This morning, I walked into our kitchen to start the coffee. In the darkness, I noticed the digital clock on the stove read 3:39, and the clock on the microwave was reading 3:40. When the time changed in November, I set the clocks back an hour and thought I did it at a precise moment, but there must have been a short lag. I did not notice the difference between the two clocks since the time change. But, when I entered the kitchen this morning, the two clocks revealed their difference for just a moment before returning to proper alignment. Had I not been standing in the kitchen at that precise moment, I would have missed the error.

Like the two digital clocks in our kitchen, not everything in our life will always align when it comes to our perception of time. Our expectations and assumptions can create miscalculations in our understanding of time. When we realize those misalignments, we need to trust God that He has the timing of our life held safely in His hands. 

On one of our trips through London, Jan, and I visited Greenwich, a suburb of London. Greenwich is where the Royal Observatory is located and where Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is kept using an atomic clock. In most of the non-English speaking world, this time keeping is referred to as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The Greenwich clock is the timepiece from which all world time is set, plus or minus hours depending on where you read the current time on the globe. Incorrectly setting our wristwatch or the clocks in our home does not affect GMT/UTC. Greenwich remains constant as a global reference point for all time measurements.

Whenever we set our spiritual and emotional clocks, we create a frame of reference for the timing of the events in our life. Our settings will always contain a human error. This doesn’t mean we failed. It merely means we missed the timing for the realization of a desire of our heart or the fulfillment of a dream. Life is not over because we set the wrong time. In God’s Kingdom, a correction of a timing error is always possible because God is the merciful keeper of time. Just as someone who wants to set their clock to the proper time would set their timepiece to the atomic clock in Greenwich, so it is with you and me when we want to align the timing of our lives with God. If we realize we made a mistake in our perception of time, we need to give God our clock to be reset. He will lovingly reset our clock to His timing and hand it back to us.