“Let’s don’t get too mushy about this,” Richard Foster says in this week’s podcast on the Contemplative Tradition. The truth is that people saturated with prayer are down to earth, ​“beautiful of soul… they laugh a lot… there’s a kind of self-forgetfulness… they aren’t gritting their teeth.”

That’s a helpful word to reorient our mental image of a contemplative person, a term that might bring to mind a mystic lost in wordless prayer, someone disengaged from ​“real life.” 

In fact, the aim of the Christian contemplative is precisely to stay connected to the life that is real. ​“I have set the Lord always before me,” says David in Psalm 16. It is that awareness of God’s nearness — God at his right hand — which helps David ​“not be shaken” while performing the demanding duties of his everyday life. 

While spiritual practices associated with the Contemplative Tradition — solitude, silence, meditation — are done alone with God, the end result isn’t for the person alone, just as a tree’s fruit isn’t for the tree alone but is enjoyed by others.

And what’s the fruit of a prayer-filled life? Increased love, delight, and freedom — even freedom from needing a particular spiritual experience. That kind of fruit blesses God and anyone God puts in our path.

If you’ve made it this far, why not take a 30-second pause from email to recognize God is present with you, wherever you are and whatever your day holds next. You might even say or whisper aloud the words of the Psalmist, ​“I have set the Lord always before me, because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken” (Psalm 16:8 ESV).