Episode 337: Helpful Habits for the New Year with Justin Whitmel Earley

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It's time to turn those what ifs into... With Shopify Today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash RBG. Go to Shopify.com slash RBG. That's Shopify.com slash RBG. Hey, friends. Welcome to the Raising Boys and Girls podcast. I'm Sissy Goff. And I'm David Thomas. And we're so glad you've joined us for this conversation. Let's dive in. Justin Whitmill Early is a lawyer, speaker and bestselling author whose work centers on the habits that form our spiritual, emotional and relational lives. His books, including the common rule and habits of the household have helped countless families build rhythms that lead to peace and connection in everyday life. Justin's newest book invites us even further into the transformative power of embodied practices. We are thrilled to welcome our friend Justin back to the Raising Boys and Girls podcast. And you all hang tight. This one is packed full of practical ideas that you could implement today. So, Justin, we are so excited about your new book. We love all that you put out into the world and are really excited about the body teaches the soul. And we would love to start by you just talking about the heart behind it and what led you to explore the connection between our physical habits and the formation of our souls. I would love to tell you because this is not only a long story, but a very personal story. So, for me, this book has really been brewing for almost a decade because it was a decade ago that I collapsed in my professional life. I was a missionary in China who became a lawyer at the age of 30. And having that missionary headspace made me feel like I was really called to lawyering. So I ran at it with all the fervor of a man on a call without really thinking about how the habits and practices of being a lawyer at a top tier firm and going through law school, the ways that I would be tethered to my phone and minimizing sleep, maximizing productivity, all the while, by the way, beginning a family, had two young boys at this time. I was running so hard, but I had such a good head, right? So I thought, and this is really important, David and Sissy, I thought that if you have the right worldview framework, that's going to trickle down to everything else. Get your head right and everything else, sort of a myopic top-down view of the world, which was working for me until it wasn't because my body collapsed into very serious panic attacks, anxiety, insomnia. These were words I did not know at the time. I just knew that I couldn't sleep. I was feeling constantly hyper-nervous in a way that I had never felt. I come to realize this is a significant problem in our modern world and particularly in law but I did not know what to do because I kept thinking I should just believe the gospel more. If I really believed what was true, then clearly I would feel it too. Two really important things happened to me in the season following. Like I said, this is a long story, so I'm going to give you the condensed version, but really this unfolded over years. The first thing that I realized was that your head can go one way, but if your habits go the other way, your heart tends to follow the habits. I realized this because right around this time of year, actually, right around the new year, I was about a year into my anxiety crash and I sat down with two of my closest friends. Their names are Matt and Steve. We've talked about them previously on a podcast because whenever I read made for people, they feature in that. These are really close friends who have walked with me for a long time. I asked Matt and Steve to keep me accountable to this new set of habits and rhythms, which were basically the spiritual disciplines by another name. I was trying to do things like scripture before phone, make sure I spent time in the word before I went to my email. I was trying to turn my phone off an hour every day, practice some sort of silence meditation. I was practicing fasting. A lot of things that I didn't think would matter actually because I didn't realize at the time smallest and most ordinary habits of your days and week really do impact your soul in the most extraordinary ways. So my life began to be totally reshaped by what I now know are the spiritual disciplines. I began writing about that. That was my first book called The Common Rule, which is sitting behind me here. Writing about how ordinary spiritual disciplines can be involved in your everyday life. But there was a sense where I was still focused on the spirituality of these disciplines. The reason these were helping me was because I was bringing prayer and scripture into my everyday routine. And to be sure, that was extraordinarily helpful. But I was a little confused about why these other things seem to be mattering so much, like getting a good night's sleep, like actually practicing a Sabbath, taking time off work. Fasting was clearly a very embodied discipline and honestly, exercise. I started a couple years into this, taking exercise seriously, and it quickly became a spiritual discipline for me. And so about a few years into this struggle, I realized embodied disciplines, pretending to sleep, to rest, to a reasonably healthy diet, and a reasonably consistent rhythm of exercise, were completely changing my relationship with God and with other people, as if, and I think here's the key, as if honoring my body in a certain way was helping me love God and love neighbor more. And that, as you might hear, was a totally different sort of bottom-up paradigm that I was not honestly spiritually comfortable with. Because I thought, that's life hack stuff. That's like biohacking. That's not biblical. And I was so wrong. I