kairos.

Today's sunrise

This morning I woke up to watch the sun rise over the Gulf of Mexico and as I watched the rays begin to pierce the gray clouds, bringing to light the crystal blue water and ivory sandy beach, I couldn’t help but think of how all is truly made beautiful in due time.

The natural world we live in parallels the lives we live. There is a season and time for everything. We can't pick strawberries in January and we don't wear Ugg boots in August. (Although California girls seem to have made an excuse for this one.) There are things we reserve for a particular timing and season. We decorate Christmas trees during the Christmas season and we sing happy birthday on an actual birth date. We reserve extravagant celebrations for significant events. We wear black to a funeral and don’t wear white to someone’s wedding. We eat dessert after dinner and don’t drink coffee after brushing our teeth. While adhering too much to formality and rules can run the risk of making things just a formality, I think we can all acknowledge that saving certain traditions and rules makes those moments those moments. The reason they are wonderful are because they are saved and experienced in their own due time.

Earlier today, I read an article that taught me that the Greeks had two different words for “time.” One was chronos and the other kairos. Chronos is literal time, the 5:35pm, quantitative time. Kairos on the other is qualitative. I’ll quote J.R. Briggs and share his explanation: “Kairos is pregnant time, the time of possibility – moments in our day, our week, our month, our year or our lifetime that define us. It is a crossroads. It has the ripe opportunity to make you bitter or better. It is a teachable moment. It is the right or opportune moment. They are rarely neutral and always leave an impact on us.” Or as Mike Breen puts] it: “Kairos moments are a string of moments that possess possibility – clarity brought on often by pain, uncertainty or crisis. They force us to be absolutely present: to ourselves, to God and to the experience of reality that we’re facing.”

I don’t know about you, but I often find myself way out of time. I call my daily commute to work “the race against time.” I picture Mr. Bean from Rat Race running beside me yelling “it’s a race! It’s a race!” I wonder why 5 minutes can make all the difference and I wonder when I will ever get a chance to sit. On the flip side, I sit down and wonder go restless sitting.

As college comes to an end, THE end, I have had so many people tell me that they can’t help by wonder what is next. The future is seriously unknown. Between Kindergarten and undergraduate graduation, most of us have spent about 17 years with the same routine and the same assurance that we know how the next year will go. We will go to class in August and we fill run out in May with the hallelujah chorus on cue. Then summer will come and end and everything starts again. While we don’t know who exactly we will meet, or what exactly we will do, or what specific class we will take, we have always had the assurance of knowing that we will meet people and we will do stuff and we will take certain types of classes. We have the guide and we just fill in the specific blanks as we move along a habitual cycle.

Come May and the 17 year cycle ends. Where are we going to meet people? Wait we actually have to go out of our way to meet new people? What are we going to do?  The season of schooling is ending and a new season is about to begin.

Or maybe the college years have come and gone and you did stuff and you got a job and you met some really cool people So what is next?  Are you stuck or are you moving? Or maybe if you’re anything like me, you just can’t help but want to do things right and do things intentionally and after if you figure out if you should do it, you want to know when to do it. And those things out of your control? Well you just can’t help but wonder when they will happen.

There are things we want and desire but if we are being truly honest, we know that they happen best in due time and due season. If they just happened all the time, they wouldn’t be all that important anymore If we had Christmas trees set up all year round, the beauty and specialness of Christmas wouldn’t be the same and if we ate cake with candles all the time, birthday songs and wishes would lack significance.

The beauty of due time is applicable to far more then a holiday, event or relationship. It’s simply applicable to everything. The unknown should not scare us but it should empower us. Granted to not be scared of the future, you need to have a knowledge of where it is going. You don’t need all the details, but you do need a final destination. If you know where you’re going, fear recedes and you can enjoy the journey. We can enjoy every bend and curve and season and time because we know eventually it’s all going to lead us to a certain place. We can enjoy every period of time for what it is because we know its purpose. We can enjoy and recognize kairos moments when they happen.

If you feel like life and time is but a grain of sand slipping through an hourglass, you have got to figure out where the hourglass has come from. Are you giving yourself certain constraints and expectations? Are these fair expectations? And finally, are you using these expectations as possible destinations for your life road map?

There is a time, a place, a season and a reason for many things. I say many things because we don’t need every single experience and person and moment, some of those are frankly bad ideas waiting to happen.

But the other things, the good things, they are all made beautiful in their own kairos time.

Beginning stages of today's sunset.