Five Quiet Minutes Before the Phone Wins the Day
Stilling Waves | ACSI Service Provider
Most students arrive at school already somewhere else. The feed has had them since before breakfast, and it already has an opinion about who they are – how they should look, what they should fear, who is doing better. By the first bell, many teenagers have absorbed an hour of other people’s voices and not one minute of stillness.
Teachers see the result every morning: a room full of young people who are present in body and scattered everywhere else.
Stilling Waves Press, a Johannesburg publisher, makes devotional journals for exactly that moment. Each one gives a class five quiet minutes with God at the start of the day – on paper, with the phone face down.
How it works
Every day has the same steady shape: an opening line, a short reflection, a stillness cue for the body, a focus for the day, a line to remember, a quotation – Scripture one day, a classic Christian writer the next – and a closing meditation, with ruled space for the student to write. Between the days, commentaries, blessings, prayers and pages of quotations mark out the five-day units and the seven sections, so the book has a rhythm of its own beyond the page. The shape never changes, and that is the point. The repetition does what novelty cannot: it builds a habit of stillness that begins to belong to the student rather than the timetable. There is nothing for the teacher to prepare and nothing to mark.
The journals are built to the school year: 140 school days, four terms of thirty-five, in five-day units that follow the school week and finish before exams. A whole class is on the same page on the same day – a teacher can say “Day 47” and every student knows where to open.
They fit a classroom in two ways. A teacher can read the day aloud – one page, five minutes, at the start of register or the first lesson; it settles a room before the work begins. Or every student keeps their own journal and writes the page themselves, in their own words, across a term or a school year.
Written for who is actually in the room
These are not generic devotionals with a teenager on the cover. There are two journals, each in its own voice:
For teen girls – When the Feed Decides Who You Are Before Lunch. For the girl whose day is scripted by the scroll before she reaches the school gate. The journal does not lecture her about her phone; it gives her somewhere quieter to stand.
For teen boys – When You’ve Been Told Strong Means Silent. For the boy who has learned that saying nothing is the same as being strong. The pages give him a private, unhurried place to put words to what he carries – and to find out he is not carrying it alone.
Both draw on Scripture and classic Christian writers – Andrew Murray among them, a South African who founded a school of his own – one honest page at a time. The journal’s own voice is modern English, and where an old quotation keeps its original wording, a short glossary line beneath it explains any unfamiliar words, so nothing on the page is out of a student’s reach.
See it before you decide anything
We would rather a teacher held the pages than read an article. There is a free classroom sample – the opening pages, five of the seven section openings, and six full days drawn from across the whole 140-day journey – ready to download, print and try with a class. No sign-up is needed. Find it at stillingwaves.com/classroom, where you can also watch a short film about the journals.
Or simply write to us at hello@stillingwaves.com. A teacher who wants to read a whole journal before deciding can ask for a review copy of either title.
Class sets are available at school pricing: email the same address with the year group and rough numbers, and we will come back to you.
Five minutes is enough. It just has to come before the feed
