kairos is a word of Greek origin, meaning "right moment" or "timely", relating to an ancient notion that the Greeks had of time.
The notion of time represented by the term kairos would have emerged from a character in Greek mythology. Kairós was the son of chronos, god of time and seasons, and who, unlike his father, expressed an idea considered metaphorical of time, or that is, non-linear and that cannot be determined or measured, an opportunity or even the right occasion for a certain thing.
It can be understood that the so-called "kairós" is a single opportune moment, which can be present within the space of a physical time, determined by Cronos, according to Greek mythology. In other words, kairos would be the ideal period for the realization of a specific thing, which could be an object, process or context.
Today, in modern Greek, the word kairos has the meaning of "climate time", similar to the meaning of the word weather in English.
In the religious sphere, the word kairos is used in the sense of "spiritual time" or "the time of God", which is divergent from the chronological concept of terrestrial time, that is, the hours, days, years and etc.
The so-called "kairos of God" cannot be measured because, according to one of the passages in the Christian Bible: "(...) a day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day" (2 Peter 3:8).
Kairos and Cronos
For Greek philosophy, kairos it symbolized the idea of momentary time, an opportunity or a specific period to carry out a certain activity, for example. Kairós was not understood as a chronological time, but as an ideal moment in the present for something.
The concept of chronos it is related to the idea of chronological and physical time, such as hours, minutes, days and so on.
For the Christian church, the terms kairos and chronos are antagonistic in the sense that one means the "time of God" (kairos) and the other the "time of humans" (chronos).
