Paul tells us in Ephesians to make the very most of our time, but how are we supposed to do that? Rod Stewart sang “Forever Young,” but I saw him at the Los Angeles International Airport recently, and I have to tell you that it is not working for him. No amount of face lifts, hair dye or tanning creams can hide his age. On the other hand, the Rolling Stones sang “Time Waits for No One,” and I’m going to have to side with them: those three rock stars are grandpas now.Even cute little Opie Taylor has been bald for years! Time marches on.

I remember being in high school and wondering, “What will I be like when I’m 40?” At the time, being 40 seemed like three hundred years away. Now I’m past 40 and high school doesn’t seem really that far gone. When as much time passes again, I’ll be in my 70s! But that’s only one kind of time — chronos time. The other kind — kairos time — has to do with right-now time. The present. It’s hard to grab the present time when it flies by so fast that I can’t even remember where I had lunch last Tuesday.

Moses prayed in Psalm 90:12, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” That’s only difficult when we number our days by the wrong calendar. Moses isn’t telling us to number our days by counting up all the days we’ve been alive — a chronos perspective. He’s urging us to make the most of our days — a kairos perspective. Kairos isn’t about asking, “What time is it?” It’s about asking, “What is this time for?” In other words, how many days you live isn’t nearly as important as how much life there is in your days. David said the same thing this way: “Better is one day in [God’s] courts, than a thousand elsewhere” (Psalm 84:10). Are you kidding me? How could one day be better than a thousand? That is an absolutely crazy statement … unless you understand kairos. Kairos is what makes chronos memorable. If it wasn’t for kairos, we wouldn’t remember most of our lives.

Years ago, I was called to conduct a funeral for a woman I didn’t know. She had lived an impressive 91 years. I met with her family to inquire about her life. Who was she? What had she done? What were her interests? What were her significant pursuits? They looked at me like a calf at a new gate, shrugged and said, “Knitting!” relieved to have come up with an answer. “Oh, and the Dallas Cowboys,” they said. As much as I’d like to give her extra credit for being a Cowboys fan, she was all chronos and no kairos. Her life lasted for a long time, but there was no real life in her time.

What we call time was given to us by God. It is a gift. We talk about “keeping” time, “saving” time and “managing” time, but in reality, we can’t do any of these. All we can do with time is count it, and we’ve become pretty good at that. The National Institute of Standards and Technology had an atomic clock, which they said wouldn’t lose a second in one million years. Then came the cesium fountain clock which wouldn’t lose a second in fifteen million years. Scientists are now building a clock called an ion trap, which will not lose a second in ten billion years. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that maybe we’re obsessing about the wrong thing here. What possible difference does it make that my clock will still be counting time accurately in ten billion years if my life doesn’t count for something today?

Regardless of what day of the week this is, today you have 1,440 minutes. The chronos of this day will tick by regardless of what else happens. But the kairos is up to you. At the end of the day, it all comes down to this: did you kairos during the chronos? Did you notice the sacred things in the midst of the common? God will make sure they are all around you. Ask Him to show you.

This is a gift of God: to experience the sacred amidst the commonplace — to taste heaven in our daily bread, a new heaven and new earth in a mouthful of wine, joy in the ache of our minds or the sweat of our brows.
~ Mark Buchanan