Chronos and Kairos

Time is funny.  It didn't always exist, and it exists differently depending on where you are.  On Sunday, most of you will be gaining an hour, which means that you will be losing an hour of sleep.  Not me--I live in Arizona, where we don't buy in to such foolishness.  We always stay at the same time.  When I was in Bakersfield, I looked forward to October--standard time--and dreaded March--daylight savings time.

This is chronos.  Time is charted, scheduled, and expected to behave.  It is so dependable  that you can use it to take a pulse, beat music, and be the chart that runs your overscheduled life.

But have you noticed that our understanding of time and experience of time aren't the same?  Remember when you were young?  There was a year between December 1 and Christmas, and yet Christmas was done in 5 minutes.  It took years to finish being grounded, yet your favorite tv show was over almost before it began.  You started reading a good book at 8pm, and it seemed like just a few minutes later you looked at the clock and realized that it was 2am!  Time doesn't behave!

That's because we don't understand time.  That marking of the hours is chronos.  We mark hours and measure our day because we are creatures that love to measure.  God doesn't live in chronos.  God lives in kairos--his own time.  Kairos is time-out-of-time, that special moment that is measured qualitatively, not quantitatively.  We live our lives in both.

We wake up at 8:00 and know that we have to be at church at 10:00.  Chronos.  We begin to pray, and as we do, we enter into a conversation with God that seems to take hours.  You leave prayer certain that you will be late for church, go to the kitchen, look at the clock--it's 8:15.  You've been in kairos.  I

God loves to play, and he does his best playing in kairos.  I've been in a praise team where we had a set time--20 minutes--to play.  Everything was rigidly set in chronos.  Announcements take x minutes, worship x minutes and sermon x minutes, and so on.  We start our set, and the Holy Spirit moves.  We've learned to let it.  We play, praise God, are given words, spend time in prayer, and finish a set that should have run well over time in exactly 20 minutes.  Kairos.

On the other hand, I've seen God play with chronos, too.  One day, I was on the opposite side of town from work and was running late.  I knew that I didn't have enough time to arrive, and I asked God to please give me extra time.  He didn't.  Instead, every light was green, including a light that turned red about 5 seconds before I got there then immediately green again (that's when I knew He was playing).  When I got to the freeway, there was absolutely no traffic--unheard of during rush hour.  I got to work with minutes to spare.

Whether you're in chronos or kairos, you're in God's time.  Take a moment this weekend to relax and enjoy being in God's time--and then try and see how often you end up in kairos!

God's love to you!