Last night during our small group, we were reflecting on the business of life and wishing we had one more day in the week—as my wife called it, “a secret day that no one else knew about”.  If we all just had a little more time we could get that rest that is just out of our reach.  It is something we want so badly but it eludes our grasp.

Then we reflected more on what we do when we actually do have some time to “rest”.  Do we even know what the meaning of rest is?  So often “rest” is still time that we fill up and use up and we feel no more rested afterwards.

After small group last night, I thought back to a book I have been reading, The Rest of God by Mark Buchanan.  He writes about our need to not only re-arrange ourselves around the time that we have in order to schedule it better but to actually re-shape how we approach time.  Below is an excerpt from his chapter, “A Beautiful Mind: Stopping to Think Anew”.

One of the largest obstacles to true Sabbath-keeping is leisure. It is what cultural historian Witold Rybczynski calls “waiting for the weekend,” where we see work as only an extended interlude between our real lives. Leisure is what Sabbath becomes when we no longer know how to sanctify time. Leisure is Sabbath bereft of the sacred. It is a vacation-literally, a vacating, an evacuation. As Rybczynski sees it, leisure has become despotic in our age, enslaving us and exhausting us, demanding from us more than it gives.

We all know how unsatisfying mere leisure can be.  We’ve all known what it is like to return to the classroom or the workplace after a time spent in revelry or retreat, in high jinks or hibernation: typically, we go back weary and depressed, like jailbirds caught.  The time away from work wasn’t time sanctified so much as time stolen, time when we escaped for a short-lived escapade.

The difference between this and Sabbath couldn’t be sharper.  Sanctifying some time adds richness to all time, just as an hour with the one you love brings light and levity to the hours that follow.  To spend some time with the object of you desire is to emerge, not sullen and peevish, but elated and refreshed.  You come away filled, not depleted.

The Greeks understood. Embedded in their language, expressed in two distinct words for “time,” is an intuition about the possibility of sanctified time. Time, they knew, has two faces, two natures. It exists in two separate realms, really, as two disparate dimensions, and we orient ourselves primarily to one or the other. One is sacred time, the other profane. The first word is chronos-familiar to us because it’s the root of many of our own words: chronology, chronicle, chronic. It is the time of clock and calendar, time as a gauntlet, time as a forced march. The word derives from one of the gods in the Greek pantheon. Chronos was a nasty minor deity, a glutton and a cannibal who gorged himself on his own children. He was always consuming, never consummated. Goya depicted him in his work Chronos Devouring His Children. In the painting, Chronos is gaunt and ravenous, wild-eyed with hunger. He crams a naked, bloody-stumped figure into his gaping mouth. Peter Paul Rubens depicted Chronos even more alarmingly: a father viciously biting into his son’s chest and tearing the flesh away, the boy arching backward in shock and pain.

 Chronos is the presiding deity of the driven.

 The second Greek word is kairos. This is time as gift, as opportunity, as season. It is time pregnant with purpose. In kairos time you ask, not “What time is it?” but “What is this time for?” Kairos is the servant of holy purpose. “There is a time for everything,” Ecclesiastes says, “and a season for every activity under heaven.”

A time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot, …

a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away, …

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace. (3:1-2, 5-8)

This year, this day, this hour, this moment—each is ripe for something: Play.  Work.  Sleep.  Love.  Worship.  Listening.  Each moment enfolds transcendence, lays hold of a significance beyond itself.  Ecclesiastes sums it up this way: “I have seen the burden God has laid on men.  He has made everything beautiful in its time.  He has also sent eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (3:10-11_

Chronos betrays us, always. It devours the beauty it creates. But sometimes chronos betrays itself: it stirs in us a longing for Something Else-Something that the beauty of things in time evokes but cannot satisfy. Either we end up as the man in Ecclesiastes did: driven, driven, driven, racing hard against chronos, desperate to seize beauty but always grasping smoke, ashes, thorns. Seeking purpose and finding none, only emptiness.

Or we learn to follow the scent of eternity in our hearts. We begin to orient toward kairos. We start to sanctify some of our time. And an odd thing can happen then. Purpose, even unsought, can take shape out of the smallest, simplest things: “I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil-this is the gift of God” (Eccl. 3:12-13).

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 ache of our muscles or the sweat of our brows.

Taken from:

Mark Buchanan, (2006). The Rest of God: restoring Your Soul By Restoring Sabbath. A Beautiful Mind: Stopping to Think Anew.  Pp. 35-37. Thomas Nelson Inc. TN