was so wrong. I had no idea the extent to which God made our bodies, calls them spiritual, holy, good, and cares about how we care about them. And so this book was born out of years of trying to learn what does it mean to honor God and my body in regular, ordinary life, and how does that impact my spiritual life? We're excited to unpack even more of that. Yes, we are. So let's start here. You often say we are formed by what we repeatedly do. Yes. How have you seen that play out specifically in the context of your family, and how have you observed that in other families? Yeah. Well, early on in this wrestling, I realized that it was habit that was driving a lot of my life. And this is very well researched. But as opposed to thinking you're formed by what you repeatedly say is true about yourself, which is true to some extent. There's a whole realm of invisible habit that we are always engaging in. I think actually a little of the neuroscience is helpful here. So listeners may or may not be familiar with this, but I think it's a helpful recap. Your upper brain is where you do all this wonderfully complex thinking. This is what makes us human. I often think of the rational brain as part of the glory that God has given us as human beings. The things that we can do in our upper brain are just amazing. But there's also this incredibly important part of us that is a lower brain, that this is the realm of habit. The beauty of habit is that you can go about an action like tying your shoes or walking with a child, taking all the right terms on the way home from work, driving in your car safely. And you can do these things on autopilot because the feature of habit is that you don't have to think about it. Your body is so smart. It absorbs these rhythms into the lower brain. And your upper brain can, you know, you can do everything that you are thinking about intentionally while these lower brain habits unfold automatically. And everybody from Aristotle to James Clear, a modern writer on habit, and in between, have been really insistent that virtue is the actions that we put on repeat. Who we are is a product of our repeated actions. And so I had a mistake in my thinking that, you know, who we are is really what we say we are. And that's where you get that head habit split. So I was, for example, I'll just take an example from Family Life. I wanted to be, and I would say in my head, a gentle patient and loving father. But when I walk in the door in the evening and my boys explode with energy on me because they're so excited to see me and knock things over or act out to get attention, which is, by the way, you know, this is what it looks like to be an actual parent in a real home. This is what kids are like. They're little kids. But I would snap at them, right? I would, you know, calm down. Like, why would you do that? You know, and I would, if you, I would hear myself say things that I did not want to say. And I realized that what was more true about me was that the fact that I wanted to be a gentle and patient father or the fact that I often continually, most stays most of the time, snap at my children in a gruff manner. And when I started to realize that it was habit driving most of my parenting, not my head knowledge about parenting, I started to think, my goodness, I need to reevaluate this paradigm. I need to think about habits of the household, which was, this was the second book, as you all know, that I worked on about five years ago when I started to think about things, for example, like pause prayers. Pause prayers were, for me, a way to fight habit with habit, because often I was trying to think my way out of a problem that I didn't think my way into. And I practiced my way into snapping and yelling at my children. So I never thought, like, I want to be the kind of guy that yells at my kids, right? So I needed to practice my way out. And so, for example, taking the wisdom of habit and saying, how would God like to work on my habits in the household? What if I committed to a practice of saying, I'm going to say a short prayer before I engage in a moment of discipline or correction, which really looks like, Lord help. I mean, it's not more than that. It's not more than just, sometimes I take the long walk around the room, actually, you know, whether it's like they're on the couch and I'm here, or whether they're upstairs. I think about my walking path as just a little circuitous. And I use that extra second or two to say, Lord, help me be full of your grace and your truth, because the child doesn't need authority. The child doesn't need truth. But he also needs a patient loving father. And it was that sort of habit intervention that has really reformed my actions in parenting. And I could give you examples in lawyering. I could give you examples of my devotional life and I could give you examples in my physical life. Because as it turns out, nobody says, I really want to be a healthy person. That'll get me there. No, you institute habits of eating and exercise and sleep. Right. And so I've noticed in so many places, this wisdom of you're formed by what you repeatedly do. And my great hope in my writings is to invite God into those habits and say, so, so Lord, how would you like to change my habits? Because by changing them, you're changing me. So good. Yes. So we're heading out on book tour, multiple cities over two weeks. And honestly, we should have asked Quints to sponsor the entire tour because I will absolutely be wearing my Quint short sleep cashmere polos at several stops. Yes, short sleep cashmere year round. I didn't know that was possible, but I'm here to share that good news with you. You are here to help folks out. Listen, when you find something that fits perfectly and feels elevated, you lean in. Quints uses premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton and European linen, but without the markup. And when we're spreading through airports, try and remember what city we're in next. I'm living in my Quint super soft performance t-shirts. I have them in multiple colors because they're that good. 