Augustine wrote in his Confessions, “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; but if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not.” I think this is a most astute observation of time, for I spend all my waking moments oriented around time - I wake up at this time; I go to work at this time; I spend this amount of time doing this task; I wasted this amount of time doing that thing. My mind is so oriented to filter all of realty through the lens of time and our best understanding and measurement of it, and yet, as soon as I reflect on the very nature of time, it seems so foreign and inexplicable a thing.

Perhaps time is best explained by Dr. Who: “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey…stuff.” 

If that didn’t clear things up, Pastor Justin perhaps helped by delineating two different Greek conceptions of time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is the steady, inexorable march of the future moving through the present to become the past; it is measurable, quantifiable; it is chaotic and wild, and must be tamed through description and fine measurement. In contrast, kairos are those moments which punctuate chronos with unearthly poignancy and substantiveness; they are not quantifiable, but only qualifiable (not how much Christmas did you have, but how was your Christmas?). Whereas chronos is the “default” view and felt realty of time, kairos is the substantive and distinct moments that can cause us to pause and reflect.

In the year that I lived in Oxford, I had a weekly engagement in the most difficult and stressful of all the places for mission: a middle-school bible study. Week after week, I returned to the blank stares and unenthused engagement, and each week, I would leave feeling frustrated and useless. However, as part of the placement, my responsibility was to reflect on my time each week and to point out a kairos moment from that week. And each week, as I would reflect on the drudgery of the Bible study with these middle-schoolers, those kairos moments would begin to stand out in my memory - perhaps a student asked a particularly poignant question that made me stop and consider; perhaps a student made a comment that demonstrated a high level of understanding, something far and above what their blank stares might convey. 

Now this usage of kairos may be making a trite usage of the word with these small moments being described as kairos, but I think that it is a helpful reflection to consider how in even the smallest moments, that is precisely where we can see heaven breaking in upon our “secular” age. As Pastor Justin described, our world is pregnant with the presence and the glory of God; we must have but the right vantage and to open our eyes, and we will see the bright glory of God impinging upon our dark world. And from that vantage, as we reflect and see how Christ is here, now, we can be encouraged to move forward knowing that so to is Christ coming, knowing that though we face drudgery, or hardship, or travail Christ is with us, and Christ is coming.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away;

They fly, forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the op’ning day.

O God, our help in ages past,

Our hope in years to come,

Be Thou our guard while life shall last,

And our eternal home.

— Isaac Watts

~ Josh Spare