Time of Your Life

For the past month I have not been wearing a watch. Since I quit wearing a watch I have learned a lot about time. I have learned that not all time is identical. Some minutes are not identical. An afternoon in a doctor’s office is eternity compared to an afternoon spent with my family by the pool. Two hours watching the Braves at Turner Stadium is nothing compared to two hours watching the Sound of Music (sorry not my thing).

Different cultures treat time differently. When I visit a South American country and invited over to a house for dinner at eight, if I arrived at eight I would be early. The host would not even be ready. If I arrived at nine I would still be one of the first one’s to arrive. Around ten the party would just be getting started. However, in America, time is a commodity. We talk about “spending” time or “wasting” time. We must have something to show for our time. We spend money on gadgets that help us to manage our time because nothing is worse than to “waste” our time.

Most of the decisions we make in life revolve around time. What will I do this year? Is it time to change careers? Is this the season for a child? Is this decision going to take away time from the family? Decisions would be a lot easier if somehow we could control time.

Jesus starts his ministry by saying, “The time is fulfilled” (Mark 1:15). The Greek word for time is kairos. It means a decisive moment, a turning point, or a time of fulfillment. In another book of the bible the word is used to describe that precise moment when the grapes are ready for picking (Matt. 21:34).

Kairos is that moment that is interjected into the chronology of our time. It is that moment when there is not enough hours in the day to get everything done and all of a sudden you run into a long-time friend and time stops. Kairos is that moment when supper has to be on the table, baths have to be given, and bills paid and your child comes down stairs dressed as a pirate and wants you to be the captain of his ship. In the course of our day God interjects into our life kairos moments. May we never be so busy that we miss them. The young struggling diabetic Shelby, in the movie Steel Magnolias (1989) muses, “I would rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.” Wonderful is all around. I started noticing it when I stopped asking, “What time is it?”