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Well, and to to your great example, we know parenting is physically exhausting and very stretching spiritually at times. And so why do you feel like it's important, particularly for parents to understand that their bodies and souls are connected even in the chaos of raising kids? For me, it's because so much of my parenting comes out of how I'm doing in my body or at least a lot more than I thought. And the whole paradigm of body teaches the soul is, you know, it says it in the title. This is why we picked this title. It's the idea that you're learning a lot more spiritually through your body than you think. And as it turns out, it is hard to parent well when you are scrolling needlessly deep into the evening, wrecking your sleep and then trying to wake up and be patient with your kids. You know, needless to say it's hard to parent when you're hung over. It's hard to parent when you're coming down off a sugar binge. And it's hard to parent if you're not taking care of your body. And it's not because you need to be a paragon of health in order to be a good parent. It's just that you, I at least was needlessly punishing my body through overwork and under nurture. And then I was taking out the frustrations of that on my children. And I'll give you a quick example of how this is one of the earliest moments where I started to realize this. I, seven years ago, started my own law firm. And right around that time, like anybody does, I was like, okay, it's a new schedule. I should really start exercising. You know, I should really see if I can work in exercise to my new program. So I started going to this CrossFit gym, which it's a lot easier to want to exercise than it is to actually exercise. Like the former is really easy. Everybody wants to do it. The latter is quite hard. It hurts a lot. You get tired and sweaty. And I would stop mid-workout all the time and take a long water break or maybe a long bathroom break. Because in the CrossFit style workouts, the workouts are about, you know, somewhere 10 to 15 minutes. So if you take a long enough water break, you're kind of done. And it was, I would just like eject halfway through these workouts. Like, oh, I'm tired. I can't do anymore. And I remember this one day, this really did change my life. I was in the middle of this workout. We're picking up this bar, putting it above our head over and over and over. And I was like, oh my gosh, I've hit the wall. Like I'm exhausted. I'm going to go get some water. And my instructor stepped right in front of me. And he like, with a big smile on his face, he was like, hey, just pick it up one more time. And I was like, hey, man, I've hit the wall. I got it. And he just, just one more time. He says, okay, I did it one more time. And then I started to walk away again. He goes, just one more. And I look at him. I look at the clock. There's eight minutes left. And I was, he's not, he's not leaving. Like he's going to stand right here for the rest of the time. And at the end of the workout, I'm totally exhausted. And I remember laying on the floor and thinking, this is interesting. The wall was not the wall. I actually had a lot more to give after what I thought was the end of myself. And if the story ended there, it would be great for a poster on the wall of the gym. You know, the wall is not the wall push. Okay. But what happened the next morning was really, really interesting. I was helping my son with breakfast and I was putting some food on his high chair and he knocks his sippy cup off the table. And I'd been down to pick it up and all the soreness from that workout yesterday was coming in. I'm like, oh, groaning. I'm picking up the sippy cup. I put it back on the high chair and I turn around to go get something from the kitchen. And as toddlers do, he looks at it and just knocks it off the table again. And I turn around like livid, like, you know, as we parents do, as if he was out to get me, you know, as if his goal in life is to ruin my life. We do this to our toddlers, right? We do this to our children. We think, you're doing this on purpose, aren't you? And I was about to, frankly, like either yell or discipline a toddler who was just being a toddler when I heard in my head, pick it up. And I like turned around looking for my coach thinking like, who just said that? And it is the Holy Spirit prompting me, you know, just you've got the patience to pick it up. And I remember picking it up again, putting it on the high chair, smiling and winking at him. And this was a Holy Spirit moment for me because I suddenly realized that for years now, I had been parenting out of this paradigm that there is an end to my patience and my kindness. And if my child pushes me there, they're going to get the real me. They're going to get the mean me. And that moment in the gym where I realized I can do more than I thought I could do, suddenly opened up this spiritual mentality in the home where I realized that is what grace is. Like, how did I not apply this to my parenting? When I think I'm at the end of myself, the Lord is making a sanctifying call that, no, be patient one more time, pick it up one more time because he's training me to be loving, to realize that I can be patient. I can be kind even when I'm tired and frustrated and angry. And this was kind of a light bulb moment for the beginning of this book because I thought I've learned something through my body that is true in the spiritual world. And