Sorry if I got you all excited there for a minute, giving you more hours in a day.)

It's still early January, so winter is officially only a couple of weeks old, but I have already begun to notice that it's staying light just a little bit longer each evening. I love noticing this each year, even though there's something about this fact that has never made sense to me. Let me see if I can explain what doesn't make sense about it.

I understand that the earth is tilted on its axis, that it rotates around the sun, and that the angle of the sunlight on the earth creates the seasons and the amount of daylight we get each day. That part I get. The part that always bewilders me, though, is that as the daylight hours get longer in January and February, the weather just seems to get colder. It seems to me that, instead, the shortest days would be the coldest days and that the weather should get noticeably warmer following the first day of winter since we start getting more sunshine each day after that. Does that make sense?

The only answer I've been able to come up with for this perplexing question is that this is a blessing from the Lord. When the cold, dreary days of winter start to overwhelm me, I can look at the clock and see that it's 5:45 p.m. and, by golly, it's still light out when just a couple of weeks ago, it seems, it was dark before 5:30. The days really are getting longer - and with that I know that springtime and warmer weather can't be far behind. That, indeed, is an encouragement to me, sort of a light at the end of the long winter tunnel, a blessing indeed!