The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

by Justin Whitmel Earley

My head said one thing, that God loves me no matter what I do, but my habits said another, that I’d better keep striving in order to stay loved.

“the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

As far as our habits go, the invisible reality is this: We are all living according to a specific regimen of habits, and those habits shape most of our life.

to fully understand habits you must think of habits as liturgies.

Notice how similar the definition of liturgy is to the definition of habit. They’re both something repeated over and over, which forms you; the only difference is that a liturgy admits that it’s an act of worship.

Our habits often obscure what we’re really worshiping, but that doesn’t mean we’re not worshiping something. The question is, what are we worshiping?

As the psalmist put it, those who make and trust in idols will become like them (Psalm 31:6). So we become our habits.

by barraging ourselves with so many choices, we get so decision-fatigued that we’re unable to choose anything well.

what if the good life doesn’t come from having the ability to do what we want but from having the ability to do what we were made for? What if true freedom comes from choosing the right limitations, not avoiding all limitations?

I had lived my whole life thinking that all limits ruin freedom, when all along it’s been the opposite: the right limits create freedom.

Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.”5

All those who want to be attentive to who they are becoming must realize that formation begins with a framework of habits.

You can’t believe truth without practicing truth, and vice versa.

Only when your habits are constructed to match your worldview do you become someone who doesn’t just know about God and neighbor but someone who actually loves God and neighbor.

called it “The Common Rule” because it was intended for common practice by common people.

We have a common problem. By ignoring the ways habits shape us, we’ve assimilated to a hidden rule of life: the American rule of life. This rigorous program of habits forms us in all the anxiety, depression, consumerism, injustice, and vanity that are so typical in the contemporary American life.

Talking about Jesus while ignoring the way of Jesus has created an American Christianity that is far more American than it is Christian.

Paying all our spiritual attention to the message of Jesus while ignoring his practices has not only led people like me into devastating life crises, it has also created a country of Christians whose practical lives are divorced from their actual faith.

How else do we explain a country of Christians who preach a radical gospel of Jesus while assimilating to the ...

if you feel like you’re struggling to figure out how to make life work from day to day, you’re holding the right book.

Let me tell you what is overwhelming: a default, normal, unexamined American life. That is completely overwhelming. It’s so much to take on, and we all do it simply by not doing anything else instead.

Our phones—and their programmers—are happy to set our habits for us.

Beginning the day in kneeling prayer is such a keystone habit. In morning prayer, we frame the first words of the day in God’s love for us, which is to say we uproot the weeds of legalism that grow if we simply do nothing, and we lay the first piece of the day’s trellis on which love can grow.

When our exhaustion gives way to our addictions, we’re exposed for who we really are.

No one can sleep while believing that she needs to keep the world spinning. But real rest comes when we thank God that we don’t need to, because he does. Thus we kneel by the bed and place the period of God’s mercy and care for us at the end of the day.

You say your prayers until your prayers say you. That’s the goal.

Our hunger to feast on God’s creation is actually a good way that we were made.

Whether you’re eating plants or meat, every single bite signifies a moment when something died to give you life.

There seems to be something distinctly Christlike about the fact that our ongoing daily life depends entirely on the sacrifice of other life on our behalf.

The norms of our table signal the norms of our community.

Many years ago, I recall someone during a mission trip telling the people who set up chairs, “Don’t you belittle what you’re doing. You are creating viewpoints for the gospel.”

Opening the household table on a regular basis creates an undercurrent of the Christian life that mimics the adoption ethic.

Cultivating the rhythms of the table must not pull us away from the outsider.

Christin Pohl wrote, “How we live together may be the greatest sermon we preach.”1

Ken Myers, argues that the kind of atheism we experience in America today is not a conclusion but a mood.

If secularism is not a conclusion but a mood, we cannot disrupt it with an argument. We must disrupt it with a presence.

Our secular age is not a barrier to evangelism; it is simply the place of evangelism.

Madeleine L’Engle once wrote, “We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe . . . but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”

“One good thing, one bad thing, one funny thing.”

Either way, I feel the discomfort of a small deceit. I’ve tried to be two places at once, and as a result, I was no place.

We don’t mean to live lives of absence, but without meaningful habits of resistance, smartphones are impossible not to look at. If we do nothing, we’re sure to live a life of fractured presence. And that’s not much of a life at all, because presence is the essence of life itself.

After eating the fruit, Adam and Eve suddenly wanted to cover themselves with clothes and hide. This is the hallmark of life as we know it now. We hide from each other, and we hide from God. We long for the face of God, but we can’t bear his gaze either.

As image bearers of God, we have a powerful presence to give to others. But unlike our omnipresent God, we have a limited presence. To long to be omnipresent is a false, bent longing to be God himself. It is not the way we were made to be. And like all efforts to be God, it will break us.

Attention is our precious commodity. Our life is defined by what we pay attention to.

our phones are carefully designed to attract our attention and sell it to advertisers.

There is a powerful monetary incentive that frames the functionality of all our devices. It doesn’t necessarily make them evil capitalistic machines, but it certainly means they aren’t neutral in the slightest.

that means we have to do the hard work of governing them, because they will not govern themselves, and...

We send these kinds of emails to each other every day: “Sorry—crazy morning, something came up. Can I get you that report tomorrow?” Every once in a while, this is actually a true statement. Almost always, however, it’s a cover-up. It wasn’t the morning that was crazy; it was me that was crazy. I made it crazy due to my inability to be present to work with focused attention.

In the age of smartphones, the ability to resist distraction purposefully is not just becoming the single most important career skill, it’s also a matter of whether or not we love our neighbors through our work.

If it’s true that our work is fundamentally good because, like God, we order the world to serve our neighbor, then the question of neighbor love is this: Am I t...