Mid-Week Message, June 7, 22

                  “Time keeps on slipping into the future.” Steve Miller

Friends,

Time is a slippery kind of thing. Here we are at the end of another church year. I don’t know about you, but I can’t decide if the year has been incredibly long or remarkably short. Both feel true.

The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos time is quantitative, measured out by clock and calendar. Kairos time is quantitative, not measured but entered and experienced.
I think of kairos as eternal time or what the bible refers to as the fullness of time. It’s when past, present, and future merge into what philosophers and mystics call deep time.

It’s when you get so engrossed in what you are doing that hours can slip away without noticing. Or catching up with an old friend you haven’t seen in years and it feels like no time has passed at all.

I believe we have all been feeling the slippery nature of time more acutely during these days of disruption and uncertainty. Keeping track of what day it is or even what month seems to be harder than in it was before COVID. Hours and days have become elastic. Some seem to last an eternity and others are gone in an instant.

I like to think that we are being invited into a different relationship with time, one not so driven by the clock and the calendar, one that allows our lives to unfold with more ease and more grace but still has enough order and structure to keep our lives from tumbling into chaos.

We are at the end of another church year. The annual congregational meeting is this Sunday, June 12 at 11:15 a.m. I hope to see you there – in person or on Zoom.

Yours in shared ministry,