The beauty in darkness
***This week I was so blessed by a message from Pastor Steve Furtick that I want to share what it learned with you****
Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick tock… Annoying isn’t it? So it is waiting isn’t it?
Especially in the time we live in is so hard to develop the virtue of patience because we have learned to get everything fast, and if I can have it right this second even better. The other day I was watching the Vergecast (www.TheVerge.com) which is a great podcast that discusses technology and culture, and they were talking about the announcement Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) gave at 60 minutes the other day about how in the next 5 years if everything works right, they would launch Amazon Air, a delivery service that would bring your product to your door in 30 minutes thanks to the Drone technology (flying robots how cool is that!)… WOW!! I’m not sure what amazes me the most, the fact that we could have flying robots delivering stuff all around us or that we can’t even wait more than 30 minutes to get our stuff.
For those of us who have grown up in church there is a phrase that I’m sure will be familiar, “God Moment”, I have used it, maybe you have used it, it’s something we have even heard from the pulpit, it’s just part of our culture, it’s when something amazing happens that wakes you up spiritually, something you needed and only God could do and then…BAAAMM!! It happens and just makes your day, but let’s be honest, those days are the least among our days, but why??
In the New Testament we find 2 Greek words translated as time: CHRONOS which means clock time, real time, you know, like, I’ll meet you at 2:30pm, that’s chronos. And we have KAIROS which literally means the right moment or the opportune moment and it describes that moment when God blows your mind, when He breaks in and touches the mundane and makes the natural, supernatural.
And I know there is no harm intended when we use this expression, I mean I get it, I know what we mean by it, but if I were God (which thank God I’m not =D) I would be a bit frustrated by it because well, He created time, all of it, every second of every minute of every hour…you know where I’m going… time is His so since when God only gets credit for bits of time? How come we don’t feel the same sense of owe all the time?
Eugene Peterson wrote a commentary on Galatians 6:7-10:
Acts of faith aren’t like pebbles dropped in a pool that make a few temporary ripples and then sink to the bottom, inert. They’re seeds planted in the soil of life, and they will come up one day. The harvest is inevitable.
Don’t be misled: No one makes a fool of God. What a person plants, he will harvest (verse 7). Decisions are seed. Attitudes are seed. Acts are seed. Prayers are seed. Thoughts are seed. And all of it will come to harvest.
The person, though, who looks for quick results from planting seeds of well doing, will be disappointed. If I want potatoes for dinner tomorrow, it will do me little good to go out tonight and plant potatoes in my garden.
Long stretches of darkness and invisibility and silence separate planting from reaping.
Many times we miss the blessing because we are waiting on the blessing…excuse me? Yes, we are so desperate to see the fruit that we miss all that God has for us between the sowing and the reaping, God is as much God when the seeds are being planted as He is when we enjoy the fruit of the labor, God is there in the dark moments, in the invisibility, the silence, while the seed is buried in the soil, He is there in every second, it is us who can’t see because we don’t know what to look for.
We don’t see Kairos because it’s dressed as Chronos, we don’t see the tree because its dressed as seed, we can’t recognize the divine because its dressed as mundane.
Let’s put our impatience aside, let’s learn to enjoy each season, each day, and lets look for God on every moment of our lives, He is there, even in the mundane waiting for us to open our eyes, He came into our world and changed everything when He send His son Jesus to die for our sins on the cross and He not only died but after 3 days of darkness, invisibility and silence, broke through again and transformed our eternity forever!!!
Let’s stop living in Chronos waiting for Kairos and let’s remember that Kairos is living in our chronos.