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

by Justin Whitmel Earley

The evening brings me face to face with the reality of my limited life.

We’re frustrated because we had no time for free time. Or we’re embarrassed because we squandered it all on free time.

The evening, then, can be a time of severe self-judgment.

There are more or less healthy ways to escape, but what I can’t escape is the desire to escape.

My dad sums it up in classic dad advice: “Avoid making important decisions after the sun goes down.” The evening is a time of vulnerability. We haven’t spent the day so much as the day has spent us. 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.

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

Our lives are something like a jasmine plant, and our days and weeks are something like the trellis.

Should we do nothing, we will still grow. But we’re likely to grow into habits that are destructive, not only to us but also to those around us.

Just because prayers are repetitive doesn’t mean they’re meaningless. Quite the opposite. Often these prayers form us over time because of their constant presence. Absolutely intermix spontaneous Spirit-led prayers into your day, but building the trellis of repetitive prayer is the way to encourage more prayers to grow.

In general, our culture puts busy schedules at the center of life and then tries to fit meals in around them. This is different from putting the table at the center and prioritizing our schedules around that.

Of course we can’t live without eating, so we make a concession to stop and stuff something in our mouths, as if food is simply a fuel—which is to say that our bodies are simply machines. But we’re not machines, we’re human beings. A people who are made to eat. Regularly. And with others.

We are not just hungry bodies, nor machines that simply need fuel. We are hungry souls; we are people who crave the company and the delights of the table.

We were created to hunger because we were made to feast on God’s generosity.

Despite the fact that the modern world has obscured the way food comes to our table, every meal signifies an incomprehensibly vast web of dependence on our neighbors and their dependence on us.

Whether you’re eating plants or meat, every single bite signifies a moment when something died to give you life. We take that thing in, and it becomes our future 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.

This was profoundly formational. In a matter of weeks, we became remarkably close to these people, not because we spent so much time around them but because we came to the table rhythmically.

Meals have a way on bonding people! There is no agenda but conversation

Our schedules need to be bent around the common table. The daily habit of a meal with others forms us in that direction.

But this current actually pushes us toward our neighbor while the usual cultural currents push us to the fake meals on the go and all the health problems and loneliness that come with them.

Like most limits, we quickly realized it brought more freedom than restrictions.

But like all work on formational habits, the background norms are far more powerful than the exceptions. The pattern, not the anomaly, is the key.

because the table is where life happens. It’s where a household learns to love.

Regardless of whether you live in a house with family, with friends, or alone, your household is not just a place where you spend a lot of your time. It’s a place of formation.

The household is where we’re first introduced to what it means that the fundamental goal of life is to love each other. The table is the centerpiece of this formation.

Think through all the ways the values of love are communicated over food. We serve each other. We clean up after each other. We take turns. We share. We fight and forgive. We praise and compliment. We express gratitude. We tell stories and ask questions. We listen. We hear each other pray. If our household routine is too busy to allow meals that unfold with family members, roommates, or neighbors, we should at least admit that the school of our household is not actually a school of love but rather a school of busyness. That house is a place where we teach each other how to do too much and be stressed about it. Or if the kitchen is way too messy to produce food, and the table is way too cluttered to sit and eat at, it’s unsurprising that we end up being formed in loneliness, eating by the TV or the computer. The norms of our table signal the norms of our community.

Our priorities are communicated by the tables we eat at

What astounds me about being a parent is the amount of time my wife and I spend clearing laundry and kids’ stuff off the table, preparing food, serving food, cleaning up after food, and beginning again to prep food for the next day. It is totally endless.

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.” As trite as it sounded to me at the time, I never forgot that, because I couldn’t deny its truth. The table is similar. An endless cycle of chores is required to create a place for food and conversation, but that seat is where love is. What’s more worth our time? I now see this overwhelmingly repetitive and unending chore list of cooking and cleaning, wiping and sweeping, as a Christlike activity of creation and service.

This is the only way to view the endless tasks of the table as a calling, not as a waste of time better accomplished by a microwave or a drive-through.

Opening the household table on a regular basis creates an undercurrent of the Christian life that mimics the adoption ethic. The family is open, not closed. And there are few more precious gifts to give someone who is lonely than inviting them into the circle. This doesn’t happen automatically; but on the other hand, once you have the rhythm of the table, all it takes is an extra chair. When we combine habits of communal rhythms around the table with habits of maintaining open seats there, we come to one of the most sweet and powerful ways of living the outward life, a life inclined toward the love of our neighbor. Cultivating the rhythms of the table must not pull us away from the outsider. Fortunately, it does not have to. A redeemed table is one that invites outsiders in. Perhaps even more importantly, it invites them into a place worth joining.

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

the kind of atheism we experience in America today is not a conclusion but a mood.2 This is an incredibly important observation. 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.

Cultivating a life of transcendent habits means that our ordinary ways of living should stand out in our culture, dancing like candles on a dark mantle. As 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.”

Wow!

one of the main things our neighbors who don’t know Jesus need is simply to trust a Christian.6 That begins at the table—a table lovingly set with good conversation and an extra chair.

Food is meant to bind us to God, neighbor, and creation, but we live in a culture where our eating habits keep us apart and increase our isolation.

The central promise of salvation is that because of the death and resurrection of Jesus, God and people will eat again. The end of the world culminates not in clouds and harps but in a feast. At the wedding supper of the Lamb, the divine presence is restored to us over a table of food.

It is a reminder that because of Christ, we will commune with God again over food.

The more the table becomes our center of gravity, the more it draws our neighbors into gospel community.

Sometimes it’s easier to invite a new or lonely coworker to a standing group than a one-on-one.

While you may be in pain, consider trying to be a blessing to others by having a regular rhythm of eating somewhere without a phone or headphones—in a way that invites conversation.

With friends, I’ve always appreciated the One Conversation Rule. That means, at some point in the meal, everyone has a single conversation instead of lots of side conversations.

Another way is to eat in your front yard or on your front porch instead of your backyard or back porch.

I tell someone that I’m talking to them, but then I give my attention elsewhere. Perhaps I’ve lied to them about where my presence is, or perhaps I’m lying to myself about how many ways I split my presence and can still be present.

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.

It’s amazing because it allows us to communicate our presence across time and space, but it’s dangerous for the very same reason. It can fracture our presence ...

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.

The Israelites are known as God’s people because of one thing: They had God’s presence among them.

Jesus came to see to it that God and man could be together again.

Now, like the Israelites, a Christian is defined by “God with us,” and this is why we have the Holy Spirit. What’s more, our great hope is to consummate this presence. In the kingdom to come, God will look at us, and we will look back. In his gaze, we will find the definition of our own lives and indeed the definition of all things.

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. When we try to be present everywhere, we end up being present nowhere.