For years, twice a year, the microwave was wrong.
So was the stove, and maybe the clock in the car. Depending on what else was in the house, a few devices needed someone to stand in front of them, press a strangely specific combination of buttons, and move the time forward or back by an hour.
The smarter devices took care of themselves. Phones adjusted. Computers adjusted. They knew when daylight saving time began and ended, and they made the change while we slept. It was one of those small conveniences that made the older clocks seem a little behind.
Then came 1 November 2026.
In most parts of British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba, three Canadian provinces, the clocks did not go back. The seasonal time change had ended there, while most of the rest of Canada and the United States turned their clocks back as usual. But not every device had caught up. Some were still running the old rules, and at the usual hour they turned their clocks back, exactly as they had been designed to do.
That was the problem. They were working perfectly, and they were wrong.
The microwave, set to daylight time last spring, was still right. It had no firmware update, no new time-zone database, nothing to patch. It knew nothing about the change because it had never known anything about daylight saving time in the first place.
For years, needing to be corrected by hand had been the proof of its limitations. This time, the limitation meant there was nothing to correct.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that. Not because I have developed a theology of kitchen appliances, but because I wonder how often I judge things, and people, the same way.
We are very good at deciding what progress is supposed to look like. Faster is better than slower. Automated is better than manual. New is better than old. The person moving ahead must be doing something right, and the person standing still must have missed something.
Often those judgments make sense. I am not about to trade my phone for a microwave clock. But usefulness always depends on circumstances. The automatic clock was not universally better. It was well suited to a world in which the clocks changed twice a year. It carried an assumption, and for years the assumption was true.
Then the world changed.
Sometimes the problem isn’t that something has stopped working. It’s that it keeps working exactly as designed after the assumptions around it have changed.
I think that is what happens when I measure my own life. Someone is further along in a career like mine. Someone’s work is being noticed. Someone has the opportunity I have been praying for. It doesn’t take much before observation becomes comparison, and comparison becomes a verdict on myself: you should be further along by now.
But the measures I use were built for someone else’s circumstances. They assume a different starting point, a different calling, a different season. I carry them around and apply them anyway, long after they have stopped fitting. And there is always another clock available, somewhere on my screen, to tell me that mine must be wrong.
The book of Ecclesiastes opens its famous passage this way: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, ESV). It goes on to name a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to keep and a time to let go.
I used to hear that mainly as reassurance that hard seasons eventually give way to better ones, and there is comfort in that. But there is something more demanding in it too. It means no single condition gets to define the whole of life. Planting is right in its time, and so is uprooting. Something can be entirely appropriate in one season and entirely wrong in another. So there may be no single picture of what a life that is going well is supposed to look like.
Perhaps wisdom begins with a different question. Not, “Am I where they are?” Not even, “Am I where I thought I would be by now?” But, “What does faithfulness require of me in this season?”
That question leaves room to grow without turning growth into a race. It leaves room to learn from people who are ahead of me without needing to become them, and to change what genuinely needs changing without treating every difference as a deficiency. It also leaves room for some things to remain simple.
I should be honest about the microwave. It was not secretly better than the smarter clocks. It was right by accident, because it was ignorant of the change, and the next time the rules change its limits will be limits again. Nothing about it was faithful or wise.
But it did show me how temporary our judgments can be. We call things advanced or outdated, ahead or behind, without knowing what circumstances will eventually reveal. Maybe I can give my own life some of that humility, and be slower to call any part of it behind.
For years, twice a year, someone had to walk over and correct the microwave.
This time, it just kept counting the seconds. And that was exactly what the moment required.