Advent challenges us to develop and deepen our sense of timing.

Timing is everything. Well, if not everything, then at least almost everything.

An Italian priest, Giovanni Caselli, developed the first commercial fax system between Paris and Lyons in 1865. He called his mysterious invention the pantelegraph. But nobody got it. Nobody used it. Caselli was simply too far ahead of his time. So the pantelegraph sat about as an unused idea for the next century while it waited for the world to catch up.

Think that couldn't happen today? Consider that researchers at Xerox developed the computer "mouse" a full 15 years too soon. For a decade and a half, the "mouse" sat on a shelf waiting for a market. Finally, through the techno-wizardry of Apple Computers, the mouse concept became a viable, ind…