We operate in “chronos,” 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year…chronological time that is fleeting and elusive, and we know it. Still, we try to manage time with day planners and appointment books and smart phones. We try to hold time by dwelling in the past or bracing for the future. We attempt to trick time, often we waste time, we speak of “killing time,” we wish to go “back in time.” We have a difficult relationship with time as we know it.
But there is something outside of time as we know it. There is “kairos,” the “fullness of time” when God acts. It is, as author Stephen Smith describes it, “the ‘time in between’ sequential time when God breaks through.” The author of Ecclesiastes puts it this way:
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven…He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil—this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that men will revere him.”{Ecclesiastes 3:1 & 11-14}
Amen
Jennifer Shaw
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