I don't think there's an end to this. I think if you get the theology right, God made our bodies on purpose. And everything about biology is a testament to theology. Everything about the world that exists is a testament to the God who made it. And that was the beginning for me of starting to think, I need to go through my body to learn how to follow Jesus and love my wife and kids and neighbors well. And as it turns out, it has so much to teach you and it's not that you need to get an incredible shape to be a good parent, but you do need to be attentive to your body because it is with your body that you are doing the great call of life, which is love God and love neighbor. And so if you want to love your kids, you need to figure out, how do I treat my body in order to do that well? So great. As you were even telling the story, Justin, I'm saying there's not a parent listening who doesn't know that moment like I knew exactly what was going to happen when you turned around. And you unpacking that as a way of thinking differently and to your wisdom living differently into a new way of thinking. And so I love that you shared that. Let's not just talk about how anger sneaks into parenting. Let's talk about shame too. So so many parents listening, I think Phil guilty about not doing enough. How would you say that embodied practices can free parents from shame rather than adding more pressure? Oh, I am so glad you asked this question because the body teaches the soul is not primarily a book on how to get healthy. There are chapters on sleep and exercise and eating. And I think this is really, really important. But the book begins with breathing and thinking. These are the first two chapters. Why breathing is so important to your spirituality and why your brain is so important to your spirituality. And the reason I got so excited about working on this project was because I realized that so much of my anxiety, so much of my shame, so much of my thought life were patterns that were unfolding by habit that I had not addressed by habit. So for example, the kitchen sink is a place of spiritual warfare for me. I don't know if this is true for other people. But when I, you know, maybe the kids are going to bed or they're in bed and I'm probably cleaning up around bedtime or right after. And I'm looking at the wreck of the house and how much we have to do. And, you know, to be clear, like Lauren and I both have sides of this story. She's off doing something and I'm doing this. And I think this is just universal to parents. I'm doing a task at the kitchen counter. And I'm going through these thoughts like no one helps me. Like I'm the only one that cares. No one listens to me. Like there's no end to this chaos and these tasks. No one loves me. And the things that I just said, no one loves me. No one helps me. You know, no one's going to intervene here. When you say those out loud, they're really bizarre things to say. I mean, they sound patently false, right? When you say I'm out loud. But when they go into my head, I listen to them. I nurture them. I sort of like roll them over like a stone in my mind because your brain has thought loops that you go over and the enemy is like suggesting, you know, does God really care? You know, think about Genesis 3. The enemy wants to be in your head suggesting little thoughts for you to roll over and over. And I did not realize how much of this is an embodied reality. To be clear, there's spiritual warfare actually going on here. Thoughts that are not mine that I don't want to nurture. But there's also the reality of the brain and how it works and how you think about things and how you choose to engage them or not. And one of my huge takeaways was realizing how much breath work and moving my body to move my mind were significant in the spiritual warfare or just the shame struggles that happened at the house. Like when I would think about, I can't do this or I'm not good enough or... And these would cause more anxiety than shame for me. I realized two things that were extraordinarily helpful was to learn how to breathe. So breath prayers have been a huge application for me, just existing in the house because they interrupt thought loops. When I think everything is falling apart and I say, I'm not going to entertain that thought. I'm actually... And here's the move your body to move your mind. I'm going to breathe a breath prayer. Like how about tracing the box, breathe in the Lord is my shepherd, hold for a few seconds, breathe out. I shall not want. Hold for a few seconds. I did not realize how much the capacity of breathing while praying... I did not realize the capacity it had to interrupt bad, shameful, anxious guilt thoughts and replace them with true thoughts and you're using breath work there to take the truth of the gospel and not just know it in your head but feel it in your body. And that would be one way to describe the whole thesis of this book. We're not trying to sideline truth. It's not that the soul doesn't teach the body to. We're trying to say there's also another direction. The body can teach the soul and practices like interrupting thought loops with breath prayers or just taking a walk around the living room or around the house and saying, I'm going to interrupt this thought loop by moving my body to move my mind. It is shame and anxiety, guilt, these things, they happen in our mind and we can either nurture them by just sitting in them or we can use our bodies to combat them. And I'm a big fan of saying, figure out a way to move your body to move your mind. It might be a breath prayer. It might be a walk. I recommend taking scripture with you in any of these cases because I like thinking about the integrated whole of it all. But it has been incredibly helpful to me to get