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

by Justin Whitmel Earley

Only in retrospect did I realize that, while the house of my life was decorated with Christian content, the architecture of my habits was just like everyone else’s. And that life had been working for me—until it collapsed.

Busyness functions like an addiction.

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 aim of the program was to try to get my heart to believe the peace that my head professed but my body refused.

The point is, as he put it, “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

We are all living according to a specific regimen of habits, and those habits shape most of our life.

A habit is a behavior that occurs automatically, over and over, and often unconsciously. A study from Duke University suggested that as much as 40 percent of the actions we take every day are not the products of choices but of habits.

The problem is, as Wallace suggested, that much of what is fundamentally shaping our existence is happening unconsciously.

And much more often than we would like to admit or even understand, we are nudged into those choices by those who want to make money off the patterns of our daily life.

“when a habit is formed, the brain stops fully participating in decision making.

Habits allow us to put our brains to better use.

We can tell ourselves that over and over, but that part of our brain is exactly the part that gets shut out when the autopilot of habit turns on.

This is the difference between what we call education and formation. Education is what you learn and know—things you are taught. Formation is what you practice and do—things that are caught. The most important things in life, of course, are caught, not taught, and formation is largely about all the unseen habits.

This is why 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.

For example, I say the Lord’s Prayer every night with my sons because I want the words of Jesus’ prayer to sink down into their bones. I want that pr...

the only difference is that a liturgy admits that it’s an act of worship.

Worship is formation, and formation is worship.

So we become our habits.

Practically speaking, we are the sum of our choices

But 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.

There's a reason we live in houses that have walls and own properties with boundary lines

He went from speaking the universe into existence by his Word to not being able to speak a word.

By surrendering his freedom for the sake of love, Christ saved the world. By surrendering our freedom to him, we participate in that love. We find our true freedom in the constraints of divine love.

The key thing to notice here is how Jesus’ actions are the exact opposite of what humans did in the Garden of Eden. There, we tried to become gods by rejecting God’s authority and eating the forbidden fruit. In trying to free ourselves from our limitations, we brought the ultimate limitation of death into the world.

We, for our own sake, tried to become limitless, and the world was ruined. Jesus, for our sake, became limited and the world was saved.

Both were obsessed with taking the small patterns of life and organizing them towards the big goal of life: to love God and neighbor.

Both saw habits as the gears by which to direct life toward the purpose of love.

But when there is no order, growth can take something that was supposed to produce fruit and turn it into a twisted vine of decay.

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.

“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. It’s utterly important to learn the right theological truths about God and neighbor, but it’s equally necessary to put that theology into practice via a rule of life.

A rule of life is how we put our beliefs into action. It’s how we make formal belief functional belief.

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

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

Let us build a trellis for love to grow on.

A “rule” is a set of habits you commit to in order to grow in your love of God and neighbor.

Change—even personal change—almost always happens within a community where people support each other, process what they’re learning, and keep each other accountable to goals.

It’s meant to distill your habits, so you do more meaningful things by doing fewer things.

You’ll find that once new Common Rule habits are established, by definition they don’t take up time and mental space. They work in the background.

A friend asked me whether the Common Rule helped us care for ourselves, and my answer was, “yes, because we’re made to be happy when we’re focusing on others.” These habits are designed to help us spend our days for the sake of others, rather than just ourselves.

Should we do nothing, we will be taught to love the very things that tear us apart.

But remember that resistance has a purpose: love. The habits of resistance aren’t supposed to shield you from the world but to turn you toward it.

They aren’t so you can feel good about what you’ve done for you. They exist so you can feel peace about what God has done for you.

We all desire to somehow shape our chaotic days into lives with meaning. That begins with punctuating our days with words: the words of prayer.

This is all to say that for my whole life, my day has begun with a profound sense of wishing something was different. Usually it revolves around what I’ve done or what I need to do. In this way, every day begins in a sort of prayer, no matter how inarticulate. When I wake up thinking of what I’ve done, I often feel guilt over the day before. When I wake up thinking about what I need to do, I often feel anxiety over the day to come.

Legalism is the belief that the world hangs on what I do and that God and people love me based on how I perform. This is an important concept because it’s the exact opposite of the gospel: God loves us not because of what we do, but rather in spite of what we do—in spite of our good deeds and our bad deeds. Legalism takes the unmerited love of God and bends it into something earned—and just like that, the world is about us and not about him.

A keystone habit is a super-habit. It’s the first domino in the line; by changing one habit, we simultaneously change ten other habits.

I was by default beginning the day by speaking the words of my pride or fear into each day.

Often one of the only ways to take hold of the mind is to take hold of the body.

In general, we aren’t content to be like God; we want to be God. And this is the cause of so much self-centeredness in work.

I need something physical to mark the moment for my slippery mind.

No matter what I do, the habit always interrupts things in the best of ways.