Habits, Mental Health, and Spiritual Formation

The Common Rule by Justin Whitmel Earley

Justin Whitmel Earley’s Website

Kasey Olander: 

Welcome to The Table where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Kasey Olander. I'm the web content specialist here at the Hendricks Center, and today we're discussing habits, mental health, and spiritual formation. If that sounds like three different topics, don't be afraid, we're going to talk about how they intersect and ways that they might overlap and relate to each other. I'm excited because we're joined by our guest, Justin Whitmel Earley. He is a lawyer, former missionary, and author and speaker. Justin, thank you so much for being with us today. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Thanks for having me, Kasey. I'm super excited to talk with you all and habits, spiritual formation, mental health, they all go together to me. I think they're the same topic, so let's find out. 

Kasey Olander: 

Perfect. Well, let's jump in. I will preface this by saying obviously we can't speak to every single person's mental health situation. People need to do what's right for them, but Justin, I would love to hear more about your story, your journey, and how you came to care about this one singular topic of habits, mental health and spiritual formation. Justin, I guess I'll start off by asking you, what are habits and how did you become so passionate about them? 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Well, the what are habits is an easy answer. Habits are the small but consequential things that we do every day, particularly, and this is important that are semi-conscious to unconscious. There are all these kinds of things that happen in our top order thinking, but habit activity, and this can be daily or it can kind of be weekly, it's the grooves that we settle in. 

It's the decisions that we don't have to make is the important part of habits. The things that we do, because we've always done them and we do because we don't really think about them too hard. That's what makes them so important. 

Now, how I got into talking about habits, that's a whole different story because I'm a former missionary and lawyer who now talks and writes about habits. There's a story there that I just launched into that. 

Kasey Olander: 

Obviously. Yes, please. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Great, let's do it. The short version of that is that I graduated University of Virginia and went to be a missionary in China for a couple years, almost five actually. That was a time where I really felt called by the Lord to be in China. Then, strangely, I felt called to leave China and go be a business lawyer, which is also, that's the loaded statement on faith, vocation and calling, but probably the subject for a different podcast, but I really did feel called to leave China and go into business law. 

The important takeaway there is that I really ran at the law with all the fervor of a man on a call, not just to do it excellently, but to indwell it as an opportunity for missions. I still believe now sitting in my law office where I'm talking to you, that the law and business need to be shaped in the shape of the gospel. They need to be formed in these institutions into the image of the way that Christ created us in the world. 

At the time, and law school was almost 10 years ago for me actually is when I started, I just ran at it like a man on a calling and I was always adding more to my resume. I was really busy. I went at it just like everybody else did, staying up later, waking up earlier. Looking back with the clarity of hindsight, which is always 2020, I had this house of my life that was decorated with wonderful Christian content on worldview and calling, but the architecture of my habits was exactly the same as every other top law school student. 

While it worked well for me, and I graduated really high in my class and got my dream job in mergers and acquisitions at an international law firm down here in Richmond, Virginia, my life completely collapsed my first year of lawyering. I went from what was a carefree, passionate, young parent, I had two boys at the time that were both born during law school, to being in very short order, the nervous medicating lawyer who could not sleep or calm down unless I took sleeping pills or a couple drinks. 

This all happened right in my first year of lawyering. I didn't know the word for panic attacks at the time. I really didn't even think of anxiety as a real thing. I thought it was a way that people described life as stressful and I was familiar with that stress. I just never responded like this before, but what happened to me that first year was something I had never experienced before. 

It was as if my mind caught a cold. It was as if my heart came apathetic about all the things that I knew and was only responding to this sort of anxious schedule that I was experiencing. I could talk about this for a long time, Kasey, but the important part I would say is twofold, one, that was a time in my life where I realized that Psalm 23 is true, that the Lord really is with you in the valley of the shadow of death. 

