BREAKING THE TYRANNY OF THE URGENT
“Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:15-16)
“Let us examine two Greek concepts of time: chronos and kairos. Chronos (from which we get words like “chronology” and “chronometer”) is clock time: minutes, decades, centuries—past, present, and future of is-ness, was-ness, and will be. Karios, on the other hand, is time as substance. It is inconsequential and indivisible. Such time is merely is-ness. It is God’s category of time just as chronos is the human category.
Most of us spend our lives serving chronos; we run from it and yet surrender to it. Clocks dictate our pace and wall us in with agendas and deadlines. Tick by tock we serve the clock.
At the basis of entering into the depths is God’s entreaty to change time zones—to move from chronos to kairos. In chronos the second hand drives life forward, but in kairos, time doesn’t move. Kairos, like God himself, is not static. It ever moves; still it is ageless. Kairos never looks back and wishes it had achieved more; with kairos there is no back. Therefore, there is no driveness in kairos, which would make us want to do more planning or strive to achieve more.
Kairos is the “is” of being, the “I am” of all existence. As Jesus pointed out to the Pharisees, God did not say to Moses at the burning bush, “I was the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” but “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Mark 12:26, emphasis added). God is all present tense. To say he has been or he may be is to strip all godhood from him and make him a prisoner of mere measured time.
Changing time zones—how is it to be done? Paul says it this way: “Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:15-16). Time belongs to God:
“Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil” (James 4:13-16).
Myth logically Chronos was the name of a short Greek god whose legs were muscular and whose heels were winged. He moved fast. He was bald and slick at the back of his head, but scalp-locked in the front. The implication was that if you could grab him as he came toward you, you would take hold of him and make him respond to your wish. But if you waited till he was past you, it was too late, for he was smooth-headed in the back and could not be grabbed once he has passed.
Chronos is like water flowing through a pipe. The pipe could be cut into three parts and water would be equally present in all three. Kairos, by contrast, is a grand ocean, and oceans are immeasurable. There, a single drop of rain might fall into the grand sea of measureless time and be absorbed.
In the Christian view of time, our earthly lives are like time in the pipe. Once our frail lives are over, we too join the sea of God’s immensity. Our ultimate joining of kairos does not mean we will lose our own separateness. We will retain our identity all through eternity, but we will no longer need to chop time into parts. Until that time—the grand kairos to which our present chronos is headed—we will always be in the hands of God. Even Jesus, during his earthly sojourn, admitted that he did not know the time (chronos) of his second coming. “
(thoughts by C. Miller)
Tomorrow I am going to tell you a story by William R. White that reminds us of the hiddenness of kairos time. You need to ponder long and hard on the concepts of Chronos and kairos time zones first—then the story will make more sense.
Until then …
