It was strange feeling our way toward an appropriate method in which to use our ten minutes. We decided to silently pray over the psalm (Psalm 1) for about five minutes and then to share our thoughts with each other, and then to spend some time in short, intermittent prayer over what we had read and thought and heard and wondered.

We were awkward, and probably both a little uncomfortable, but both of us took something away from the time—each of us had a central impression, and we were both encouraged in our practice to notice that Psalm 1 itself is actually recommending the kind of discipline we were starting. How appropriate! My take-away was a sense that the opposite of fruitful implantation by the stream of God’s law was disintegration—the chaff that blows away in the second half of the Psalm—and that the only way to avoid disintegration was to hold onto the unity of the calling of God. Failing to relate everything that I do to that central calling will result in my drying up, chaff-like, and blowing away. My brother’s take-away was an image: a tree that had withered except for a single green leaf. He was struck by the idea that even if our lives do seem to be disintegrating, and we do seem to be failing to relate everything to our central vocation in Christ, we can rest in the assurance of vegetable prosperity, we always have a green leaf, we will always bear fruit in our season.

I was a bit upset with myself at first for seeking this “take-away”—it seemed facile when I first reconsidered it. But I think now that it would only be facile if I meant by it that my meditating should wrap up at the end of the ten minutes and issue in a thesis statement. It shouldn’t. If it does I probably haven’t quieted my heart. But it probably should leave me with the memory of something, something that I can rest in and turn around in my mental hands like a gem with interesting facets, whenever I have quiet moments without work at hand. Otherwise it’s quite possible that my ten minute morning meditations will become a compartment unto themselves, a place where “spirituality” occurs and then I leave the Spirit safely packed away on a shelf until I want to take him down again. As if that would work. Instead, I want the rhythm of these two times to be part of the day, in fact the poles around which the day rotates. I want to look forward to these time and to remember them, allowing my thoughts and actions to radiate out and toward them rather than to be separate and untouched by them.