Seven Months

She said, “It’s time.”

 My body tensed. I closed my eyes and thought, “No.” In my head I knew it was coming at some point, but now that the time had arrived, I didn’t want to go through it.

 As I write this, today is the seven month anniversary of my open heart surgery to replace my aortic valve.

 They wheeled me in to the operating room at 7:00 am. They took me to the intensive care unit about 2:00 pm. Seven hours.

 I first remember my wife, Joy, patting me on the shoulder and saying, “It’s OK, you’re waking up, you’re in the ICU.” The rest of the details of that day are sketchy at best. I do remember trying to tell my family that they should leave so they could get some sleep. It had been a long day for everyone.

 When I was alone, I thought it was late at night. It was dark in my room and it felt like I’d been in the ICU for long time. I asked what time it was and the nurse said, “Oh, it’s just 8:30 pm.” I was disappointed. I knew getting through that night in the ICU was a big step and it seemed to be taking a long time.

 Time. The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos implies time that can be measured in minutes and hours. It’s clock time, calendar time. It’s quantitative.

 Kairos is qualitative. It measures moments not minutes, and it describes the right time, an opportune moment. Kairos recognizes the brevity of human life and refers to the diligent use of opportunities in life.

 The writer of Ecclesiastes says, for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven, a time for all kinds of things, birth and death, weeping and laughing, seeking and losing. God has made everything suitable for its time (3:1-8, 11a). In the first Greek translations of this Hebrew text in the Old Testament, each use of the word ‘time’ was rendered as kairos, not chronos.

 That night in the ICU I watched the clock move slowly. The next three months were a long time, too. Now, here I am seven months past my surgery. The truth is I don’t remember the chronological time, the hours and weeks. I do know there were a series of important moments. Kairos. I was alive and I was fighting. It was an opportunity in my life to use diligently.

 For everything there is a time. Salem, we’ve endured flood, relocation, a time of praying and planning. Finally the digging begins.

 It’s the beginning of our seventh year together. Our building project is scheduled for seven months. Will the next seven months go by quickly or slowly? Will it be measured in chronos or kairos? Is is just a period of days and weeks, or is it a series of opportune moments in our life together? Will we simply count this time or make this time count?

 Life is not about chronos. That’s just counting. Life is about kairos. Likewise, a church is not just counting up bricks but a gathering of people whose lives have been changed by Jesus and whose intention is to bless the earth and show the world what it means to be the world that God intended in Creation.

 God is using us to work things out. It’s generally difficult because we have to take a long view in life and most of the time we can only really see it by looking in the rearview mirror, but God is busy working things out.

 It’s time. Don’t let this opportune moment slip away.

 Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time. Ephesians 5:15-16a

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