Today is Monday. It is also Memorial Day. And “today” is the most important day in life.

It is the bridge between all the past and all the future—the bud to which the branches lead and in which the blossom of the future waits. As I remember an ambitious friend telling me: “Today is the the first day in the rest of my life!”

Jehovah Himself told Israel that He was the “I am”. Rather than identifying Himself as the ‘I was’ or ‘I will be’ He said “I Am”.

But what day is today?

I read Genesis 1 last week about the creation of the sun and moon, made to “document” the passing of days and years, and to give light to the earth. Since calendars vary from country to country, let’s set a standard calendar to which we can can compare the others and find out what today would be called if we had that ideal standard calendar.

To do that we first set two reference points: a geographical location on earth and a point in time in history. Jerusalem seems to be the eternal center of attention . . . and for time reference we will use the easily-determined spring equinox of the actual year of Christ’s birth, 4 BC.

Now we have the year: 2011 + 4 = 2015

This year spring began on March 20 so we’ll take the next new moon as the beginning of the first month of the year: April 3.

You will see that if we begin at this new moon, one more new moon has gone by since then (May 3) and we are actually about to see another one (June 1). That means we are about to start the third month of the year. But here is where Jerusalem, our geographical compass, comes in to play. The new moon on June 1st may be happening at 5:03pm Eastern Daylight Time, but it is 12:03am Israel Daylight Time and that is June 2nd!

That will be our reference day. Instead of calling it June 2nd, 2011, we will call it the first day of the third month in 2015. How’s that for a change?!

Now comes the fun part. We will compare it to calendars all over the world. Hold on!

“The 1st Day of our Third Month in 2015” =

1 US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, others
2 Second month in the religious/Biblical calendar beginning in spring
3 Saudi Arabia, others
4 Called the Persian Calendar
5 Other Eastern countries included: Korea and Vietnam
6 In Taiwan, it is the 101st year since their “Independence Day”
7 The Japanese Calendar varies slightly

Many thanks to the Calendar Converter from Fourmilab, in the friendly country of Switzerland.