While I never want to experience that time of insomnia and panic, and even at some point, suicidal thoughts, I never want to experience that again, but I see now the Lord walked with me through that incredible low point and used it to make me into someone who was more like Christ, more loving, more patience, more sensitive. Primarily, that sanctification that happened was through a great epiphany that your head can go this way and your habits can go the opposite way and your heart is going to start to follow habits. 

With the clarity of hindsight, again, easy to say now, a long journey later, I realized that despite the fact that I had a great worldview. I was living according to a set of rigorous, liturgical, spiritual disciplines called everyday habits of the Modern West. They were the ways I looked at my phone, the ways I treated my schedule, the ways I didn't rest, the way I didn't sabbath, the way that I didn't sleep, the way that I thought everything was about what I could get done. I now see those ordinary habits as deeply, formative, spiritual disciplines. 

That's the short version. I now see that habits are not neutral, nor can you ever get away from them. You're always going to be living according to habits. Once you realize that habits are spiritual liturgies in and of themselves, it becomes fairly intuitive to say, "Well, why don't I choose them carefully?" That's what a lot of my writing has been about ever since. 

Kasey Olander: 

Wow. You feel called to be a missionary, and then you feel called with a similar feeling of mission to lawyering, but then all of a sudden you realize, wait a minute, this pace of life isn't going to work, just looking the way that my peers look, even though I know Christ, my life needs to look like it, not just with reading the Bible… 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes. 

Kasey Olander: 

… but also with things, I mean, you defined habits as things we don't even think about, right? 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Right, right, very much so. 

Kasey Olander: 

Then, how did you realize that connection between what your habits were, not thinking about them to realizing, maybe this is actually related to my spiritual life? 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Well, there were two ways. The primary wake up was about a year into my struggle. I had tried medication, I had tried counseling, and neither of those were really moving the needle, though, I hardly recommend both to anybody, but I was still really struggling. I ended up, right around the new year, sitting at a table with my two best friends, Steve and Matt and I had this journal on the table where I had written out this program of daily and weekly habits. 

The reason I had done that was because my wife and I had said, "Let's just try to find something to reign in your chaos, put a couple limits on your days and weeks," but they were small things, like turning off my phone an hour a day, actually practicing a Sabbath, trying to do at least a meal with other people once a day and not always eating on the go, committing to scripture before phone, so I wasn't looking at my email first thing in the morning, I mean, all stuff that I list them out like that. 

They sound like good ideas, but I didn't think they were going to matter because at the time, I had no idea how much these smallest and most ordinary patterns of our days and weeks actually affect our souls, not to mention our mental health, but our spiritual formation in the most deep and extraordinary ways. 

My life began to drastically change from this day on. It was really a sharp pivot. I started asking myself, Kasey, I mean, it was good. I started to feel different, not completely better all of a sudden. I could never in good conscious recommend to anybody who's struggling with their mental health that this will fix you right away, but it was the most meaningful change that had happened in that whole year of struggle. 

I just started to ask why was that? Almost as if, why is this working? What I found in my reading, as a lawyer and a Christian and an armchair philosopher myself, I just started to read and research and ask, why does this mattering so much? I'm almost a little embarrassed to say that I started to realize that what I was doing was absolutely nothing new, but just a rediscovery of the spiritual disciplines of a very old, because it's biblical, understanding of sanctification and participation in the Lord's work of sanctification. 

I was also reading people like Jamie Smith or other people that were writing on cultural liturgies and understanding that there is no neutral, that what I had happened in on, I thought that these ways that we used our phones or lived according to certain law school schedules or things were happening in the realm of neutrality, and we could put Christian content maybe on top of them. I started to realize that, there is no neutral for the human heart. We are always gravitating towards some love or another. 

It was both the experience of a deeply changed life as I started practicing that what I now know were spiritual discipline is and also then reading and realizing that this is a historical biblical way of living the faith and maybe most famously coming to understand that what I had essentially done was create a rule of life, even though I never knew that word at the time. That is when I started to realize this is not just for me. 

