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

by Justin Whitmel Earley

We are guaranteed to be formed in consumption unless we ruthlessly pursue curation.

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. Limits are where freedom is found. We don’t need unlimited choices; that actually limits our ability to choose well. We need a limit on our choices, which actually empowers us to choose well. By limiting stories to a certain number of hours in a week, you introduce the ability to choose them well.

The English language affords words for this experience. We say things like “feast your eyes on this,” because we intuitively acknowledge we are hungry for beauty.

We need counter-formative habits of diversity to resist the slide into tribalism.

I believe a new problem of my generation is the way that (whether right or left leaning) 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.

For better or worse, we will become the stories we give our attention to. In a world of limitless streaming stories, we must set limits that force curation. The weekly habit of curating media helps us cultivate the ability to choose stories well.

We were made to feast. Not in order to become full, but because we are full. We are to celebrate that fullness by feasting. Feasting to fill the emptiness is not feasting; it is coping.

We eat to avoid our problems, and then we eat to deal with the problems that our overeating caused in the first place.

Fasting exposes all of this. It suddenly exposes the self because you can’t use food to dull your desires, numb your feelings, or make you feel satisfied or happy.

To live without fasting is to live without knowing who you truly are.

Like Adam and Eve in the garden, we are not content to be like God; we want to be God. The weekly habit of sabbath is to remind us that God is God and we are not.

We seem to have come to a point as a culture where we praise the acts of being inhuman as acts of being a great human. The consequences, of course, are dreadful.

But I’m very grateful for that failure because that’s when I learned that rest is a generous gift. It’s made for us, for our body and our soul. When I tried to live outside its limitations, my body and soul both suffered for it.

We have a spare day, so we need to “get our life together” or do all the things around the house we’ve been meaning to take care of. Stopping and taking a nap would be a sign of weakness or poor stewardship. Sometimes we honestly feel it’s immoral to rest.

It used to be that the upper class showed off their status by displaying their lives of leisure. Now we do it by conspicuously displaying lives of constant busyness. The more important you are, the more in demand your time is, so nobody who is anybody has time for enough sleep. And this, of course, is what we in our restless culture are after: an abiding sense that someone thinks we’re important.

Our souls need rest too. But the rest that our souls need is not simply a nap. It’s the rest that comes with realizing we don’t have anything to prove anymore. We don’t have to prove we’re important.

This is why we live in a culture that can’t accept sabbath; we do not believe that work is from God and for our neighbor. Instead we believe that work is from us and for us. It’s something we pursue to become who we want to become. Our careers define us. This is the American dream. We can work our way to significance. This is what we’re doing when we prove our busyness to ourselves and each other; we’re trying to show that we matter, that the world wants us, that the world depends on us

“It is finished” is the lullaby of all things, our restless hearts included.

One of the first things we learned was that proper sabbathing is much more about doing than not doing. It’s about doing restful things. Often our inclination to stop and veg out ended up being counterproductive.

Abraham Heschel, a rabbi who lived during the civil rights movement, put it like this: “A man who works with his mind should sabbath with his hands. A man who works with his hands should sabbath with his mind.”

Many, many people believe that being a Christian means trying to be a good person. The idea is that God supposedly likes “good” people. No one is perfect, but God at least forgives those who try hard enough. This is not true! Don’t believe a word of it. Even worse, it is the most burdensome lie ever told. Here’s the truth: we are messed up beyond belief, but loved beyond belief, and that is the one thing worthy of our belief.

If you’ve lived your life believing that you can earn your worth, that you can earn your salvation by outweighing the bad with the good, that you can justify your place in this world through the money you earn or status you achieve—come and rest! Come and sabbath with Jesus. Here there is peace that no amount of effort can buy: he came to you first. He lived the good life we are all trying to live. He did it all. He sacrificed everything. He always said the right thing. He always knew what to do and where to go. And where did it get him? It got him killed. People hated him. They stripped him naked and killed him. He lived the light of life we’re all trying to live, and he was answered with death. But it was all for love. It was all for you! He stayed up all night in the garden of Gethsemane so you could sleep. He finished his work on the cross so you could rest. He let the world break him so it doesn’t have to break you. He rose from the grave so all your aspirations won’t end in the grave.

If you’ve read any of this book thinking you can muster the good life out of a few daily and weekly practices, you’re reading it backward. Love has first come to us. Anything and everything else we do comes after. All ...

Place habits before love, and you will be full of legalism, but place love before habits, and you will be full of the gospel. God’s love for us really can change the way we live, but the way we live will never change God’s love for us.

Sabbath is a gospel practice because it reminds us that the world doesn’t hang on what we can accomplish, but rather on what God has accomplished for us.

Sabbath is the essence of our salvation. We can rest because God has done all that needs to be done.

But this remains stubbornly true: We will never build lives of love out of anything except ordinary days—simple, extraordinarily beautiful, but still ordinary days like those Robert Hayden celebrates in his famous ode to dutiful parenting, Those Winter Sundays.

A beautiful life inspires a beautiful life. Even when the imitation of Christ is a sorry echo of the real thing, it’s worth doing, because something worth doing is worth doing badly.