Life-Defining Moments: Daily Choices with the Power to Transform Your Life - Hardcover

White, James Emery

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1578564549 ISBN 13: 9781578564545

Publisher: WaterBrook Press, 2001

Synopsis

“Seize this opportunity! Explore this terrific book and let Jim White help you maximize the defining moments in your life. Your attitudes, your character, your priorities, your relationships, and your future will never be the same!”
– Lee Strobel, author of The Case for Christ and The Case for Faith

Seize the Most Important Moments of Your Life.
In the Western world, we think of time as the passage of minute and hours, days and weeks. But biblical writers used a word that gives time a deeper meaning, kairos, which speaks to the very quality and content of time itself.
All time is not the same. Every moment is not equal.
Some moments simply pass. Others are filled with opportunity, pregnant with eternal significance and possibility. In light of heaven, there can be no doubt about the significance that fills the kairos moments. These are the moments that determine life itself.

In Your Life’s Defining Moments: Choosing Wisely When It Counts, you’ll explore the most pivotal moments in human experience and learn how you can use them to be transformed into the person you were created to be.

About this title

About the Author

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, often cited as one of the fastest growing church starts in the United States. He is the author of seven books, including You Can Experience a Purposeful Life, Rethinking the Church, and A Search for the Spiritual. Dr. White holds a Ph.D. from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and has done post-doctoral work at the University of Oxford. He and his wife, Susan have four children.

Reviews

How many "kairos moments" have you seized for eternity? White (Rethinking the Church; A Search for the Spiritual) compels readers to ask just this question as he expounds upon the courage needed to make tough choices in matters of the heart and of faith. Biblical writers offer a definition of time beyond the mere sequencing of events; these ancients speak of "kairos," which is described by White as "time filled with opportunity, a moment pregnant with eternal significance and possibility." Under the most insignificant circumstances, Christians can find themselves facing decisions that either fulfill personal vision or sabotage it. Passionate seekers will discover that kairos moments occur constantly, as ordinary events point to larger issues such as obedience, self-revelation, failure, moral courage, suffering, forgiveness, temptation, repentance and understanding God. White speaks profoundly about meeting failure squarely and pressing beyond it. Specifically, he says, Christians should train themselves to bring to mind others who have succeeded and use those stories to propel them forward. Pressing ahead also involves personal introspection, as one casts off any hindrances to growth while simultaneously nurturing a patience that is willing to see a vision through to its completion. White's finely tuned manual challenges Christians to think seriously about affecting eternal changes with their personal choices.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

