Justin Whitmel Earley > Quotes

“Habits form much more than our schedules: they form our hearts.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“This was the morning I realized that failure is not the enemy of formation; it is the liturgy of formation. How we deal with failure says volumes about who we really believe we are. Who we really believe God is. When we trip on failure, do we fall into ourselves? Or do we fall into grace?”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“when a habit is formed, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. The patterns we have unfold automatically.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“But the more I use social media, the more I realize that the great danger is not in simply overusing social media, it is in living through social media. The problem is not so much the way it wastes time, it is the way it frames time. Without limits, we begin to see our whole life through it. We see our whole day through a possible post. We look around, wondering what in our field of view is worth taking a picture of. We listen to every conversation for a tweetable quote, instead of trying to understand the human being who is talking. We avoid disagreement in public, yet we express our most ardent emotions in carefully crafted Facebook replies or all-caps tweets.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“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.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“The daily habit of one meal a day with others is a way of moving the table back to the center of who we are and ordering our day around the kind of people we were created to be: dependent and communal human beings.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“You can’t think yourself out of a pattern you didn’t think yourself into. You practiced yourself into it, so you have to practice your way out.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms

“By not choosing our habits carefully, we are falling back on rhythms that are forming us in all of the usual patterns of unceasing screentime, unending busyness, unrivaled consumerism, unrelenting loneliness, unmitigated addictions, and unparalleled distraction.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms

“All those who want to be attentive to who they are becoming must realize that formation begins with a framework of habits.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Most days, we wake up to our own monsters, desperately in need of a heavenly parent to remind us the truth about reality—that we are loved by a good God, and because of him, everything is going to be okay.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms

“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. But remember that the phone isn’t neutral. We can’t use it the right way without habits that protect us from the wrong way. When we do nothing, they tilt us toward absence. This is why we must cultivate habits that resist absence—because we were made for presence. Cultivating the daily habit of turning your phone off for an hour each day is the keystone habit that can change the way you think about your phone and spark new daily routines that usher in a life of presence.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“we become our habits, and our kids become us. Which means who our children are becoming is tightly connected to who we are becoming—personally and communally.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms

“I can’t recall most dinners, I forget too many books, and I don’t remember 90 percent of the sermons I’ve heard; and yet all have sustained my body and soul in ways I cannot even begin to fathom. I might not be able to recall the vast majority of my conversations with friends, but I know they have sustained my soul through the years.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, Made for People: Why We Drift into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship

“I’ve tried to be two places at once, and as a result, I was no place. This is the core struggle of the smartphone. 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 across time and space until nothing is left. Usually this happens simply by habit, like me talking via phone to my wife while doing two or three other things. We don’t mean to live lives of absence, but without meaningful habits of resistance, smartphones are impossible not to look at. If we do nothing, we’re sure to live a life of fractured presence. And that’s not much of a life at all, because presence is the essence of life itself.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Our hearts need to be led to good places if we are going to lead the hearts of our children to good places. This is the kind of work that only prayer can do because words- especially the words of prayer and Scripture- lead the heart. So prayer and self-talk need to be habits that happen in that moment that we approach the situation.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms

“Why is the freedom liturgy so dangerous? Because it perpetuates the slavery to all the other habits—ironically. My life was an ode of worship to omniscience, omnipresence, and limitlessness. No wonder my body rebelled. The freedom liturgy is dangerous for two reasons. First, it doesn’t actually produce freedom. We think that by rejecting any limits on our habits, we remain free to choose. Actually, by barraging ourselves with so many choices, we get so decision-fatigued that we’re unable to choose anything well. Since we’re too tired to make any good decisions, we’re extremely susceptible to letting other people—from manipulative bosses to invisible smartphone programmers—make our decisions for us. The dogged pursuit of this kind of freedom always collapses into slavery, which leads us to the second reason the freedom liturgy is dangerous.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“If we are made for friendship, then we will be missing something fundamental in our marriages and parenting if we try to do those without friends.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, Made for People: Why We Drift into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship

“Anger and fear have something in common: we become the center of things.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“To follow Jesus is not just to believe in his life; it is also to follow him into his lifestyle.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“I was standing amid floor-to-ceiling shelves of books in wonder and awe when my view of stories suddenly and forever changed. There were enormous piles of books lying in corners. Books covered the walls. Books even lined the staircases as you went up from one floor to the next. It was as if this used bookstore was not just a place for selling used books; it was like the infrastructure itself was made up of books. There were books to hold more books, stories built out of stories.