My story might be extreme, but I'm not unusual. That's when I started to realize that, wait, everybody needs to start thinking about this. That really started the writing about it to try to offer all the other people like me who are struggling with their mental health and sort of the chaotic sense that there's no form to life, I'm just being whipped around in different places and say, "You're right. It's not, but that's a problem of the modern world." We haven't always lived this way and we need to really think about the biblical and ancient practices of a rule of life and spiritual disciplines. 

Kasey Olander: 

That's kind of funny that you're like, "I invented this new thing. Wait a minute. No, I'm actually joining in with this old thing." 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yeah. 

Kasey Olander: 

I love that. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Honestly, it was refreshing because if I invented a new thing, you're always pretty skeptical like, really did that happen? 

Kasey Olander: 

In Christianity, you're not really trying to make stuff up. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yeah, but it was deeply encouraging when I started to read about just spiritual disciplines and the rule of life, and it was just say, "This is why I've felt the way that I felt, and this is why this is working the way that it's working because it's how God made us and it's how the church has lived usually." 

That gave me a sense of history and tradition and theology that was not present on that night with my journal where I was asking my friends. It started as an experiment. It ended as realizing that I was in a deep, strong, and comforting current of Christian theology for centuries. 

Kasey Olander: 

That is comforting to know you're joining in with these ancient friends. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes, yes, very much so. 

Kasey Olander: 

How did you identify, I assume these ancient saints weren't telling you to turn off your phone for an hour, right? How did you and your wife, you said you sat down and you made this list, how did you come to these specific habits? How did you identify, it's my relationship with technology or specifically my phone? I guess, what did that kind of look like for you? 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

That's such a good question because some of them, we didn't invent Sabbath. You sort of suddenly look back and realize that you've been ignoring one or more of the 10 commandments your whole life. Other ones that were turn my phone off for an hour a day and scripture before phone, I'll go with both of those because those have been incredibly important disciplines that I still, even yesterday did, Kasey, and today. I still actually live like this surprisingly. 

A lot of people intuit that something is happening to them with their smartphone and that they need different practices. I'm no different in that sense. I was intuiting that something was fracturing my sense of presence. Honestly, I think I had read about each of those practices somewhere else. I had heard in a podcast that turning your phone off for an hour a day was one of the most psychologically effective ways to break phone addictions. 

I had also read someone talking about morning prayer and how one easy marker is just to say, "Do you go to prayer before you go to your phone?" I'm actually not sure where I came to it, but those were places where I thought, "Well, that makes sense. Let's just try that." 

Now, what I think is interesting, Kasey, is that I was in the place, probably most other people are listening to this and they're hearing it right now, and they're saying, "That sounds like a wise idea, but is that really going to make or break my life or is that really necessary?" I am here to tell you, yes, it is because here is what is happening. We are overlooking one of those formational moments of our day in waking and by default giving it to our smartphone. I think some most recent statistic I read, some 90% of Americans begin their day in their phone in bed. 

Kasey Olander: 

Wow. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

It is now unsurprising to me that if we begin our day on Twitter, we become spiritually formed into angry people. If we begin our day in cable news, we become spiritually formed into very, very worried and frustrated people. If we begin our day on Instagram, we become formed into very, very envious or self-conscious people. I could go on. 

We have a God-shaped and God-sized hole in our heart. We wake up every day wondering, "How is it that I'm justified? Can somebody look at me and tell me that I'm worth it today?" I, for many weeks, months, really years, actually looked to my inbox to say, "What am I going to do to prove that I'm lovable today?" 

The answer, as a young lawyer was, "Well, I need to do these tasks. I already see the list of things I need to do today in my inbox." I never would've said, I had way better theology, way better worldview to say, "I'm going to go find my identity and work today." I would never have said that. Probably nobody listening would. 

Kasey Olander: 

Not explicitly. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

That's the whole point of what we're talking about exactly. We would never say it explicitly, our head's going that way, but our heart is following the habit. When you look there first thing every day, we become our habits of attention. 