An Opening Word
A high school En­glish teacher took time to share her students’ reactions to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. This Booker Prize novel tells the story of Stevens, an aging butler who realizes too late that his life has been wasted through foolish choices. He must live the rest of his life without the love of the only woman he has ever cherished.
At first the students were baffled that this man’s choices would have permanent consequences. They ­couldn’t accept that despite Stevens’s subsequent efforts and his strongest wishes, he must learn to live with the unhappy results of what he had done. As the classroom discussion was beginning, they asked, “Why ­doesn’t he just act on his feelings? [Why] ­doesn’t he just tell the housekeeper that he loves her?”
“She’s married to someone else now and has a daughter,” the teacher reminded them. “He can’t ask her to leave her family.”
“But they love each other,” the students protested. All the teacher ­could say was, “It’s too late.”
“Too late” is a term that mystifies these high school students. As teenagers, ­they’ve made very few decisions that can’t easily be unmade. Yet the idea is not beyond them. As graduation looms, they realize that the choices ­they’ve made about working hard or slacking off in their studies have caught up with them as scholarship offers and college acceptances appear in the mail–or don’t.
A troubling thought begins to take shape in their minds. Starting now, their decisions about work and school and relationships will affect what happens tomorrow, and they ask, “What if I pick the wrong thing?”
They realize that some of their peers already have made decisions that can’t be reversed. Several have babies. One is married. Many are working in after-school jobs that will become their lifetime careers. Others ­haven’t passed the courses necessary to graduate and may never get meaningful work. All of them know students who died because someone chose to drink and drive.
Then they reflect on the adults they know, and they recognize that many are reeling from long-ago decisions that led to drug addiction and disease, soured marriages and divorces, disappointing careers and estranged offspring. Suddenly they see that the one thing they don’t want is to come to the end of their lives and say, as Stevens must say in the novel, “If only I had done things differently.”
The teacher ­doesn’t want to squash her students’ idealism or make them feel defeated. But she does want them to have greater respect and sympathy for those who endure rather than rage, who stay the course instead of fleeing the scene. Most important, she wants them to hold on to their hope while learning to be more cautious, more aware of the forever aspect of what they decide today.1
She was a very wise teacher.
Every life is defined by two movements of time, but most of us are aware only of one. We are born, we live, and we die. That is our lifetime. The Bible soberly notes that we are promised threescore years and ten, and those boundaries have yet to be moved with any great success.
There is, however, another great sweep of time that transcends the limits of hours or days. In the movie Gladiator, as the Roman army prepares to engage the last of the invading barbaric hordes, the Roman general Maximus cries out, “What we do now echoes in eternity.”2 And many things we do today will echo throughout eternity. Beyond the time that defines the parameters of a life, there is a time that defines the outcome of a life.
This reality was better understood by the ancient Greeks than by us moderns. Beyond having a word for the common passage of time, chronos, from which we get our word “chronological,” they made use of another term, kairos, for which we have no counterpart in the En­glish language. Kairos speaks to the quality and content of time itself, independent of its actual length. It speaks of something altogether different from chronological time. Kairos is time filled with opportunity, a moment pregnant with eternal significance and possibility. It is a point of time that demands action, a space of time in which life-determining decisions are made.3 As a result, Plato wrote that anyone who misses or evades his kairos destroys himself: “Can there be any doubt that a work is spoilt when it is not done at the right time?”4 Kairos is that decisive time, the moment that meets the challenge of shaping our destiny.
Intriguingly, the biblical writers made extensive use of this unique and provocative word. In the book of Jeremiah, Pharaoh is talked about as being a king who was only a loud noise, and nothing more, because he had missed his moment.5 In the New Testament we find Satan leaving Jesus at the end of forty days of temptation until a more opportune time6 and Jesus Himself talking about specific times of testing that await all who receive the Word of God. These times of testing, according to Jesus, will determine faith’s final outcome.7 Perhaps the most poignant reflection of this is found when Jesus came to Je­ru­salem. Seeing the city, He broke down in tears, because the ­people did not recognize the time of God’s coming.8
Leonardo da Vinci once reflected that the average human “looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance, and talks without thinking.”9
He ­could have added, “and lives without sensing the importance of the time.” In heaven’s eyes, there can be little doubt about the significance that fills the kairos moments of life. They determine the entire trajectory of life itself. “Nothing is more critical than to recognize and respond to such a moment,” writes Os Guinness. “Before will hardens into fate and choice into ‘might have been,’ the [kairos] hour is the moment when the present is at its greatest intensity and the future is uniquely open to our decision and action.”10
We make a choice, and then the choice makes us.
In the critically acclaimed film Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams plays John Keating, an En­glish teacher at an elite New En­gland preparatory school. On the first day of the semester, he enters a classroom filled with students only to draw them away from their desks and into the hallway. There, standing in front of a large wooden case filled with the pictures and trophies of young men from years past, he looks down on his roll sheet and, searching for a name to call, addresses the class.
“Now, Mister…Pitts… Mr. Pitts, will you open your ‘hymnal’ to page 542. Read the first stanza of the poem.”
The student finds the section and questioningly reads the title.
“‘To the Virgins to Make Much of Time’?”
“Yes, that’s the one.” Looking at his pupils, the teacher adds, “Somewhat appropriate, ­isn’t it?”
Knowingly the students laugh. Young Mr. Pitts begins to read the famed verse by Robert Herrick: “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying; / And this same flower that smiles today / Tomorrow will be dying.”
“Thank you, Mr. Pitts. ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.’ The Latin term for that sentiment is ‘carpe diem.’ Now, who knows what that means?”
A bespectacled student near the front replies, “‘Carpe diem,’ that’s ‘seize the day.’”
“Very good,” replies the teacher. “Mr.…”
“Meeks,” the student supplies.
“Meeks,” repeats Keating. “‘Seize the day.’ ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.’ Why does the writer use these lines?”
“Because he’s in a hurry,” offers a student.
“No!” exclaims Keating. “Ding! Thanks for playing anyway.” Then, turning serious, he gives them the answer.
“Because we are food for worms, lads. Because believe it or not, each and ­every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die.”
He then reveals why they are standing in the hallway.
“I would like you to step forward over here and peruse some of the faces from the past. You’ve walked past them many times. I don’t think you’ve ­really looked at them.”
The students gaze into the case full of photographs. For the first time, they look into the eyes of those who walked the hallways before them.
“They’re not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe ­they’re destined for great things, just like many of you. Their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because you see, gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen. You hear it?”
Then, himself whispering as if to give voice to the past, Keating intones, “carpe…carpe…carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”11
But do we know what this means? Our tendency is to think of life’s defining moments in terms of personal milestones or achievements: graduating from college, getting married, having a child, landing a particular job. In truth, these are far from the most influential and eternity-filled moments that set the course of our destiny. Truly definitive moments are those that shape the deepest parts of who we are, and more importa...

Edition details

• Publisher: WaterBrook Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1578564549
• ISBN 13: 9781578564545
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224