Do You Have The Time?

I should begin with a disclaimer. I am not against time management … I think. I make out schedules and keep to them fairly steadily. I own a pocket Day-Timer, one page per day, complete with little yellow insert pages headed TO BE DONE TODAY. Last year I even got around to reading that book on time management I had no time to read for so long. You could even say that time management changed my life. As a sophomore in high school, I had been placed in an accelerated academic program on the basis of my aptitude test scores. Within a few months of being involved in this more rigorous academic regime, along with interscholastic sports and church activities, I found myself on the verge of flunking out. I just couldn’t seem to find time to get everything done. A teacher suggested that I make out a schedule and plan my time in blocks for study, sports, church, sleep, meals, recreation, and whatever else. It worked. Who knows, I may never have gone to college and then to seminary had I not learned about time management. Instead of writing this article, I might now be sitting in front of a television set with a beer in my hand, at the end of an eight-hour day on a garbage truck.

So I am not against time management … I think. What follows is more a long sigh about the whole worthy enterprise than anything else.

The place to begin is with two pictures that hang side by side in the hallway of my home. One is of a little boy with a round face and high forehead. He’s wearing overalls and sitting on a chair. Beside the chair is a table with a large birthday cake. The cake has one candle. The picture was taken December 22, 1943. The boy is me.

The other picture is also of a little boy with a round face sitting on a stool beside a table that bears a birthday cake with one candle. The picture was taken September 22, 1977. The boy is my first son.

In one deft stroke those two black and white photographs sum up thirty-four years of time: who I was, what I’ve become, and where I hope to be. They are filled with meaning. They are literally joy, tears, dreams, disappointments, success, and failure caught within two frames.

The passage of time: what does it mean? The Greeks had two slogans posted over the temple at Delphi. One is very familiar to us. It was “Know thyself.” The other is much more significant for us, living as we do in a narcissistic culture. It was “Know thy moment.” It is also more biblical. Jesus chided the Pharisees for their blindness to the “signs of the times” (Matt. 16:1-3). He wept over Jerusalem because she did not know the time of her visitation (Luke 19:41-44). That lack would mean the city’s destruction. To know what time it is and to be appropriately obedient to God within the context of that knowledge means the difference between life and death!

In both cases, the word Jesus used for time is the Greek word kairos. Its meaning is best understood in contrast to another word in the Greek language for time, chronos. Chronos signifies time as an interval; kairos refers to the features of that interval. Chronos is a period, a quantity; kairos is the quality, the meaning of that period. Chronos is abstract dimension; kairos is concrete circumstances. Chronos is a date: November 26, 1981. kairos is a season: Fall, Thanksgiving.

These two words signify two overlapping, yet different universes of meaning. Chronos is time to be controlled, managed, and used. Kairos is time to be understood and responded to in order to obey God. The evening my third son was born, my wife and I had just sat down to eat dinner with some friends in the church. Her water broke, and labor began before we finished the soup. Our time, our kairos had come. What chronos it was was only marginally relevant. All we could do was understand and respond. To control it would be folly.

When time is viewed predominantly as chronos, there is a tendency to see it as determined, as abstract, even as having no meaning in itself. The kairos perspective sees time as given by God, as meaningful, going somewhere, and open ended. In 1895 the chancellor exchequer of England had lunch with a fledgling young politician. He told him, “The experiences of a long life have convinced me that nothing ever happens.” Chronos. The young man’s name was Winston Churchill. His lifetime of ninety years demonstrated the opposite: practically everything happens. Kairos.

It is not hard to see which view of time prevails in our culture. We are a people obsessed with chronos; how to get more of it, how to control it, how to manage it. A few years ago a young man named Mark Mabry was arrested for the murder of his mother. A search of his room turned up a list headed THINGS TO DO: (1) buy shells, (2) shoot father, (3) shoot mother. Life gets so busy sometimes it’s easy to forget.

Os Guinness has observed that we are conditioned by the social experience of possessing wrist watches. This is so much the case that quantities can equal qualities. Nine to five, the twelfth hour, forty hours, the twenty-five-hour day, and overtime are but a few examples.

Perhaps now you can see why I said I am not against time management … I think. The Christian’s first question should not be, “How much time do I have, and what should I do with it?” It should be, “Do I see the moment presented to me by God, and how should I respond to it?” Paul reminded the Christians at Rome that they knew what kairos it was and should therefore “cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” and conduct themselves “becomingly as in the day” (Rom. 13:11-13). The word translated “becomingly” is a word that means elegantly, gracefully, with class. There is no technique to be used to do this. Elegance and grace are the fruit of harmony with God. They are not skills but gifts.

Somehow all of us time managers with our furrowed brows, set jaws, and priority lists miss the bill here. We are to reading the signs of the kairos what a child’s somersault is to the pirouettes of an Olympic figure skater.

There is a frantically preposterous dimension to the very idea of time management, whether the time be chronos or kairos. Who do we think we are anyway, attempting to subdue time? Inexorable chronos cannot be slowed down or speeded up. And kairos! Do we really propose to manage the moments presented to us by God? Change your term to “life management” and it gets worse. Life is messy. People are messy. Death is messier than both, and will not be managed. There is a sense in which God himself is the messiest of all. Life, death, God—all are management-denying. Our culture’s denial of death is, in part, a denial of death’s and life’s and God’s denial of our management.

I’m not against time management, honest … I think. Given the opportunity and time (heh heh), I may even take another seminar or read another book. And I sincerely hope you will benefit from all the things in this issue on time management. But while we read the books, peruse this issue, and take the seminars, we would do well to wink at one another as we do, maybe even grin sardonically, and sigh.

When I’m in the midst of all this talk about time management, I think of how I felt as I drove to work the morning after I got engaged to the girl who became my wife. I was caught up in the midst of rush hour traffic, and a song by the group Chicago came on the radio. The song was “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” It was about people rushing here and there with their wrist watches on, not knowing what time it was. “Does anybody really care?” they sang. “We’ve all got time enough to die.”

As I listened, I thought of how no one with me on the freeway had the faintest notion of the wonderful thing that had happened to me the night before. I wanted to get out of my car, go to each of their cars, and tell them. But neither they nor I had the time.