When I noticed, and anybody who practices this will, you will feel extraordinarily different if you, for the next 30 days, decide to spend your waking moments in either silence, meditation, prayer or scripture, any of those things work, but do it before you go to your phone. You will find your life is dramatically different and it's unsurprising, because as the scriptures tell us, prayer and the word of God, they're divine. They're here for a reason. 

It sort of the phone off for an hour every day is similar just in that it was one of those practices where I realized, "This is not about a life hack to get more done," though I would recommend that, anybody who wants to be more productive, turn your phone off, literally off and see how your mind works differently when you work. 

What I realized is that I was made for presence, presence with other people. When I was turning off my phone, I was suddenly with my kids and with my wife in a way that I hadn't been in a long time. It became intuitive once again that I was living in a rushing current of fractured presence and that I was going to try to be omnipresent for the rest of my life if I didn't turn off my phone, because the phone encouraged us to sort of sense that we can actually be like God and be everywhere. 

Unsurprisingly, our mental health splinters, when we believe that and act that out. It is a dangerous spiritual narrative that is essentially replaying the sin of Eden over and over. I'd rather be God than worship him. I'm kind of raising the stakes of phone usage on purpose in that, of course, again, we'd never say that. I'd never pick up my phone and say, "I want to be God, thus I will swipe up." 

Those habits, that worship is bound up at habits and swiping with our thumb in the ways that is now available to us very quickly becomes a liturgical habit of, I am God, through my thumbs' motions and I can be everywhere and anywhere and present to all people at any time. 

Once again, I'm not surprised we have the mental health epidemics that we do when our habits are leading us in such idolatry. Of course, we fracture because worship forms us. As the psalmist says, "Those who make and trust in idols will become like them. That formation is dangerous even if we don't know that it's worship. That's why I want to call people's attention to the liturgical and the spiritual discipline nature of habits because so much is happening that we didn't know was happening there. 

Kasey Olander: 

I feel like you're highlighting some interesting things about anthropology, who we are as humans. We don't consciously set out to say, "You know what? I'm going to worship my phone," or "I want to feel loved, and so I'm going to check my email or my social media," or whatever, but a lot of times the rhythms like our bodies sometimes lead the way in a way that we don't think that they do. We think… 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes. 

Kasey Olander: 

… my mind is in charge, and so if I cognitively think whatever is true about how Jesus is Lord, but my body does something else, then it'll just be fine. I'll go with my mind, but you're saying that that's not the case. We're creatures and we're finite and we're limited, even sometimes such that we're limited in our own awareness of ourselves. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes, and I think we, it's such a good point, Kasey, the way you just put it, I think we know this when it comes to the most visceral tasks of the body. We recognize, for example, that exercise will change us, that something happens to our body when we move it in this way or that. That's not necessarily neutral. 

I think we intuit it and know it but probably rather explicitly with sex, that there are acts that are not neutral. You can't just say, I am devoted to my wife or husband, and then go, as Paul says, "Unite your body with a prostitute," because something happens spiritually in those moments. Your body is not neutral. I just think, we probably, this is probably the task of another podcast, smarter people than me, but I think our theology of the body is actually probably very underdeveloped in the 21st century western Christianity. 

I think that we have assumed a much more pagan understanding of our body, and that is that we're basically in sort of a platonic charge of it, as in the important things happen up here in the head. What happens down here in the body is not that important, that's just of the world. That is not biblical. 

God had created our bodies and then he breathes life into them. They're not accidental and they matter. I mean, I'll short circuit this discussion because I'm probably not qualified to give a protestant theology of the body here on this podcast, but it may be important, but when it comes to our phones, I think we don't realize how much our bodily attunement, attention gaze swiping is actually forming our mental health and our souls. If we did, we'd probably realize why so much American Christianity looks like it does and why so much of the western mental health problems are what they are. 

Kasey Olander: 

Also, I think I want to mention too, it's not that phones themselves are always evil, even though sometimes our posture has changed and sometimes our eyes change based on how much we look at them, but I was thinking a phone can be a great resource to call a friend who's an actual… 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes. 

Kasey Olander: 

… human being that you can connect with… 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes. 

