April 1, 2013 (Monday)
“My times are in your hands; deliver me from the hands of my enemies, from those who pursue me.” (Psalm 31:15)
Man-made satellites orbit the earth. Humans placed them there. Before we put ours up there, God put one in place Himself: the moon. The moon orbits the earth. It takes about a month for it to do that. The earth itself not only is spinning on its axis, making a complete spin every day, it is also in an orbit all its own. Earth orbits the sun. It takes the earth a year to accomplish a complete orbit.
We humans observed the sky and the seasons, and figured out that neither were always the same. They changed. Over time, we saw that it was a cycle that repeated itself. We needed to know where we were in that cycle, so we devised calendars. In 45 BC, the Julian Calendar was introduced and that’s what most people used for almost 1600 years, until the Gregorian Calendar was adopted in its place. The Julian Calendar was replaced because after a while, it became clear that the cycle on the calendar was not exactly a year. It was slightly “off.”
When our ancestors changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, the new year began on January 1 instead of April 1. Some people refused to change. I can hear them now: “I been a’celebratin’ New Years on April 1 fer 81 yar, and ain’t no bureaucrat in Rome gonna change me. No, sir!” As the general populace got with the new program, those who refused to accept the new calendar looked foolish. Therefore, when they celebrated the New Year on April 1, some people called them “fools.”
From that idea, others developed, and soon people were playing practical jokes on the old-timers. Eventually, hoaxes on April 1 became common place. I remember the first time somebody played an April Fool joke on me; I was in the fourth grade, and nine years old. As I recall, once it was done to you, you did it to someone else. We discovered something new at school that day. As we grew older, we began to realize we were not nine years old anymore and childish behavior became out of place in our lives. Too bad all adults don’t know that today.