Finding the rhythm in healthy household habits

LOUISVILLE — Justin Whitmel Earley has served as a missionary and an attorney, but his current gig has proven even more satisfying.

Now he writes books, for both children and to help grownups develop habits that lead to good health — for themselves, their family and their community.

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Earley’s most recent book is “Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms,” and he’s got another book on the way. He was the guest recently of the Rev. Cliff Haddox and the Rev. Michelle Thomas-Bush on the “Around the Table” podcast. Listen to their 51-minute conversation here. Earley is introduced in the 14^th minute.

After a time as a missionary in China, Earley became a lawyer working at a firm that demanded around-the-clock work. “Even though professing my identity was in Jesus and my hope was in the Lord, I functionally was putting my hope and my identity into my work,” he told the hosts. It took him a “long while” to rebuild his life afterward, “but encountering, practicing and committing to creating a schedule for the spiritual disciplines was the way the Lord saw me out of that season.”

Earley learned that more than 4 in 10 of our everyday actions “are not conscious choices but default habits.” But “it’s clearly possible to choose otherwise, and this is the good news.” He suggested making invisible habits visible by naming them.

Haddox said there’d invariably be resistance in the first few weeks of trying to change a habit.

“Your brain takes a while to get used to things — usually four to six weeks,” Earley said. A powerful example in his own lawyering life was his habit of checking work email or social media posts first thing in the morning, “which was creating either anxiety or anger, depending on which I went to first.”

Nearly 9 in 10 Americans do the same thing the moment they roll out of bed, he said. “When we start our day with social media or news or our inbox or our daily schedule for our identity, those are terrible places, because they’ll never love us back the way God loves us,” Earley said. “As a habit, saying I will look at scripture before I look at my phone every morning was immensely powerful in my life.”

“I had to fight this internal narrative and the norm of saying, ‘I can figure this out at 8:30 when I get to the office.’ But it’s 6:30 now. That means I have two hours with my family. It can wait.”

Earley said he often thinks about Romans 12:1-2, Paul’s words about not being conformed but being transformed. “It’s important to note we’re being formed in either of those situations,” he said. “The idea is don’t passively become conformed to the patterns of the world, but rather be transformed. That takes effort, thinking and choosing.”

All this transformation occurred when Earley was the father of two young boys. He now has four, ages 13, 11, 8 and 6. “One thing I’ve realized after I started writing and talking about habits and spirituality is that parenting puts us on display perhaps more than any other realm,” he said. “Parenting is the realm of habit.” In those days, Earley was “the guy who barked my kids to bed each evening.” Starting a nighttime prayer rhythm with his children “helped me think about a different endpoint for the day.”

He and his children would exchange call-and-response prayers at bedtime. “Do you know I love you no matter what bad things you do? What good things you do?” His boys would tell him yes. “Who else loves you like that?” he’d ask them. “God does,” they’d respond. “It was a way for them to land the day on the love of God being unconditional for them and me.”

Our busy schedules

Earley called a busy schedule “the default American center of gravity.”

“We arrange the family around all the things we think we need to do,” he said, “but the fundamental thing we need to do in family is to learn to love. That’s the great call in life — to love God and love our neighbor. To make friends out of family is one of the close-to-center things, and the way you do that is to learn how to talk to each other, primarily by sharing meals.” Earley called coming to the table and sharing a meal “sacramental.”

When their children were small, Earley and his wife would invite a friend to dinner as often as they could. “Hospitality is inviting people into your actual life,” even if things around the house are a little messy, he said. “We wanted our kids to see us in relationship.”

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A good way to change a habit is to pick one friend to do one habit for one month, either together or on one’s own. “You need community to form new habits. This is well-researched,” he said. “It takes a month for a habit to sink down from the upper brain to the lower brain, from conscious effort to unconscious habit.”

After you practice for a few weeks, “it’ll be an amazing day and you won’t even realize it,” Earley said. “You’ll do it without realizing it.”

His next book, due out on Oct. 28, is “The Body Teaches the Soul: Ten Essential Habits to Form a Healthy and Holy Life.”

After eight years of researching and writing, “I have slowly realized I have been circling the body the whole time,” Earley told the hosts. “To talk about habit and spiritual formation is to talk about how your body is related to your formation.”

“Life — real spiritual life — is where the spirit and the body are intertwined inseparably,” Earley said, “and that’s how God made us to live.”