Kasey Olander: 

… or to FaceTime… 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes. 

Kasey Olander: 

… somebody who lives far away, they can be an instrument that actually cultivates connection instead of just stealing it, but it depends on, I think your intentionality with the way that you use it. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

I couldn't agree more, though, I would add something in there, but first, the agreement, yes, it would be super important to know that I am no Luddite. I am a corporate lawyer and a writer who is on my phone and my computer now and most of the day. 

Kasey Olander: 

We're on Zoom right now. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes. Here we go to, the redemptive point of technology. Just as a Bible believing Christian, I believe what Genesis says, and that is that God created the world and it was good and that we are also called to create, and that fundamentally, I believe that technology is more redeemable than it is evil, any day of the week. Sometimes people say, "Well, it's good too, right? It's not all bad." I would not only say yes, I would say, "That doesn't quite encapsulate it." 

Technology can and should be very good the way that God says good in creation. The problem is only that it's actually just way more important than we think. I think like sex, like money, like power, the most important things that God created have the greatest capacity for evil and brokenness and the greatest capacity for good. I would put technology right there in that category because it's a mode fundamentally of human communication and knowledge and for us to communicate with each other. 

It's just tremendously wonderful that I can call my wife and tell her I love her in the middle of the day from the office, or that my son can FaceTime me when he scrapes his knee and I can comfort him or that we can have this incredible conversation across time zones is not only good, it's very good in the genesis sense of it, but that I could go home tonight and create a secret user account and go do things on the internet that nobody would know. That is a possibility we now all live with and that is very, very dangerous. 

If we don't have patterns of radically different technology uses, we will slip into some of the most dangerous evils almost unconsciously. I just would caution anybody against saying, "Well, technology is neutral, it just depends on the intentions you bring to it." That's not quite enough. 

Intentions are very important, but it also really depends on how this is made. It depends on how our computer is made. For example, I would love the next generation of Christians to be thinking about are disappearing chats an appropriate version of technology period? Is that or are swipe right for a private browsing window, is that good technology because it means that despite your best intentions, you are almost certainly going to use this for evil. 

I say this because Tolkien and Aristotle and many other writers and philosophers in the 2000 years between those two back this up. This is the ring of Gyges' idea that the Lord of the Rings was based on what happens when you give a human being a ring that makes them invisible? What will they go do? It was the philosopher's will of saying, clearly human nature is flawed because we all know what people will go do. Are they going to use it to go put money in people's pockets and do kind things for widows or are they going to, I don't even have to give the list of things. 

When technology allows us to disappear, we have really dangerous questions when it allows us to comment on people's posts with just vitriolic poison and never be known because we created a secret account. I'm not sure these are actually things that should exist. It matters how technology is created. I'd love to see a new generation of Christian entrepreneurs who say, "We're going to make better social media platforms. We're going to make better devices." 

That's a generational thing. It's not going to happen tomorrow, but then again, anything that can be accomplished in one generation is probably journeying too small anyway. I would love Christians to think about that in the long run. 

Kasey Olander: 

Absolutely. We think, I mean, we affirm that humans are totally depraved and we've rebelled against God, and thankfully we also affirm that Jesus makes a way for us to be made right with him, that Jesus is the one who accomplished everything on our behalf. I wonder in light of that, that as Christians, we are all about God's grace. How do you reconcile that? If somebody says to you, "Justin, that sounds a little legalistic. You really want me… 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes. 

Kasey Olander: 

… to put that many boundaries on my phone or on the stuff I feel like doing all the time, I just want to rest in God's grace. Jesus died and rose again. How do you respond to that? 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Well, first I would affirm we're on the same page of theology. This is unquestionable, it's unassailable. We are saved not by our good habits. We are saved by Jesus's good work on our behalf. Honestly, I think a fear of legalism was actually probably what made me the person that I was going into law school, which is something to notice. 

