“Jesus answered him, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise’” (Luke 23:43, NIV).

My phone awakened me from a pretty wonderful sleep last night.

“Doctor, I had an appointment at 10:30. I’m sorry I didn’t make it. My stomach was sick.”

I looked at my watch, 1:30 a.m.

“It’s still nighttime.”

“It’s still nighttime?”

“Yes,” I said. “You can still come today. You haven’t missed it yet.”

Have you ever looked at your life and said, “It’s too late—I’ve missed it”?

Only in the last few years have I quit the dream of high school, where I can’t find my classroom and know I have missed an exam.

Real-life thoughts of missed opportunities are far more painful. You can’t just wake up and make them untrue.

Sometimes it’s a relationship lost, because you could not change your character in time or did not speak the words you knew were right in time.

Sometimes you too late considered the lab test that would have saved your patient.

Sometimes financial and business opportunities pass you by.

Sometimes it’s the neighbor who died just before you developed the courage to speak about Jesus.

Sometimes God spoke about mission, but you waited, and the pathway disappeared.

I have known most of these. I can feel the pain of those I know. Thank God that He is not caught in our time zones. Loving and powerful and independent from time, He can redeem our lateness and even make us better people in the process.

Those times we failed because we were too late cannot be undone, but they can be redone by God in redemptive ways. God is always restarting our clocks when we lay our failures at His feet. Even though the painful consequences of our delay may follow us, we are able to bear them, because He is carrying them with us. It is never too late to hand our missed opportunities to God and let Him redeem them to make something new. If He did it for the thief on the cross, He can do it for you.

Dear Father,
Help me to be on time by your timing. Help me to redeem the time when I have been too late.
Amen