"Passage...................."

Fredrick Buechner is one of my favorite authors and, thanks to a Christmas gift card, there are three more books of his being shipped to me via UPS. Hopefully, none will prove to be the same discovery experienced with a recent purchase of a devotional from Joseph Beth. It turned out that a copy of it was already a part of my collection. Even so, a buddy benefitted from my loss of memory and the incident sparked a re-read of the author’s thoughts therein. Thus it is that, on January 1st, 2015, the old man is occupied with a July 17th entry that, oddly enough, speaks of the Greeks possessing two words for time, (a) “chromos”, which speaks in a quantitative sense, chronological in that we divide it into durational segments; and (b) “kairos”, which puts it into qualitative terms possessing no measurement at all. It is possible, I wonder, to know a balance of those two, a place where, in spite of the clock and the calendar’s grip on our existence, one can know “life” without losing cognizance of reality, where, even though a peace is maintained within the soul, concern and compassion is not ignored for others around us? My entry on Facebook this morning referenced an old cartoon of two golfers ignoring what appears to be nuclear holocaust occurring in the background in order to finish putting before the shock wave overtakes them. A present-day version has our current President inserted into that same scenario and there might well be some political truth to such accusation; but what concerns me is “me”. Putting meaning into moment has to involve more than just satisfying my own comforts, chasing my own dreams, operating only out of my own perspectives. That’s true in all areas of our existence. Marriage requires two become one; church membership demands the same surrender with the numbers multiplied; community must at least be approached with an effort to accept the other person’s humanity. Reduce Christ to a theology anywhere within those perimeters and a believer has no more than a religious robe, a covering beneath which eternity is not already conquered in an inner connection, but a future yet to be achieved through his own doctrinal determination. I choose walking with the Holy Ghost…..