We should be good at identifying legalism, and I would define legalism as looking for anything besides Christ for your justification. Looking to your work, looking to your Christian practice, looking to the health of your marriage or the greatness of how you raise these kids, looking at whatever it is, your bank account, your followers online, whatever it is that makes you feel like I'm worth it today, you're now basing the validity of your existence or your sensitive justification on something else that's not Christ. 

I think what's important to note, Kasey, is that we are all equally prone to do that. We do it in radically different ways, but we're all equally prone to do that. I usually try to turn this question gently back to the asker and say, "What makes you think you're more prone to legalism simply because you're trying to cooperate in your sanctification?" 

As in, if you did nothing, you look to your status as a Christian who just does nothing than rest in God's grace and start to imagine that that's why you're actually doing well as a Christian. I mean, that's how broken we are. Legalism is going to be a problem everywhere. I always just am skeptical of the upshot of that question, but I think the more final answer is just that I always try to remind people, habits will not change God's love for you, but God's love for you should change your habits. That is just one… 

Kasey Olander: 

Say that one more time. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

… short summary way to say, read the Bible and the way that Jesus talks or the way that Paul ends any of his letters, after explaining the love and the unconditional love of God and justification by faith alone, Paul is extremely comfortable and so is Jesus in telling us how to live our lives, telling us what to do in light of that. 

That's just the correct use of the law to put it in reformed theologies in a sense. I mean, the idea of the law was to tell us one, why we're damned to show us the standard that we're not going to live up to, two, to create order in society. That's another use. The 10 commandments have practical use in most cultures, but three, to show us the path for the good life. These are traditional biblical understandings of the use of the law. 

That third one that I mentioned is about sanctification. It's the idea of participating in your sanctification, which does not justify you, but it is God is trying to work in your life. He is laid out good works for us in advance, Ephesians says. I wholeheartedly now look at habits as a way to honor God and participate in my sanctification, not at all a way to justify myself. 

Kasey Olander: 

I want to come back to that. You used a pithy phrase and I liked it. I think it was that you said habits don't change God's love for you, but God's love for you should change your habits. I think… 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

That's right. 

Kasey Olander: 

… that's a great way of looking at it because it removes from us this idea that if I live a good enough life, if I order all my things, if I have the appropriate boundaries on my technology and stuff, then God will like me, but rather, it gives us this freedom as believers to be like, God already loved me when I was at my worst, in my deepest mess… 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes. 

Kasey Olander: 

… Jesus still died for me. Out of that, wow, I can understand a little bit of this great love and then be motivated. How can I order my life so that it's honoring to him and how can I be a good steward of my health, my mental health, my physical health, my things that have been entrusted to me like phones and computers and the internet or what have you, as a means of worshiping God, of being intentional with worshiping God instead of worshiping the good gifts that he gives. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes, that's exactly it. 

Kasey Olander: 

I love how you said that. What is the value of doing this in community? I definitely see value in, for me, if I read scripture before I'm on my phone, that puts me in a better mental state and it puts me in a good spot, but what is the value of doing this with other people? 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Really everything, because I don't see a route to do this alone. The book on this that I wrote is called The Common Rule, which is a play on the idea of the rule of life that I mentioned earlier, a program of spiritual habits that changes you. The rules of life were traditionally done in monasteries amongst communities of monks. The lessons we could draw from Acts where people would point to that as an example of a rule of life happened in the community of the church of early believers. 

You could point to all the biblical examples of this, but you could also just look to the whole of the Bible and how it describes the church and our relationship of Jesus and that is that we were not made to walk with Jesus alone. We're made to walk with Jesus alongside other people. 

This is actually, as you know, something that I now have a whole book on because this is so important to me, but just in the habit sense, any habit psychology will actually tell you that it is extraordinarily hard to start and keep a habit alone, but it is very, very possible to do it in community. I always tell people to start any of this stuff, you pick one habit, let's call it [inaudible 00:33:42], one person, and do it with them for about four to six weeks a month maybe. Those are the ingredients. 

