TIME

What is time? In our world time is what we have become slave to. Running here and there, never savoring, never enjoying, just a madness that overcomes us as we strive to do one more thing before we crash into bed, unfulfilled, unhappy, always desiring more than we can every possibly attain. For the Greeks, there was two kinds of time...one is familiar, Chronos, it is the root of what we think time essentially is; a clock. Chronos was one of the minor greek gods in the Greek pantheon. His manner is interesting when we consider how we view time in this rat race that we call American life...He was a nasty glutton, a cannibal who gorged himself on his own children. Always consuming time, resources, people. Never having a sacred, consumated moment. He was to the Greeks the presiding god of the driven. Greeks also thought of time in another way, that is quite facinating as you consider it from the perspective of a child of God. That time was called Kairos Time. This time is a gift, a season, pregnant with opportunity and purpose. It is a servant to the HOLY. According to Ecclesiastes there is a "season for every activity under the heaven." Every moment is ripe with something, something God has already ordained. "Each moment enfolds transendence, lays hold of a significance beyond itself." says Mark Buchanan in The Rest of God. Chronos times takes and never gives back and yet leaves us with a desire for something that is not yet fulfilled in us. It is that same longing that every person is born with and can only be relieved when he feels the touch of God on his face, hears God whisper in his heart, smells the sweet fragrance of God's presence as he walks with HIM on a moment to moment basis. Chronos steals, kills, and destroys...sounds like the enemy that we have been directed to put on our armor to fight against. Chronos destroys the beauty we have the possibilty of beholding the our moments, days, weeks and years. We become like the man depicted in Ecclesiastes, running, chasing the wind, driven till we are sick and depraved from spiritual famine until we collapse, empty, forlorn, depressed.

But our God has a different way...he created us to follow the "scent of eternity in our hearts" with the knowledge and love that it would lead us straight to His heart. How do we do it? We santify our time. Eccl. 3:12-13 says "I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they life. That everone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil--This is a gift from God." God's gift to us is to "experience the sacred amidst the commonplace--to taste heaven in our daily bread, a new heaven and a new earth in a mouthful of wind, joy in the ache of our muscles or the sweat of our brows" Mark Buchanan. We need to recover the sancity of time and learn to savor each moment; to ask God "what do you have for me in the next moment?" He will lead us, he will speak, he will reveal to us His story for our life.

So I leave you with this thought...How do you redeem your time, how do you make it sacred? Consider your ways!!! Are we being a light on a hilltop to lure a fallen and sinful world to the loving Savior or are we running around looking no different than the world we have been called to be separate from. What are we looking forward to? Because what we look forward to is where our heart is...

Oh Father that I may redeem the time you have given me. May I set TIME apart as sacred so that I do not look like this world, but point the world to the ONE who gives life and gives it abundantly!