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“Habit 6: Wind the Clock”

God is in the business of strategically positioning us in the right place at the right time. He is preparing good works in advance (Ephesians 2:10). He is ordering your footsteps (Proverbs 16:9)? And He who began a good work, will carry it to completion (Philippians 1:6). 

Simply put, God is setting you up! The unborn tomorrows you imagine, were sovereignly prepared by God himself before the creation of the world.

In light of this, a right relationship with time means recognizing, first and fore­most, that time is measured in minutes, but life is measured in moments! Not all time is created equal. As Albert Einstein so ably demonstrated, time is relative.

The sixth habit—wind the clock—stewards time in two ways. It makes the most of every minute, but it also makes the most of every moment. It’s acutely aware of everything that is happening right here, right now. It also keeps a constant eye on eternity. Most importantly, it doesn’t lose faith in the end of the story. 

The ancient Greeks had two words for time—chronos and kairos. They are two sides of the same coin, but they are as different as heads and tails. 

Chronos is clock time. Chronos is sequential—past, present, future. Chronos is quantitative—it counts seconds, minutes, and hours. Man­aging chronos time is incredibly important. If you don’t control your calendar, your calendar will control you. But it’s not as important as “redeeming the time” (Ephesians 5:16, KJV), which is where kairos enters the equation. 

Kairos makes the most of every opportunity. It’s the sixth sense that perceives the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Kairos doesn’t keep time as much as it makes time. When it discerns a holy moment, it takes off its shoes.

I believe in what Coach Vince Lombardi said: if you aren’t fifteen minutes early, you’re late. But the greatest moments in life are off the clock, off the grid. Chronos is all about making good time. Kairos is about enjoying the journey. It’s about smelling the roses. It’s less about getting to a particu­lar destination in record time and more about who you become along the way. Let’s wind both the chronos and the kairos clocks with the sixth habit.

It’s time to wind the clock!

Think on this: Time is measured in minutes; life is measured in moments.