Walking in the Valley A bi-weekly column, featuring one Christian's (a)musings on life's journey by Barbara Dahlgren

A Perfect Calendar Column for the weeks of February 16-29, 2008

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I just can’t let this February pass without acknowledging that it’s a leap year. Leap years have one extra day inserted into February. Instead of 28 days, February will have 29 days. Therefore, leap years have 366 days instead of the usually 365.

People like me who prefer to have things totally organized are fascinated by leap years. It’s as if someone said, “This calendar thing is not really working out as well as we hoped, so let’s just put an extra day in every four years or so and it will work out fine.” I guess I could accept the every four years thing, but even that isn’t exact, which plays further havoc with my left brain thinking.

In the Gregorian calendar, which is the calendar used by most modern countries, including us, the following rules decide which years are leap years:

1. Every year divisible by 4 is a leap year
2. But every year divisible by 100 is NOT a leap year
3. Unless the year is also divisible by 400, then it is still a leap year

In the old Julian calendar, there was only one rule: Every year divisible by 4 is a leap year. I’m very good with coping with just one rule. But was that good enough for everyone? NO! So everyone adopted the Gregorian calendar!

One might ask, “Do we really need a leap year?” Well, you do the math!

It takes 365.2422 days for the earth to orbit the sun. We have an extra .2422-day, which is about 6 hours each year. That can really add up over a period of time. But even that extra day doesn’t make for a perfect calendar. You see, man has not been able to come up with a perfect calendar. They all are off by seconds, minutes, hours, or days. Lunar calendars had problems because some years had 12 moons and some 13. Even the Gregorian calendar may need some modifications eventually. The reason is even though a tropical year is approximately 365.242199 days long, it varies from year to year because of influence by other planets.

The longest time between two leap years is 8 years. The last time that happened was between 1896 and 1904. It will happen again in 2096 and 2104. However, by that time we’ll be dead and they may have another system in place.

Being a person who likes peace, order, organization….alright…I’m a bit anal retentive (Can’t they come up with a better name for this?)….I still struggle accepting that all the months don’t have the same amount of days in them. If it weren’t for the ditty about 30 days has September, April, June…yada, yada, yada…I would be lost. I certainly would have done a better job of laying this out. But then I’m not God.

As confused as I get with leap years, I love them. They reinforce what I know in my heart, but tend to forget – that in the midst of man’s chaos, God is in charge. In fact, he made the sun, moon, and stars in their orbits (Psalm 8:2-4). God has a perfect calendar. We just don’t know what it is, so we do the best with the information we’ve been given. Leap years remind me to “let go and let God” handle it. I don’t have to fully understand everything because God is in control.

Man may never get the whole calendar thing figured out, and as hard as that if for me to deal with, I can live with it. I’ll just focus on God. After all, there would be no calendar without him.

Be sure to visit this page often to read the next edition of Walking in the Valley. You can write to the author at bdahlgren@wcgsouthbay.org.