Resting

I had a rough semester, really rough. I took 18 credits, worked 10 hours a week, spent 5 hours at my PCM, served on our floors Ministry Team, plus endured about 35+ hours of school work per week. That doesn’t leave much time for anything else. Needless to say I was stressed, and tired. A lot. I yearned for rest, for restoration, for time where my soul could rejuvenate. I felt as if I was sprinting in a race and the only rest I could find was to slow down to a run. Occasionally I had little pockets of complete rest, but there was a good 3 or 4 weeks of straight sprinting. I. was. tired. And my times of rest were never truly restful. 

Mark Buchanan writes in The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Your Sabbath, about the two faces of time according to the Greeks - chronos and Kairos. 

Chronos is depicted in the Greek gods as a cannibal, a glutton that gorged himself on his own children. 

      “Chronos betrays us, always. It devours the beauty it creates.”

 Kairos, on the other hand, is time as a gift, opportunity. 

      “Each moment enfolds transcendence, lays hold of a significance beyond itself.” 

I had been enslaving myself to Chronos - always striving, seeking, trying to fill my time - and coming up empty-handed. I was trying to catch smoke, and it wasn’t working. I was chasing a lost cause, fulfillment, but I could never catch it because I was looking in the wrong place. 

Kairos, it is time pregnant with purpose. Kairos is finding rest within the work, it is enjoying every moment of our day as a gift from God. Kairos is seizing our time and our work as an opportunity instead of something to kill and slave through. 

I was in this mind-set of moving on to the next thing, simply surviving my semester and surviving my classes when I could have been thriving in them. God gave me 18 hours of classes to soak in His truth. He gave me 10 beautiful hours of loving Kaden and Caroline. He gave me 5 joyful hours of laughter while serving at my PCM, He gave me time to love and pray for the amazing girls on my floor, and He gave me 35+ hours to practice discipline and dig deeper into His truth. 

      “This is a gift of God: to experience the sacred amidst the commonplace - to taste heaven in our                  

      daily bread, a new heaven and new earth in a mouthful of wine, joy in the midst of the ache of our    

      muscles or the sweat of our brow.”

Ecclesiastes 3:10-11 - “I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time.”