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

by Justin Whitmel Earley

to fully understand habits you must think of habits as liturgies. A liturgy is a pattern of words or actions repeated regularly as a way of worship.

Just as God spoke mountains and soil into existence, so we use the words of prayer as a generative act of wishing new realities into existence.

To sit peacefully in silence requires knowing your soul, knowing who you really are, and being fundamentally okay with that and at peace with that. This is exactly why we avoid it; we don’t know who we really are.

Among the thousands of radical implications of the Trinity, my favorite is that God is a fellowship. That means we are made in the image of fellowship.

That’s what friendship is: vulnerability across time.

And this is why friendship is so hard. Vulnerability is risky, and time is limited. How do we create a life of friendship when we have neither the courage nor the time to talk? The answer is to practice courage and prioritize time.

always-offended tone of mainstream news sources is making us numb to the world’s pain.

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

Practicing sabbath is supposed to make us feel like we can’t get it all done because that is the way reality is.