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

by Justin Whitmel Earley

“All of man’s problems stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

When the distractions fade away and the roar of silence begins, we’re confronted with the question that haunts us: Who are we really, now that no one is looking?

Silence begins as a personal practice, but it always ends as a public virtue.

When we can’t answer the question of who we are in silence, we can’t answer it in public either, and our insecurities spill out into the world in the form of manipulations.

Only when we know who we are can we turn to love others, not use others. Only then can we actually listen to them.

“How can we love our neighbor if we never allow her to reveal herself because we are always chattering?”

when we cultivate inner rhythms of silence, we become attentive to the voice of conscience, to the voice of God’s love for the world, and to the voice of our neighbor’s need.

But it’s possible to avoid confrontations with our conscience simply because we’re never quiet.

Use your phone one way, and it fuels the life of love and presence you long for. Use your phone the other way, and it robs you of everything you were made for. But remember that the phone isn’t neutral. We can’t use it the right way without habits that protect us from the wrong way. When we do nothing, they tilt us toward absence.

Having a place for phones goes a long way toward putting them in their place.

Who am I? And who am I becoming? These are the questions our morning routines are inevitably asking and answering for us.

But no words except the words of Scripture can bear the weight of a response to these questions.

we can’t know who we are by looking deep inside, discovering a true identity, and then becoming more like that person out of sheer willpower.

We become what or who we reflect, which is to say we become what we pay attention to.

We can’t become ourselves by ourselves. The way we discover ourselves is by staring at someone else.

when we turn our eyes toward Jesus, only there do we finally see the kind of person we were made to be like. We are children of the king, perfectly loved—not because that’s “just who we are” but because that’s who he is making us.

I think my dad managed to keep a stable identity through a roller coaster of work success and failures because of the habit of looking each morning to God’s love before he turned to look at the world. And once you know who you are in God, you can turn to the world in love.

Anger and fear have something in common: we become the center of things.

The questions of whether we let pundits or prophets calibrate our morning identity is an urgent matter of neighbor love.

When we’re Christians first we can finally be good citizens second.

we can avoid being, in the words of Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr., either uncritical lovers of country or loveless critics of country.

when we’re citizens of heaven first, we finally become loving critics of country next—which is th...

How do we stay just far enough from the world to love it well? How do we be against the culture for the sake of culture? How do we be in these realms but not of these realms?

in general, I believe we should be wary of the flicking thumb motion. The restless thumb often correlates to the restless heart.

the more I use social media, the more I realize that the great danger is not in simply overusing social media, it is in living through social media.

The problem is not so much the way it wastes time, it is the way it frames time. Without limits, we begin to see our whole life through it.

We see our whole day through a possible post. We look around, wondering what in our field of view is worth taking a picture of. We listen to every conversation for a tweetable quote, instead of trying to understand the human being who is talking. We avoid disagreement in public, yet we express our...

This is no way to live. In fact, it’s a miserable way to live. There is no love of neighbor in it, and there is no solution for it outside of becomi...

Each morning presents us with these questions: Who am I? And who am I becoming? Each morning, the Scriptures answer the same, as God says, “You are my child, and you are becoming like me.” That is something to stand the day on.

We can’t become ourselves by looking inward, and we can’t become ourselves by staring at our strange reflections in the screen. We have to look into the Word.

We all seem to have a capacity to make ourselves appear okay while hiding something that slowly kills us from the inside out.

Is there anything you aren’t telling me? That is the question that goes either unasked or unanswered in so many lives that collapse.

Often, if honestly asked and honestly answered, this question can turn whole lives around.

The question “Is there anything you aren’t telling me?” gets at the heart of friendship, because friendship is being known by someone else and loved anyway. Friendships in which we’re vulnerable make or break our lives. With them we thrive, and without them an essential part of us—if not all of us—dies.

Everything in the universe has its roots in friendship. That means the longing to be in right relationship with other people and things is at the heart of every molecule in existence—and most powerfully in our own hearts.

That’s what friendship is: vulnerability across time.

Friendships embody the power of the gospel in a unique way, because in friendship we live out the truth of the gospel to each other.

Much of friendship comes from admitting the things that make you seem fragile when spoken out loud. And this is why friendship is so hard. Vulnerability is risky, and time is limited.

Here is the power that lies in vulnerable friendships: together we beat back the darkness by exposing it to light.

Put more generally, why do we arrange our geography and our schedules in a way that makes putting consistent time into friendships so hard?

any blessing that you try to hoard for yourself begins to sour. We ruin the goodness of blessings when we refuse to use them to bless others.

If friendship is a practice that reminds us of what the gospel is, it is also a practice that puts the gospel on display to the world. In a culture of loneliness and individualism, there is no better witness to the Trinity than embodying a counterculture of real friendship.

to choose anything means to kill off other options you might have otherwise chosen.

When the media critic Marshall McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message” in 1964, he was talking about the advent of TV and how rapidly it was changing communication forms. This has only become more true. Now the content of a story is not our only concern; the medium is equally if not more formative. The way we watch is as important as what we watch.

The good life doesn’t come from the ability to choose anything and everything; the good life comes from the ability to choose good things by setting limits.

We need the diversity of all of God’s children and the collective wisdom of many voices. This is always true, but it is particularly urgent at a moment when the mediums of news are designed to push us into echo chambers. We need counter-formative habits of diversity to resist the slide into tribalism.

the ever-outraged and always-offended tone of mainstream news sources is making us numb to the world’s pain. When everything is a crisis, nothing is.

We think we’re becoming informed, but actually we’re becoming numb.

True understanding of the world’s brokenness and real compassion for the oppressed will not come from the firehose of online anger but from a care...

We must resist becoming people who talk of justice out of rage and work on becoming people who ...