By April Yamasaki

What is time?

I’ve been watching a mini-series on Albert Einstein, the brilliant physicist who asked this grand question, whose great intellect and imagination were so taken with it, to the detriment of his personal and professional life.

The series moves easily between the Einstein of the 1930s with his experience in Nazi Germany and the younger Einstein as a student in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. Will the two timelines eventually meet? Or will the younger and older Einstein continue in their separate storylines? I’m fascinated to see how the mini-series turns out.

Each of us lives our lives in what New Testament Greek calls chronos, chronological time that begins at one point and continues moment by moment, day by day. So when King Herod summons the magi, he asks them the time of the star’s appearing. He wants to know the chronos that could be measured in days and months.

But we also live with kairos, a word that describes a fitting time, a proper time for something. So when Jesus begins his public ministry, he says, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15). Instead of citing a particular day or hour, he speaks of kairos as time fulfilled.

At the end of November, I completed my pastoral ministry at the church where I have served for over twenty-five years. As chronos, celebrating those years of ministry was a great milestone that capped off 69 parent-child dedications, 79 youth and adult baptisms, and 76 weddings! And no, I didn’t count every one of those celebrations, but our farewell committee dug through our church records and shared the final numbers.

Twenty-five years of anything is quite a chronos, and more and more I understand the completion of my pastoral ministry as kairos too. A year ago when I signed a new book contract, I knew that I would need to let go of pastoral ministry to meet the tight deadline. Since then I’ve received further confirmation that now is the time to invest more deeply in my writing: with new writing and speaking opportunities coming my way, and a new role as Resident Author with a local church beginning this month. For me, chronos and kairos have come together.

I’m looking forward to what 2019 will mean for me, and I’d love to hear from you too. What will chronos mean for you at this stage of your life, and what will be your kairos moments?

April Yamasaki is just beginning as Resident Author of Valley CrossWay Church in Abbotsford, B.C. This is such a new role that it’s not even listed on the church website yet, but it means that she will continue to work on her own writing projects, do some regular preaching, and be involved in other ways still being discerned. For more of her writing, please see aprilyamasaki.com and WhenYouWorkfortheChurch.com.