Chairos and Chronos

Mark recently led a lesson on Chairos and Chronos and when he explained it to me, I thought, how perfect for what we're going through right now. He's such a smart little cookie! This is a portion of his newsletter article from this week.

"...at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.' Romans 5:6 'Now, Paul, the hand of the Lord is against you. You are going to be blind, and for a time you will be unable to see the light of the sun.' Acts 13:11 'Therefore, the right time has not yet come for me; for you any time is right.' Luke 7:6,8"

"Chairos time is time understood loosely. It is the kind of time that challenges us, that forces us to wait and trust, to walk in faith. It is the kind of time only God can tell, as opposed to the chronos time, as used in Matthew 2:7 and Mark 9:21, we live by on our wrist watches and wall calendars."

"Most of the Christian life, it seems, is lived at the intersection of chronos and chairos--as we wait for that thing, a job, a test result, a relationship, we've been praying for and our clocks are continually reset to God's timing."

"It is frustrating and painful at times as we wait; humorous at others. But at the right time, when it is time!--God will bring about his purposes for your life and mine."

Our entire family struggles right now to understand the delays in Allan's arrival. Had he come on our time, he would have been here a month ago, but God's timing is different. Allan was scheduled to leave Entebbe this past Friday and even though he had signed consent from the doctor, KLM thought he did not appear to be well enough to fly. His stomach is still not totally back to normal and they did not want to be responsible for a child that could get sick during a long flight. It's not that I don't understand that, but we are now forced to reschedule again. They said he could fly on Wednesday, so we'll go at it again.

Please pray for Allan, this morning we received a phone call from Jamil at 2 a.m. our time and he said that Allan was feeling better, because of some medicine the doctor gave him, but that he was so upset he wanted to be in a room alone and didn't want to talk to anybody. I can only imagine, that as disappointed as we have been that he is even more disappointed. We just long for him to be with us again. We're trusting that in "God's perfect timing" this will be possible. We're not totally sure when that will be, but you can rest assure we're praying that it's this Thursday, after Allan is scheduled to leave on Wednesday!