out of those dangerous thought loops that I have that everybody has and get into scripture based true thought loops that heal your body and your soul. Yes. Well, we love that you write because we certainly agree with this that our children catch our habits more than they're taught them. And we would love to hear what embodied habits do you think are most formational for kids to watch in their parents? This is going to be very hard because I don't know if I have a first. I don't know if I have a short list. I really think so, so much is happening in our kids just watching us. I often tell people, you become your habits and your kids become you. So, you know, choose your habits carefully because they're the most important parts of your kids spiritual formation. So let me just, maybe I'll do like two or three really short ones. I don't think we compare children well unless we're parented by God. And a huge part of that is learning to be in the word. Now any parent told like figure out how to get up early and have a quiet time is kind of like heaping, you know, coals on somebody's head when they're already burning. It's like, I don't have time for this. But I would often think about, and I was just talking to a dad two days ago about this, you know, trying to see if you can do something like scripture before phone. Like you, you wake up and either just don't use your phone in the morning until you get out of the house and maybe you have a little quiet time. If you're like me and you're moving to an office or you just, you know, get up five minutes early and spend a moment in the word. I, the next thing that people say is like, well, my kids are always waking up and interrupting me. And right there, I think is a beautiful thing because when my kids come down and I have a Bible and a journal open, it doesn't really matter how much I accomplished. One of the things that I accomplished was that they see a dad who is seeking the Lord. They just see it and it's not performative. I'm not saying, you know, sit there so your kids can walk down, but I'm saying your kids being able to see that you walk with Jesus. That is an incredible habit because your kids are catching onto that. It becomes normal to think, okay, this is what a man does. I guess a man searches what, you know, searches out what God wants. I think about responding gently to my wife. This is a, this is one of the primary ways they're going to understand how a husband and wife interact. And one of the primary ways they're going to understand how to treat a woman is watching me talk to my wife. That is almost entirely caught. I can tell them all I want, but you need to respect, you know, women, you need to speak nicely to them. You need to blah, blah, blah. I could say a lot of things and I will, but they're mostly going to think about how, what were my reactions like to Lauren in the car when we're taking wrong turns or when we're late for church? And one of the things that Lauren does so well and her habit is rubbed off on me is she's really great about apologizing to anybody in the family when she has lost her temper or said something that she ought not have. And that's the boys. That's me. And I've realized, oh, this is a wonderful thing for me to imitate the habit of saying, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have spoken to you like that. Particularly if I do it in front of the kids, if I lose my temper saying, you know what, I lost my temper in front of them. So I need to apologize in front of them. And then last one, I could talk about exercise and eating here because we talk a lot in our family about, hey, look, if you eat that, you're going to feel like that. And we want to be careful about what we put in our bodies because we want to be careful about how our bodies act. So, you know, we enjoy sweets and great foods, it's probably as much as any family, but we kind of think hard about like how to make them more special occasions rather than saying, rather than assuming we could eat all the sugar and salt and processed foods we want and still be healthy people in our minds. I actually think a lot, we talk a lot about this to the kids. And they're kids, you know, they're only slowly, slowly catching on. But I watched them think about, like I watched my son, Asher, I thought about this the other night. He was like, do I want a second cup of eggnog? We were celebrating, like we're doing a little advent activity, enjoying eggnog at the holidays. And he was like, I think I'm going to feel bad if I have a second cup. And I was like, that's a great way to think. We can enjoy more of this tomorrow. And showing them moderation at an early age, because this is the struggle of so many of our adult lives, like how do I control what I eat and drink? I love that we, you know, we talk about that as a family. And there's still kids that enjoy lots of little treats all the time. But I think the habit of talking about how we treat our bodies is a spiritual thing. And so we eat differently because of that. That's rubbing off on them young. So there's a couple ideas for you. That's great. With Mother's Day coming up, we have both been thinking a lot about our moms. We both lost them in recent years. And there are days we miss their voices more than we know how to say. There is something about hearing a laugh, a phrase they used to say, even just seeing the way they moved in a home video. Those details matter. And so many of those memories are still sitting in boxes somewhere. Old VHS tapes, camcorder tapes, photo albums, fading with time. That's where Legacy Box comes in. Legacy Box is the simplest and safest way to preserve your old home movies, photos and audio. 