Liturgies for Parents

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Liturgies for Parents
🌊Time: Chronos & Kairos
Year of Breath

🌊Time: Chronos & Kairos

Waves of God's presence, here and now. (And JULY reading guide!)

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Kayla Craig
Jun 29, 2025
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Liturgies for Parents
Liturgies for Parents
🌊Time: Chronos & Kairos
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Every once in a while, I experience what I can only describe as a thin-place moment. A wave in an ocean of time that stops, just for a moment. A moment that belongs both in and out of time. A moment that slows into focus, one you realize is a memory as it’s happening, as time speeds up and slows down all at once.

If you’ve read my books, you’ve probably noticed I’m a little obsessed with time. We live in it, yet we also live beyond it.

The Christian story is steeped in the kind of time that ticks by on calendars, yes—but also in something immeasurable. Something we can’t quite grasp or hold.

I explored this a bit in Every Season Sacred:

“Followers of Christ, we have the gift of marking our calendars with a different sort of time. We orient our year with the liturgical calendar, which walks us through the rhythms of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.

Christians across backgrounds, bloodlines, and borders enter this calendar with a larger understanding of God’s time, rooted in Christ instead of in the shifting sands of constantly refreshed endcaps at our favorite stores.

We incorporate yearly rituals and rhythms, welcoming God into our homes and hearts. As we enter this sacred circle of time, we worship and pray, celebrate and grieve. We read Scripture, practice traditions, and observe the work of Christ in us and around us. Year after year, we cycle through liturgical seasons, embarking on times of both contemplation and action.”

Though I wrote those words in the winter section of that book, the truth they point to lives outside of any single season. Because time, as we know it, isn’t the whole story.

Also from Every Season Sacred:

“Chronos, the Greek word for the chronological understanding of time, is not all there is. As children of God, we are also welcomed into kairos, a divine sense that time is a circle we live in and outside of. Kairos reminds us that as seasons shift and we raise our families, do our jobs, and live our seemingly ordinary lives, we experience extraordinary glimmers of something more.

Though our feet are firmly planted on earth, kairos time allows us to catch a glimpse of heaven.”

It’s twisty, right? Thinking of time as a spiral or a circle is the best kind of strange. It whispers that there is more to life than what we can see or schedule.

And to me, that’s comforting—especially in seasons of upheaval and uncertainty.

In a world that often tells me to do more, be more, produce more, I’ve come to realize that my soul finds peace in being small. Small things are held. Protected. Treasured.

Madeleine L’Engle wrote:

“This holy time beyond time can enter, penetrate, break through chronos:
the child at play, the painter at his easel... are in kairos. The saint at prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby, are in kairos.”

And sometimes? So are we.

If you’re like me, you’ve felt overwhelmed in these times. I hear it again and again from parents:

“How do we keep going? How do we care about the world when we’re just trying to survive the chaos of daily life? How do we hold the weight of global crisis and still make peanut butter sandwiches and find the missing cleat before practice?”

It’s a lot.

person standing near ocean
Photo by John Forson on Unsplash

If you’re raising tweens or teens, you’ve probably heard the phrase “touch grass”—and honestly, I think it’s sacred wisdom. Yesterday, my family “touched grass” at our local waterpark. It’s a special place for me, full of memories from my lifeguarding days and the beginning of my love story with my husband.

And it’s where I recently experienced a glimmer of kairos on a giant yellow waterslide in the middle of an Iowa cornfield on a hot, humid June afternoon.

As my husband and I, along with our three sons, gripped the handles of a giant raft, it surged up the wall in a tidal wave of water. In a flash, I looked up and saw the sun illuminate their laughing faces—heads thrown back, joy pouring out.

And in that moment, time seemed to stretch.

I saw them as chubby toddlers and eager kindergarteners. I saw who they are now—and maybe even glimpsed who they might become. All of it in one blink. One sacred second. A moment drenched in chlorine, somehow baptized in grace.

We were laughing. We were together.

Together. Together. Together.

I know that raising kids in this world can be overwhelming. That’s a common refrain every time I sit down to write. There’s so much we can’t control. But maybe that’s not always a bad thing.

We can’t control time. We can’t control the rush of the waterslide or the way the sun lights up my youngest’s blonde curls or my eldest’s walnut eyes. We can’t control what makes us laugh until we can’t breathe. And maybe that’s where the beauty is.

Even in the heaviness, there are moments of lightness—glimmers of sacred time breaking through.

Kairos doesn't need a mountaintop. Sometimes, it meets us on a slide in the middle of a cornfield.

Again and again, God’s time breaks into our own.

Will we notice?

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Borrow this Prayer

The prayer below is adapted from the two prayers on page 109 of Every Season Sacred.

God, You are the Creator of time.
In You, all things are formed.
O Christ, through You we enter a sacred circle of time.
Help us to remember that there has never been a moment
When You haven’t gone behind us or before us.
Thank You for the gift of Your presence
Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Christ, You are in all time, and You are all time.
Awaken us to a deeper sense of time
That is both now and not yet.
In Your Incarnation, we hear echoes of eternity.
May these sacred reverberations form our family
As we journey deeper into knowing You.

Help us to live in the light of Your glorious love,
Time after time.
Amen.

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July Reading Guide

Looking for a gentle way to stay rooted this month? The July 2025 Reading Guide offers curated prayers and reflections from To Light Their Way and Every Season Sacred to help you slow down, breathe deep, and meet God in the midst of it all.

(Thank you for helping with this, Kara! So grateful.)

July 2025 Reading Guide
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Breath Prayer

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INHALE: God of the here and now,

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