One small change, one other person and one limited timeframe like a month where you can actually build a new habit, but that other person, Kasey, is nearly essential. That sense of accountability and community, that is how we change. I always think it's just delicious to read the habit philosophy and hear psychologists say that as it turns out, we can't change unless we're in a community of other people who believes in some higher calling for themselves. 

That's the church. That's why we have the church. We were built to change in the local church. Find somebody in your small group, ask them if they want to do this habit together, that is the route to practically starting any of this. 

Kasey Olander: 

I love that. That's awesome. I really enjoy The Common Rule and I've sent it to a number of people. I think that that's really helpful. It's I think helpful and hopeful that it's not just me by myself, and it's not even just me and Jesus, but it's, God has saved Jesus's bride the church and enabled us and equipped us to do some, like you said, small incremental things. You've given people really easy bite-sized things. They don't have to start with eight habits for the rest of your life forever. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Right. Only the weird people like me will do them all at one time. Most of us will do them incrementally, and that is actually the way to radically change your life. Start small, the small things are the big things as it turns out. 

Kasey Olander: 

Do you encourage people, what is it about the rhythms of daily and/or weekly? Is there anything to be said for quarterly or annual habits? I don't know if you can call them habits at that point. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

That is exactly the conversation. We could get really esoteric here, but usually we would call them traditions or rituals when they occur less than weekly because it's harder to be subconscious about things that only occur annually, but not entirely because we all know at Christmas time, we all sort of celebrate it this way in our family. Traditions become that. 

You should think about it writ large for sure, but it's the micro habits on the daily to weekly level that I think are the most powerful and spiritually formative practices that we don't know we have. That's why I point people to those. Some of your weekly and daily rhythms are probably the things that are discipling you the most. I would just want to encourage the church to give that daily and weekly discipleship over to Jesus rather than the cultural norms of the modern technological west. 

Kasey Olander: 

That's a good way to put it. You're definitely being discipled. You're being formed by something, but there's hope for the fact that you can actually be intentional about what it is you can actually submit to the lordship of Jesus and you can be a steward of… 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes. 

Kasey Olander: 

… things that he's entrusted to you. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes, that's absolutely right. We are all being discipled by American culture unless you are counter discipling yourself in the way of Jesus. 

Kasey Olander: 

That's good. Yeah. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Well, I would revise that, you're not counter discipling yourself unless you're allowing Jesus to be the counter discipleship. 

Kasey Olander: 

There you go. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

We are primarily following him. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah, you're intentional with where your mind is going, where your affections are going instead of letting somebody else decide it for you. That's really good. Can you speak to, I guess, a couple more of the ways that you doing these habits has formed like you, your family, your community, the group, whatever group you inhabit? 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Well, I wrote in The Common Rule about a weekly practice of spending an intentional hour in conversation with friends every week. That habit is not as pithy as scripture before phone, but it actually became one of the most important and cherished practices for me over the past few years. That is just to look for a regular, typically weekly rhythm of deep conversation with other friends. 

That has really changed the way that I walk with the Lord in recent years. I've seen, I think looking to my right and looking to my left, just the difference in people who persevere in their walk with the Lord, who persevere in their marriage, who persevere through mental health struggles, the difference between those people and the ones who fall away or are crushed by mental health struggles or are receding or drawing back from their marriage. 

It's not usually the circumstances because we all face suffering and difficulty. It's just life, as it turns out, is very hard. We live in a fallen world and we're sinners after all, but those who walk through those circumstances alone are almost doomed to failure, because I believe that God really did make us for other people, he made us to experience him the most, or not, I don't think we can even experience God correctly until we experience him alongside other people because he made us in the Trinitarian image of God. We need other people to fill out that image bearing. 

My point is that practice of communal living, which helps me practice all these habits in community of my family and my friends, that has drastically changed things maybe more than anything else because again, back to the American culture of discipleship, we are being aggressively discipled into individualism if we do nothing else. That's the current of American culture to become busier, wealthier people who used to have friends. 

