Living for the Moment

In the words of Ferris Bueller, "Life moves fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you just might miss it.: And he was right. But beyond looking, there are also times you need to jump in and be a part of what’s going on around you. That’s because life’s moments are packed with life-changing possibilities.

What Time is It? In its song "Seasons of Love," the Broadway musical "Rent" asks a pretty powerful question: "How do you measure, measure a year…how do you measure a year in the life?" There are, the tune reminds us, 525,600 minutes in a year; but time is measured more by moments than minutes. In his book “Chasing Daylight,” Erwin McManus adds, “Within those moments, a handful will become the defining moments in your life. However mundane a moment may appear, the miraculous may wait to be unwrapped within it.”

Within Scripture, the word translated as time actually refers to two different kinds. Chronos, the root of our word chronological, is a succession of points on a continuum [it is 10:02 a.m. as I write this sentence, for example; or in Matthew 2:7, "Then Herod secretly summoned the wise men and asked them the exact time (chronos) the star appeared"]. Kairos, on the other hand, refers to the fullness of a moment, the possibility for eternal significance, a moment that demands a decision. Romans 5:6 uses kairos rather than chronos to highlight that what is important is the significance of time, the depth of a moment: "For while we were still helpless, at the appointed moment (kairos), Christ died for the ungodly." While chronos refers to quantity of time, kairos measures quality of time.

Madeleine L’Engle distinguishes the two times in her book "Walking on Water": "Chronos: our wristwatch and alarm-clock time. Kairos: God’s time, real time." She unpacks this idea as a challenge to see the possibilities in our moments by seeking the kairos in our chronos. We can, for example, use time spent waiting in line to pray or to appreciate the diversity of life experience in the people around us.

We all have the same amount of time each day, but we have a choice about how we’ll view the significance of it. To borrow L'Engle's example, we can spend those minutes tapping our feet impatiently and silently grousing, or we can offer them to God as an opportunity for His purposes – to offer a word of encouragement to the frazzled person in front of us or to offer a prayer of gratitude for our provisions.

A Kairos Mindset, when we see our minutes as divine opportunities, our hearts are most receptive to God’s promptings. It’s easy to divide days in our minds: work time, workout time, play time, relationship time, and church time. But Colossians 4:5 tells us to "walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the most of the time." The crux of the kairos concept is recognizing that sometimes God's time doesn’t exactly follow our neat and tidy delineations.

Dr. Angela Jackson confronted this challenge firsthand. In her second year of medical school residency, Jackson spent a month at a mission hospital in West Africa. Humbled by her ability to minister to both the physical and spiritual needs of women in that setting, Jackson was no longer content to be an occasional medical missionary. She dreamed of a Christ-centered OB/GYN practice that would allow her to spend a month every year serving overseas.

Naysayers presented all the reasons why Jackson was anything from naive to unrealistic. But that moment of vision in Africa stayed with her, and today, she is on staff at a practice that celebrates the miracles of both physical and spiritual healing.

Defining Moments sometimes it's the less obvious moments that can be the most powerful in our lives. "We tend to think that life's most defining moments come in the form of personal achievements of milestones: graduation, marriage, promotion," author Kenneth Boa says. "The reality is that these are usually not the most influential moments in our lives. Truly defining moments shape the contours and destiny of our lives. These moments are rarely written into our appointment books, but their potency is such that they become the things we most remember and are most remembered for. The Bible teaches that within every life God provides such kairos moments for us to seize and exploit."

Back in school, I enrolled in a class called "Modern Mathematical Vistas." One of those vistas was "chaos theory." The basic idea is looking for order in disorder, considering the large-scale effects of a seemingly small-scale start (for example, a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo could, in theory, cause a hurricane in the United States). In the same way, an act of obedience in something seemingly insignificant could, in fact, be the small start of something rather spectacular in our lives.

When we think of each day as a series of potential kairos moments, we are invited to become part of God’s incredible work, whether the outcome is immediate or in the future, whether it will be known or unknown, whether we are to benefit or be used to benefit someone else, and whether the change is internal or external.

Living in the holy now in order to make the most of every opportunity, we need to train ourselves to look for kairos moments. Ours is a holy calling to seek the eternal in the everyday. So we change the way we look at the moments in our lives, and we begin to pay attention to the way God is working around us.

Embracing our kairos moments means a shift in perspective by turning our focus outward. We can begin by changing the way we pray. Jesus taught us to pray, "Our Father in heaven...Your kingdom come, Your will be done" [Matthew 6:9,10]. But somewhere along the way, we’ve turned that into asking God to show us His specific will for our lives -- before we will take a step. Pray instead that God would show you where He’s at work; then seek to join Him there.

By watching for kairos moments, we focus on following. "How we view God dramatically affects the persons we become. How we understand God to work radically affects the life we live in God," McManus adds. "When Jesus walked this earth, His disciples had to keep up with Him."

In 2 Corinthians 5:20 reminds us that "we are ambassadors for Christ; certain that God is appealing through us, we plead on Christ’s behalf, ‘Be reconciled to God." By understanding this, we recognize that our role -- no matter what job we do, what ministry we serve, what relationships we value -- our primary work is to represent God to others so that they might be reconciled to Him. God has created specific intersections with people in our lives. It’s up to us to seize those moments.

But before we start to panic that we might mess up a God-ordained moment, McManus encourages us simply to act on what we know. “While there are moments when God steps in and calls us to a specific task or assignment, even without that kind of special directive, we are not left without a mission or calling,” he writes.

"Every follower of Christ has the prime directive of representing Him on this earth," he adds. "We are called to be His witnesses. We are all commissioned to make disciples. We are all given the assignment of serving as His ambassadors of reconciliation..." It’s in living our entire lives only waiting and watching that we miss the life-changing possibilities around us. Life does move fast. And if you do not look for your kairos moments, you just might miss them.