Your attention is a time-limited resource.

In the span of a minute, you can only ever pay attention to a minute’s worth of stimuli and information. That’s it. You can’t save it up to spend it later—you spend it just by being conscious.

Right now you’re paying attention to these words. You could choose to pay attention to something else, but it would be at the expense of the attention you’re spending here. (Sorry, multitaskers—you’re actually just task-switching at very high speeds, which often leads to more errors and less efficiency.)

But these words aren’t particularly important. They can stand to be ignored—or never noticed at all.

Some words are different.

The very first Psalm pronounces a blessing on the man whose “delight is in the law of the LORD, and in His law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2).

The Hebrew word for law here (torah) is about more than just a list of dos and don’ts. It’s a comprehensive reference to instruction and teaching of any kind. Although “the Torah” is a common way to refer to the first five book of the Bible, one way of looking at God’s torah includes the entire Bible—everything He’s provided to teach and instruct us.

The blessed men and women are the ones who meditate on God’s law day and night. They keep returning
to it throughout their conscious hours because they delight in it. It’s precious to them, and they’re driven to keep turning their attention toward it.

Is that you? Is that me?

In my New King James Bible, there’s a footnote to clarify the world “meditates” in Psalm 1. When the blessed man meditates, he “ponders by talking to himself.” That’s because the Hebrew word translated “meditate” is from a word that can describe the cooing of a dove or the growling of a lion. There’s a verbal element here—from the psalmist’s perspective, meditation involves a degree of muttering or self-talk while thinking through God’s torah. Reading the words, reciting them, mulling them over, noticing connections, strengthening recall.

I’m not much of a mutterer when I read through God’s word, but I suspect it helps keep your attention locked on to what you’re reading and meditating about. Attention that the world very much wants to hijack and redirect at every possible moment.

And here you are at the end of the post. You had to spend some precious amounts of a finite resource to get here, and I don’t take that for granted. Thanks for taking the time to engage with what I wrote.

But now, as always, there’s an important question facing you:

Where will you turn your attention next?