God is with you whatever time of life it is

St. Paul Lutheran Church gives holiday messages

 

Editor’s note: The following article was submitted by Sharon Smith, pastor at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Imlay City. We thank Pastor Smith for taking the time to share her thoughts about the upcoming year, 2025. The youth group from the church gave a live nativity re-enactment of the story of the Birth of Jesus earlier in December.

Kairos Time

People often report that in moments of crisis, time slows to a crawl.

I can testify to this, as I experienced it myself at age 16 when a car hit my bicycle. I wasn’t hurt badly; I merely rolled over the hood and into the street.

But during the few seconds when I was rolling over the hood, I was astonished how I had “time” to notice each detail on the clouds above as well as each crack in the pavement.

When I hit the ground, time returned to its normal progression and I sprang up from the blacktop sore, but mostly dismayed my bike was ruined.

Even if you haven’t experienced time slowing to a crawl, you’ve likely experienced the relativity of time.

Once during a short flight with my young daughter, the only thing that could stop her wailing was her fruit snacks.

Wailing and chewing, fruit snacks ran down both sides of her mouth, intermingling with the mucus that ran freely from her nose.

At one point she leaned over and wiped her face on my new wool dress slacks. There, I learned that half an hour can be an eternity.

On the other hand, time can speed by. One midsummer night around a campfire with family, I was astonished to see it was already 10:30 p.m. My normal bedtime is 8:30! What happened? Where did the evening go?

The New Testament uses two words for time: Chronos and Karis.

Chronos is sequential time, sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, that type of chronological time.

Kairos is qualitative time. While chronos is a minute, Kairos is a moment, a season. A minute is measured by the clock, a moment is measured by eternity.

Chronos is how we measure time, Kairos is how God measures time. “You know what kairos it is,” Paul writes in Romans. In other words, it is God’s time we now live.

God entered chronos, our time, at Christmas and made it into Kairos, God’s time.

After New Years Day it seems to go into monotonous chronos.

Back to the office, pay the bills, go to school, ordinary life resuming.

But because it is God’s time, in the ordinary day to day things we do, as well as the crises we find ourselves in, it’s more.

God hasn’t left us after Christmas. God is with us, here, now, right here in our lives.

You want to be close to God? Then go home, resume your work, go back to the routine, make it through each Monday, all the while knowing that in Jesus Christ God is with you where you are, in whatever time of life this is for you.

The good news of the New Year is this: God is with us!