I was standing in Daedalus Books in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I had recently read Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book. I was alive with the desire to read. But at that particular moment, my glee turned to horror. For whatever reason, the truth of the numbers suddenly hit me. The year before, I had read about thirty books. For me, that was a new record. But then I started counting. I was in my early twenties, and with any luck I'd live at least fifty more years. At that rate, I'd have about 1,500 books in me, give or take.

There were more books than that on the single wall I was staring at.

That's when I had a realization of my mortality. My desire outpaced reality. I simply didn't have the life to read what I wanted to read.

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. I would have to choose carefully. I would have to curate my stories....

Curating stories used to be a matter of luxury. Now it's a matter of necessity—and perhaps even urgency.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“In other words: You can’t think yourself out of a pattern you didn’t think yourself into. You practiced yourself into it, so you have to practice your way out.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms

“The internet and smartphones are fantastic for connections, communication, and knowledge. But connections are not friends, communication is not intimacy, and knowledge is not wisdom.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, Made for People: Why We Drift into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship

“people have to be friends with the sinner version of you because that’s the real version of you.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, Made for People: Why We Drift into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship

“Scripture before phone Refusing to check the phone until after reading a passage of Scripture is a way of replacing the question “What do I need to do today?” with a better one, “Who am I and who am I becoming?” We have no stable identity outside of Jesus. Daily immersion in the Scriptures resists the anxiety of emails, the anger of news, and the envy of social media. Instead it forms us daily in our true identity as children of the King, dearly loved.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“A BEDTIME BLESSING OF GOSPEL LOVE

Said perhaps with a hand on your child’s face or head.

Parent: Do you see my eyes?
Child: Yes.
Parent: Can you see that I see your eyes?
Child: Yes.
Parent: Do you know that I love you?
Child: Yes.
Parent: Do you know that I love you no matter what bad things you do?
Child: Yes.
Parent: Do you know that I love you no matter what good things you do?
Child: Yes.
Parent: Who else loves you like that?
Child: God does.
Parent: Even more than me?
Child: Yes.
Parent: Rest in that love.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms

“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. The goal of a liturgy is for the participant to be formed in a certain way. 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 prayer to form the contours of their lives. Notice how similar the definition of liturgy is to the definition of habit. They’re both something repeated over and over, which forms you; the only difference is that a liturgy admits that it’s an act of worship. Calling habits liturgies may seem odd, but we need language to emphasize the non-neutrality of our day-to-day routines. Our habits often obscure what we’re really worshiping, but that doesn’t mean we’re not worshiping something. The question is, what are we worshiping?”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“the greatest spiritual work happens in the normal moments of domestic life.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms

“The fact that we’re made to eat says volumes about who we are and who God is. 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. Our need for food says something profound about us. It says we need God, we need others, and we need the created world.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“In the passing of dishes we practice delayed gratification. In complimenting the meal, we practice the power of spoken encouragement. In withholding criticisms, we practice the virtue of silence, we are reminded that lots of things we think aren’t worth saying. In roses and thorns and questions and pepper games, we practice telling stories, recalling memories, celebrating and sympathizing with each other.9 We practice forgiving when someone spills something (again!). And in waiting until we’re excused, we practice sticking around even when we don’t want to—the root of learning loyalty.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms

“My hour with my phone off starts shortly after I get home from work. This is one of the hardest times of the day because my children are ramped up for my attention, but I’m still trying to come down from the workday. My habit is to get changed, make one final email check to make sure things are in order at the office—and if not, to tell someone that I’ll get back to them later that night—and then to turn it off and put it in my dresser drawer. It’s a weird feeling, almost like hiding a valuable under a mattress. You walk away but your mind stays on it. You can visualize it sitting there in the dark. But whether the boys and I are riding bikes to the park, initiating a royal rumble on the living room floor, or setting the table together, my presence is fundamentally different that hour of the day. I am with them. Whatever we’re doing, it is together.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction