In what is still a new year, and still the season of Epiphany, when we are asked to look for what is manifesting, what is showing up in our lives that is new, I found myself drawn yet again to the Biblical concepts of time, and how rich they are.

The Bible has two words for time: chronos—that straight line, chronological time that is so useful, and presumably gets me places on time, keeps the calendars turning, etc. We live by this version of time, as if there were no other.

But there is another type of time, and it is called kairos, translated biblically as “God’s time,” or “fullness of time.” It is as circular and mysterious as the other is linear and seemingly clear. It is our partner for those places (and times) in our life when things seem to have their own schedule, when they don’t happen according to impatience, or even effort, but happen because of some culmination and readiness that we often can’t even articulate, much less predict.

Another explanation of how this graced way time can work came up in an account I read last week about Rosa Parks, and the day she would not give up her seat on the bus. I think these words are by Quaker author Parker Palmer:

“December 1, 1955 dawned like any ordinary day of chronos, except that a seamstress and civil rights activist named Rosa Lee Parks (1913–2005) sensed the moment of God's kairos.

After a long day of work at Montgomery Fair department store, she boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus and refused the driver's demand to relinquish her seat to a white passenger. Parks understood the fleeting nature of transient chronos, and the limited opportunities we have to choose risk over regret, and urgency over complacency.

In her autobiography Rosa Parks: My Story she explained her motivation that December evening: "I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." Her solitary act provoked the Montgomery bus boycott, propelled a 26-year old year old Martin Luther King, Jr. into the forefront of the civil rights movement, and became an iconic moment of kairos in American history.”

So suddenly, after years of things one way, there is an inbreaking of the kairos moment, the iconic time—in the country’s history, in our personal histories—after which nothing is ever the same again.

Think of this time in your life. Its horizontal aspects, one day following another. Is there a place for a kairos in-breaking, for choosing “risk over regret… urgency over complacency?" What comes to mind?