The author of Ecclesiastes writes (if you've ever seen "Footloose" this will sound familiar):

There's an opportune time to do things, a right time for everything on the earth:
A right time for birth and another for death,
A right time to plant and another to reap,
A right time to kill and another to heal,
A right time to destroy and another to construct,
A right time to cry and another to laugh,
A right time to lament and another to cheer,
A right time to make love and another to abstain,
A right time to embrace and another to part,
A right time to search and another to count your losses,
A right time to hold on and another to let go,
A right time to rip out and another to mend,
A right time to shut up and another to speak up,
A right time to love and another to hate,
A right time to wage war and another to make peace.
(Eccl 3:1-8 MSG)

Country music (and a classic cliche) put it this way: "Timing is everything."
If the timing is off in my car, nothing runs quite the way it's supposed to.
If the timing is off between a couple on Dancing With the Stars, they aren't voted on to the next week of competition

Timing (and missing it) are scary prospects.

What if we "miss" the plan? What if our internal clock is skewed by a slow battery or a sun flare or a prankster in the household? What if we don't "hear" from heaven and respond accordingly in time? Are we then lost to the ultimate power and control of that incessant ticking called TIME?
I don't think so.
In my opinion, God is bigger than our mere human understanding of time in the form of years and centuries and millenia. Forgive my comparison, please, but like Doctor Who of BBC fame, God is the ultimate "TIME LORD."

And because His expressed will for us is for our GOOD, not for our failure, defeat, or destruction, He is well able (and perhaps more importantly, willing) to correct our human failures in timing in order that His perfect plan for our well-being is ultimately fulfilled.

The Patrick and I are notorious for getting lost on road trips. On the way home from Las Vegas we missed the only exit we needed to take on the interstate (and that with GPS) and ended up more than an hour off course somewhere in Utah. We were lost because we hadn't been paying attention to the blinking dot on the iPhone that marked our course, but that didn't mean we were forsaken! (Although the dot on the map we found ourselves at might have been sucked right out of a "Deliverance" or "Race With the Devil" movie set.

Too many people get off course, fall out of God's plan for some reason, find themselves on an unexpected detour, or are convinced they are lost forever. Not. True. Can you imagine how crazy insane it would have been if we'd called up the kids and said, "We missed an exit, got lost, and are gonna  settle down in this tiny little burg in the boonies of Utah." Um, no. No one does that. (Do they?)

Sure, missed turns and opportunities cost us something, but they aren't the end of the road! Our God is able to redeem the time, able to give us new opportunities. Stop looking backward at what you may have missed and start looking forward! 

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