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For the past week I have been trying a little spiritual experiment. I don’t know about you, but I get pretty  overwhelmed with wanting to pray more, wanting to read my Bible more, and wanting to read other spiritual books more. More often than not it seems like I have to choose one, and then I feel a little incomplete without the others. (And, unfortunately, sometimes I don’t even choose one!)

So at the beginning of last week I came up with an idea to try and help manage my daily desire for something more. I decided to take a thirty minute block of time for a specific spiritual focus and divide it into three parts: Bible, Book, and Prayer. I spend ten minutes reading my Bible, ten minutes reading another spiritual book (right now I’m reading C.S. Lewis’ The Weight of Glory), and then ten solid minutes of praying.

I feel like thirty minutes is a block of time we can handle (most TV shows run for a half-hour) and dividing the time three ways really leaves you wanting more. Obviously ten minutes a day really isn’t the way to get through your Bible in a year, but it’s ten focused minutes reading God’s word, which can really get your brain going. Ten minutes of an extracurricular books seems just about right, and I have been loving the ten minutes of prayer time. Ten minutes is long enough for me to get past my general, repetitive prayers and start really talking to God. And to take that time every day has been refreshing.

And for those of you who might be thinking, Ten minutes is nothing!, you’re right. I often am a bit disappointed when the alarm goes off to signal my time is done. But here’s the best part — you don’t have to stop, and you’re not going to get in trouble if you keep going. Everything I’ve been talking about here has been about devoting a minimum amount of time to your day, but if you want to keep reading, do it. I have found that at the end of ten minutes I want to keep going, so I commit to making it to the end of a chapter, or at least to the end of a complete thought.

Thirty minutes is such a little block of time in your day, and it’s a block of time we often waste staring at a TV or at a computer screen (or sometimes staring at nothing at all). I don’t know if this gets you interested, but I encourage you to try it, especially if you’re noticing days go by without you taking time for any of this.