Stewardship of Time

Before and After. This is how we measure our lives. Before and after marriage. Before and and after kids. Before I went to college. After I had real responsibility. Before and after covid. We spend all of our time in the before or the after, between one time zone and the next.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could control time? If we could slow it down during long vacations, if we could speed it up through awkward moments, if we could skip over the boring parts, run back to fix our mistakes, and fast forward to the future so we know how things end up? If we could alter the before or extend the after? What happens with the time we have left?

Today Moses pleas with God about time. This is the only Psalm attributed to Moses although we don’t know if it was actually written by him or not. Either way, Moses begins by grounding his prayer in praise.

He says God is our dwelling place, from generation to generation. Before the earth was formed. Before time. Before creation. God was God. God is eternal. God wasn’t created by anything or anyone else. God always has been and is the source of all being. This is who God is.

And who are we in comparison? We are but dust. A flash in the pan. A dream. A blade of grass that springs up and withers the same day. We are fragile and finite, maybe getting seventy or eighty years. We are human, and as Kate Bowler says, “there’s no cure for being human.”

And as humans, we spend a lot of time. We go to school. We do homework. We work. We visit family and friends. We cook dinner. We clean up. We travel. We watch TV and play video games- anyone look at their screen time report lately? We get sick and have to keep going to the doctor. We buy stuff to save time in the future. We buy stuff to make us look like time has reversed. All the while, we are but human. Dust. But we don’t always use the time we have well.

This is why Moses talks about the wrath of God in this prayer. This is consistent language with Deuteronomy and Moses’ final speech to the Israelites. God had been with them in the wilderness. God had been their dwelling place through the tabernacle, had provided for them....but they grumbled. They wanted to get to the promised land.

Have you ever been there? You are so ready for the next thing, the long-awaited thing, that you lose sight of what is right in front of you? All of your time is wrapped up in the future, the after, that you find the present meaningless. The Israelites wasted their time, and God was angry. It says they are overwhelmed by God’s anger, that all their years end in sighs. They had been too busy planning ahead to remember God in their midst.

As humans, we do a lot of planning, a lot of filling up of our days. This is what is referred to as chronos time, where we get our term chronological from. This is what I call calendar time.

I love a good calendar. I like the big ones with fancy tabs, stickers, and plenty of room to write everything out. I actually used to keep all of my old calendars in case I ever needed to reference anything. One day I was cleaning out my filing cabinet and my cousin found them all. He laughed and would tease me. “Why on earth do you need these? When you die, what good will all these old calendars do you?” He used to joke with me that at my funeral he was going to get up and read out of my old calendar saying things like....”On October 3rd, Hannah attended a 10:00 meeting. On May 2nd, she ate lunch with friends at 12. On July 15th at 5, she attended a finance meeting.” You get the picture.

We would always joke about this but it got me to thinking… how do I care for my time? Do I leave any room in the margins for the unexpected? Do I leave any room for God at all?

In the midst of all of our chronos time, there is what we call kairos. This is God’s time table, the time table that is ushered in with Jesus. It is when the eternal breaks through the fabric of the temporal. I call this resurrection time.

Sarah Ban Breathnach says “Chronos is clocks, deadlines, watches, calendars, agendas, planners, schedules, beepers. Chronos is time at her worst. Chronos keeps track ... Chronos is the world's time. Kairos is transcendence, infinity, reverence, joy, passion, love, the Sacred. Kairos is intimacy with the Real. Kairos is time at her best ... Kairos is Spirit's time. We exist in chronos. We long for kairos. That's our duality. Chronos requires speed so that it won't be wasted. Kairos requires space so that it might be savored. We do in chronos. In kairos we're allowed to be.”

What would happen if someone read your calendar? Would they be able to tell what you prioritize? Who you care about? Would any kairos moments appear within the chronos of your everyday life?

The Israelites have wasted time, and so Moses pleads with God to return God’s favor to God’s people. Have you ever wasted time? Or felt like all the time you spent was for nothing? Or maybe you are captive to the time you have left, trying to race against your own clock.

Moses says “so teach us to count our days, that we may gain a wise heart.” Other translations say teach us to number our days, teach us to live well. If ever there was a prayer for caring for stewardship of time, this is it. Teach us to count our days, to learn to live well, so that we may have a wise heart.

It seems hard to do that when we don’t know how many days we have. Some of us seem to have plenty, while others are fighting for one more. If only we could trade our before for our afters. Trade in our chronos for some more kairos.

Henri Nouwen says that maybe that’s exactly what we need.

“Time has to be converted, then, from chronos, mere chronological time, to kairos, a New Testament Greek word that has to do with opportunity, with moments that seem ripe for their intended purpose. Then, even while life continues to seem harried, while it continues to have hard moments, we say, “Something good is happening amid all this.” We get glimpses of how God might be working out his purposes in our days. Time becomes not just something to get through or manipulate or manage, but the arena of God’s work with us. Whatever happens— good things or bad, pleasant or problematic—we look and ask, “What might God be doing here?”

Before and After. Chronos and Kairos. What might God be up to? My calendar would reveal a lot of deadlines and to-do lists, a lot of movement of time. But it wouldn’t show the moments that I want to last forever, the moments I will never have enough of: like the way Adalyn’s head feels tucked under my own while I rock her, the way my spirit lifts during when I see the leaves turn to brilliant colors, the taste of coffee in the morning, the moments I sit and listen to someone’s pain and take it with them to God, the feeling of fresh tears on my face during worship, of new sheets on a bed, a fresh bar of soap, doing my best British accent while reading to my oldest daughter, sharing in a meal with friends, voices lifted in prayer, the sound of laughter, and the feeling I have in my husband’s arms. These are moments where the eternal breaks through, where the hope of resurrection takes our breath away. Moments I want to savor instead of spend. O Lord. Teach me to number my days, that I would have a wise heart.

Kate Bowler beautifully shares about this in her most recent book where she chronicles what it was like to live after being diagnosed with stage four colon cancer at the age of 35. Suddenly the future was no longer a language she knew how to speak. Everything was broken into before cancer and after cancer. She says that she was always asking the question-”how do we live now? What Jesus has done in the past- loved us, saved us, given us a future- stands behind us and in front of us. We were saved and will be saved. But today we are not young believers or resurrected bodies.”

“In the meantime” she says, “we are stuck with our beautiful, terrible finitude. Our gossip and our petty fights, self-hatred and refusal to check our voicemail. We get distracted, waste our time, and break our own hearts. We are cobbled together by the softest material, laughter and pets and long talks with old friends. By God’s unscrupulous love and by communities who give us a place to belong.”

We are timekeepers, the body of Christ that stands together, counting our days and asking “what are you up to God?” In between the before and the after, may we set our spirits to kairos, for the hope of the resurrection to break through all around us.