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

by Justin Whitmel Earley

Busyness functions like an addiction. When you stop, you have to face your thoughts, which terrifies most of us. So to cope you have to keep up the busyness. I started taking the sleeping pills and thus began the darkest phase I have ever known.

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. In the end, I started to believe my habits—mind, body, and soul.

I didn’t think these habits would matter much because I had no idea how much my ordinary habits were shaping my soul in the most extraordinary ways.

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.

But just because we don’t choose our habits doesn’t mean we don’t have them. On the contrary, it usually means someone else chose them for us, and usually that someone doesn’t have our best interests in mind.

This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that habits form much more than our schedules: they form our hearts.

Education is what you learn and know—things you are taught. Formation is what you practice and do—things that are caught.

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?

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 else do we explain a country of Christians who preach a radical gospel of Jesus while assimilating to the usual contours of American life?

There is a better way. It is the way of Jesus. Let us see that habits shape the heart. Let us stop fearing that limits are a threat to our freedom. Let us see that the right limitations are the way to the good life. Let us build a trellis for love to grow on. Let us craft a common rule of life for our time, one that will unite our heads and our habits, growing us into the lovers of God and neighbor we were created to be.

The Common Rule is made up of eight habits, four daily and four weekly. The daily habits are ■ kneeling prayer at morning, midday, and bedtime, ■ one meal with others, ■ one hour with phone off, and ■ Scripture before phone. The weekly habits are ■ one hour of conversation with a friend, ■ curate media to four hours, ■ fast from something for twenty-four hours, and ■ sabbath.

They encourage us to interrupt our busy schedules for the sake of rhythms of community. They encourage us to put down our devices and become more present with others. 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.”

Legalism is the belief that the world hangs on what I do and that God and people love me based on how I perform.

Because, of course, my phone is the portal through which the chaos of the world reaches my half-asleep heart through the pesky thing we call “notifications.” This inevitably begins my day with all that I need to do and all that I’ve failed to do.

Our phones—and their programmers—are happy to set our habits for us. They would love to speak the first words of the day, and they usually do. Our phones—and whatever has come through them—thus shape the first desires of the morning and order our first prayers 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.

Tov is the benediction God speaks over his creation, and if we miss that, we miss the fundamental truth that God is caught up in his love of matter and being and creation.

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. Work becomes about proving that we can accomplish something, that we are worth our salt, and that our voices are worth listening to—even if we have to bang the table or send a snarky told-you-so email. So we invert the purpose of work. Instead of working as a way to love and serve others, we turn work into a way to be loved and served by others. Instead of longing to hear the “Tov!” of God, we work for the “Tov!” of people.

If I’m working in a public place, I may just set my hands on my lap and turn them up. I need something physical to mark the moment for my slippery mind.

That’s a worrisome thought, and because of it, I want to tune everything out. And many of us do. A drink sounds nice; two sounds better. Sex sounds good; porn is easier. A conversation would help; but binging on TV will let me tune out. Catching up on reading would be restful; Twitter has some notifications that are probably more urgent. Lauren and I should spend some time talking; talking is hard, and there’s a podcast of a sermon that everyone said we should listen to. Oh, and an article is trending. There are more or less healthy ways to escape, but what I can’t escape is the desire to escape.

The business world calls it “decision fatigue.” 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.

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve said the same thing every night for a month or not. It’s just habit. You say your prayers until your prayers say you. That’s the goal.

We are twisted. But that doesn’t mean we don’t grow; it means we grow sideways in ways we weren’t meant to, often twisting into something that kills us and hurts those around us. 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. Building the trellis of habit is a way to acknowledge the good ways God designed us as well as the ways the fall has broken us. It is a way to craft Annie Dillard’s “net for catching days.”1 How else do we get our hands on time itself?

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.

When we try to be present everywhere, we end up being present nowhere. When we try to free ourselves from the limitations of our presence, we always become enslaved to absence. But when we embrace our reality of being able to be present only in one place, we find the deep joy of being present someplace.

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

The goal is to regularly cut off the ability to be reached by everyone and anyone, so that in those limits we can be fully present to someone.

Playing with children takes so much concentration and energy, and they always, always know when you’re multitasking. In fact, I’ve noticed that my son, Coulter, who is great at getting my attention by use of his supersonic squeal, doesn’t use said squeal when I’m looking at my phone. Instead he hits something, sometimes me. He never does that any other time. He can’t talk yet, but something in him already knows that my attention to a screen is different from my attention to a frying pan or a guitar, and he responds accordingly.

At my best, I want to be a reflection of their Father in heaven. When they look up and squeal, “Play with me!” I want them to find my gaze there, looking back down at them—not buried in a phone so they feel they need to earn or interrupt my attention by acting out. I want them to know they have it. So when I’m with them, I am actually with them. They have my gaze, which is to say they have my attention, which is to say they have my love.

There’s no love of neighbor outside of attention to neighbor. This is true on our cul-de-sacs and in our offices.

Blaise Pascal’s famous line in a box quote: “All of man’s problems stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

The tragic irony when it comes to our troubled emotional lives is that distraction functions both as one of the best quick fixes and as one of the roots of the problem.

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. Or if we do, we’re terrified of ourselves. Silence confronts us with that fact, so we will do anything to avoid it.

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. We hide our confusion behind a posture of perpetual offense. If we are opposed to someone or something, that’s enough to create our identity for the day,

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.

To be two places at a time is to be no place at all.

The smartphone is a tool that enables many things, but it will never multiply our presence.

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 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.

Let longer times of reading a book or commentary, or making an in-depth annotation of a passage, grow out of reading your Bible regularly (not get in the way of it). Remember, these habits build a trellis that amazing new things grow on. Short daily readings don’t undercut longer study, they build the foundation for it.

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.

Vulnerability and time turn people who have a relationship into people who have a friendship. That’s what friendship is: vulnerability across time. The practice of conversation is the basis of friendship because it’s in conversation that we become exposed to each other.

So often I’m tempted to think that life is not, after all, very high stakes. I’m tempted to believe the fiction that evil is more like a cat that I can bat away than a lion that is “crouching at the door,” waiting to pounce on us (see Genesis 4:7 and 1 Peter 5:8).

I see the world as a place where lions prowl, desperate to tear you apart. But inevitably the most vicious lion is within. He is born as a little secret that no one needs to know, and he grows into a monster that rips you apart from the inside out. This is the truth of the darkness within. But the darkness is never as strong as the light.

One of the darkest twists on friendship is our tendency to ruin it by making it exclusive.

Suddenly my choices in that bookstore became a profound act of deciding. The Latin root of the word decide—cise or cide—is to “cut off” or “kill.” The idea is that to choose anything means to kill off other options you might have otherwise chosen. That day I realized that by choosing one story, I would have to cut off other stories. I had to choose one thing at the expense of many, many other things.

We are characters in the most epic narrative of all time, and it is real. It is a story unfolding in actual time, and the stories we watch are all trying to explain to us what this real story is about. They help us figure out how to live in our own story.

Now, however, we don’t choose our stories nearly as much as they choose us. Should we do nothing, someone else’s stories will curate our lives for us. If we don’t cut off their options; they will cut off our options.