"Why does God make Himself shine in certain ordinary or tragic moments and not in others? I don't know. All I know is that God intrudes into my daily story in extraordinary ways. The ancient Greeks knew two kinds of time: chronos and chairos. Chronos is clock time--the grind of daily routine. Chairos is a moment of glory--an epiphany when God shows up and begins a new epoch, a new life." Dan Allender in The Healing Path
Why does God make Himself shine in some moments but not others? Or are we just missing Him in our smallness and He's actually there?
My favorite moment in a classical song is hearing the violins rise above the rest and wander through their melody. But were I then to say that the best song then would be all violins all the time, I'd not be a mature listener. The rest of the instruments create drama and tell their own stories to weave into the bigger story. The violins are the cream, but we need the rest of the ingredients to make a whole meal.
God is the Conductor and Author of every story played out in my life. In that sense, He's in every millisecond of my life on a thousand levels. But chairos time is rare for me--my violin time where I see God clearly and I'm moved to freshly discover and enjoy Him. My life sounds mostly like chronos time, the gentle thrumming of the flutes and the rise and fall of the piano. The violins are playing, but they don't often hush the rest for a solo.
In Heaven it will be all chairos time when we get to experience God clearly from all 5 (or however many we have by that point) senses. That will sprout us into something entirely different and incredible. In the meantime, today my role is to enjoy the whole orchestra while it plays. It was written and planned up by our King and He's excited to show it to us. It's ok for me to lean forward itching to hear the violins, but the whole piece is the masterpiece, not just the chairos time.
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