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A reflection and prayer to start the day with the Revd Dr Craig Gardiner, a tutor at Cardiff Baptist College.

Good morning. We finally put up our Christmas tree this weekend. There’s a gold star balancing on top, there’s softly glowing lights, and baubles collected over many festive years hang from all the branches.

Of course, not everyone will want or be able to celebrate with a tree, real or artificial, but for those who do, the perennial controversy is when to put it up and decorate it. Some trees around us, went up in mid-November, straight after Hallowe’en. Other folk may be waiting until every distant family member has home on Christmas Eve.

Some people will be adamant: we always do this on the first Saturday in December. Others do it when it just feels right. I have some sympathy for the date-stamped certainty of knowing when something must be done, doing it in what the ancient world called ‘Chronos’ time. But the Bible also speaks ‘Kairos’ time, moments, when, regardless of the day or the hour, we do something because it is the appropriate occasion to act. There is a time for everything, the Bible says: ‘a time to be born, a time to die, a time to weep and a time to laugh, to be silent and to speak’. Chronos is about the quantity of hours we have, but Kairos measures the deeper quality of our time. Sadly, we sometimes miss the Kairos quality under the tyranny of Chronos schedules. We were ‘on time’ but we missed ‘the moment’. So, every now and then, it’s good to lay aside the dates and the deadlines, and trust our intuition, and feel our way towards an opportune moment that is pregnant with welcome or beauty, kindness or justice, or maybe even God.

God of eternity,
Attentive to all of our moments,
Beckon us towards the right time to act,
to speak or to pause and pray,
That we may celebrate the quality of our days
Forever in praise of your presence
Amen