I've come to believe that fighting back against that current towards a communal life where friendship is sacred and seen as spiritually valuable on the same level of quiet times and church walking deeply with other people, should be recognized as an incredibly spiritually formative practice. I've just seen that as one of the key issues for the modern church. We could do a lot of other things right, but if we get that wrong, we're not living the way that God made us or the way that Jesus calls us to. 

We can't be people who are so good at scripture before phone and we put our phone away and we Sabbath, and yet, no one in our life actually knows who we are. That's not a Christian, that's not describing a life that Christ called us to. We need to figure out ways to radically push against that individualistic current and live into a community of people. 

As we talked about before this, that's the subject of my most recent book, Made for People, because I've found that that one practice in The Common Rule was actually so important. The Made for People is kind of an exploration of the theology behind why we can't live a spiritual life alone, why it all falls apart if we try to do it alone. 

Kasey Olander: 

It sounds like you're saying that these habits are not just good for you, but they're part of the, Jesus talks about the greatest commandment to love the Lord your God, but then also, the second is like it to love your neighbor and you can't… 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes. 

Kasey Olander: 

… very well love your neighbor in isolation. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

That's exactly and none of these, I try to be really clear in The Common Rule, you'll read at the very beginning that these are not habits designed to optimize your life. They're not habits designed to make your life easier or neater or more productive. They're designed to actually push you out of you into the love of God and neighbors. 

In that sense, yes, we're talking about inward spiritual disciplines in some sense, but the inward spiritual disciplines are always pushing you outward. I think it was Luther who called our sinful state, like being curved in. I can't remember the Latin incurvatus in se or something maybe, but the state of being sinful is always being curved into yourself. 

These spiritual disciplines are trying to push us out towards the love of God, towards the love of neighbor, of course, the greatest commandment, but I think we need a particular push in our modern moment to say that you can't do those spiritual disciplines correctly unless you're doing them intimately alongside other people. 

I think we've been so formed in the American water of individualism that we kind of sense our Christian life could happen in that structure and Made for People as sort of a treatise on saying, "No, you're fundamentally created in the communal Trinitarian image of God, which is why nothing works until you're doing it in friendship with others." 

Kasey Olander: 

That's beautiful. I like that you're highlighting too. We actually have an episode on Sabbath. It's called The Lost Art, I'm sorry, it's called Sabbath for Your Soul. Then, we have an episode on friendship called The Lost Art of Friendship. We are really on board with these things that you're discussing. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

We're tracking on these topics. That's so great. Did you say The Lost Art of Friendship or was it lost? 

Kasey Olander: 

Yes. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

I couldn't agree more. I can't wait to hear that one. 

Kasey Olander: 

Well, I wish that we had more time to talk. I feel like, we've talked about a lot of things that could be an episode in and of themselves, but I think the… 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Sure- 

Kasey Olander: 

… encouragement that we have for our listeners, that you can be intentional about your habits, not in order to please God or make him love you, but in order to be a good steward. This intentionality with habits is something that actually can cause you to flourish and cause you to love God and love your neighbor more. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Yes. 

Kasey Olander: 

Real quick, Justin, if people want to connect with you and find out more about the work that you're doing, where can they find you? 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Two best ways to do that would be to go to my website, justinwhitmelearley.com, and I've got a mailing list that people can subscribe to there. I am always sending out maybe article ideas or thoughts or recent podcasts like these that I think are useful. 

Then, second, I am on social media. Instagram is where I'm most active in putting out some of this content and responding to people. As you might know from the conversation, I limit my engagement there and have certain rules and practices about how I do it, but I am there in my own way. People can come find me there, and I won't respond to messages right away, but I always eventually respond. You're always free to direct message me there. 

Kasey Olander: 

That's perfect. Well, thank you so much for your time, Justin. I'm really grateful that you're able to be here today. Really enjoyed our conversation. 

Justin Whitmel Earley: 

Thank you so much, Kasey. This has just been wonderful, and I really appreciate your great questions. 

Kasey Olander: 

I've really enjoyed it. We also want to say thanks to our listeners for joining us. We hope that you join us next time at The Table when we discuss issues of God and culture.