Living on a different time this holiday season

I have been reading Henri Nouwen’s Discernment and he touches upon the idea of God’s time (Kairos as opposed to Chronos).  In Greek, Chronos is sequential time – the minutes and seconds that make up our lives and our collective history.  Kairos is the right or opportune time for something to happen. It is a length of indeterminate time in which everything happens.  There are many sermons and websites dedicated to this distinction, so I will not break it down any more here.  

But Christians often acknowledge a desire to live on God’s time.  To do this, I think we have no further to look than the ancient Jewish custom of remembrance through festivals. The Jewish calendar is full of festivals commemorating God’s interventions in their history. The seven Jewish festivals or “feasts” in the bible are Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Firstfruits, the Feast of Weeks, the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles.  All of these are remembrances of God’s interaction with the Jewish story. All of these feasts are preceded by a Sabbath, or day of rest and reflection. Living in and reflecting on the events in our history and in our own individual lives that have carried God’s fingerprints on them, is the way to live in God’s time, ways to be aware of the events on God’s time table.  Not so much living in a way contained by secular Chronos time - ticking away as we hurry from one appointment to the next without any reflection.

For me, this means reflecting on the events of the day in my nightly prayers.  When I have been taking time with God, he infuses all the events of the day with meaning: divine appointments that come and go throughout the day. But I have been blessed with a wonderfully inadequate memory. Thanks, God. Not to mention an innate aversion towards morning prayers. So I have taken to journaling at crucial points in my life. At each of these, I have made an entry. I journaled when I went to Ghana and Guatemala to build houses for the poor. I journaled when I met my wife and began courting her.  I journaled when when I got sick and came out of a three day coma.  Those were the most grateful words I ever wrote.  And every time, I was careful to consider what God was doing in those times. Now I can look back and see God’s fingerprints on my life.

When looking over these entries, it occurred to me that time is not necessarily a linear thing.  Time, for me, is a tree. Literally. Like a tree it grows out of an event, a birth, and breaks into smaller and smaller branches.  And each branch is a crucial point, a decision, a choice (inspired by God’s hand or not), a point at which paths diverge.  I think sometimes back to those crucial points and think of what my life would be if I had taken the other path.  I would be somewhere much removed from the place in the foliage that I currently find myself.   Every time I look at a tree, I have this image of my life and the history of my interactions with God.

This is the perfect time of year to start living on God’s time, to reflect on your own history, your own tree, and of the history of God’s interactions with his people. Christians, like our Jewish fathers, have a time to remember God’s divine fingerprint on history: Advent.  In the month leading up to Christmas, take some Sabbath time and reflect on what God has done in your life.  Reflect on the birth of Jesus in history like the Jewish people remembered Pentecost or Sukkot (the feast of Booths). Get a book of Advent devotionals. Take some time to journal.  Read the servant songs in Isaiah. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_songs Take time away from the hectic chronos of this season and just remember.  That is how to live on God’s time.