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Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at bowlingbranch.com. That's bowl and branch. Okay, can we talk for a minute about technology? Oh yeah. So many families, you can imagine talk with us about anxiety, distraction, disconnection and that being tied to technology and attention. So what embodied counter habits would you say families could adopt? Really like how you put that. Chapter 7, I believe, and the Body of the Soul is all about technology. And it felt a little weird at first because you look at the chapter lineup and it's breathing, thinking, eating, sleeping, exercise, sickness, all these clearly embodied things. And then you get to technology. It's like, well, what is embodied about this? And the ironic answer is that, well, it's so disembodied. It's so disembodied that you need to think really hard about it because everything about technology wants you to sort of quiet or ignore your body and just be attentive to what's on the other side of the screen. And as I thought through, what does embodiment have to do with technology? And I think there was sort of only everything because how we engage with technology is completely a matter of our posture, our eyes, our attention, our heart rate. There's so much going on with it. And so the solution to using technology healthily is not just, again, a mindset shift. I see it as a sweeping paradigm of different embodied habits with the phone. I detail a lot of these out in the book and also reference a resource that Lauren and I have been working on called the Hang 10 movement, which has lots of suggestions for families who want to choose different technology habits. So if you're listening to this and you want more, just go to thehang10movement.com and you can find 10 suggestions for how families should develop practices for technology. But I'll just give you two or three here. One of the things that we realized that was very embodied and very helpful in our house was to have a home for our phones. So right when we walk in the door, we have an RO box next to our door. I think you all know Joey and Heath from Reclaim Well. They're wonderful and they have an app that goes along with this to help you practice a new habit of being off your phone. But having what psychologists would call a nudge. There's a nudge there to say, oh, here's a tangible object. When I walk in my door, this is a place for my phone. It means it moves out of the pocket into the box. Now, there's plenty of times we use our phone around the house and in the evening, but because we tend to take our bodies there, use it and try to leave it there. We're living in a different embodied life in our home because it's not with us all the time. A corollary habit of that, so second idea here is to set up no zones in the house. So this is our name for them, but the dinner table would be a no zone, for example. That's a zone where we say, oh, this is like, you could imagine like a red line drawn around it. We don't bring technology here because we want an embodied space that's like, when we go here, we're just talking. We're just eating like dinner time is conversation time. A typical car ride is also that for us on long car rides. We do movies or games, but a typical car ride, this started young. If they were like, can I play with your phone in the car? It was like, no, we're all going to do something together. We're either going to talk or we're going to read or we're going to look out the window. We're going to practice the art of being bored. And different families might choose different no zones, but I think the idea of having a nudge where you put your phone away and then some no zones where you say they're never here. You start to set up norms where you say, okay, then where do we use phones? And the idea is, well, less and less. I mean, because you're at home, you want to be with each other. One more that I found is incredibly important. And this is a version of no zones. As we've said, technology is for public places in the house. So specifically a phone in a child's bedroom or a screen in a child's bedroom is a very big no zone. And in fact, even right now when our kids are just learning technology, as in they're allowed to use the iPad sometimes or they're allowed to use our home iPhone. One of our rules, even with our eighth grader, Whit, who is, you know, he's allowed to use the phone widely now for things like looking at YouTube videos to practice guitar or he has some shows he's allowed to watch. He does a lot of music. He loves music. It's great. But I'll remind him often, but less and less, hey, when you're using that, you need to be sitting at a posture where I can see it. So no corner of the room where I would have to say, hey, what are you doing? I tell him his, that screen needs to be facing the center of the room so that when I walk by, I can see what's on it. And you know, it's a little, it's a little like much right now. You know, he's not going to grow up so that always has to be true. But right now I'm trying to train my sons in something very, very important that when you are on a screen, you are not alone. So many problems, particularly for men and young boys come from this habit of thinking I'm alone here. This is a privacy window. Nobody knows what I'm doing here. And when you live in that, you are living in a world of darkness and danger, body and soul. This will tear you apart. And so not only are we going to have filters on our home internet and, you know, I can look at all of our phones history, but we don't have hidden places. But we also try to embody it and say that, that reality of technology that, hey, I'm going to be with you here, not watching like a big brother, but with you like a dad. I'm not going to send you onto the internet alone. I wouldn't send you out into the desert alone. I'm going to come with you. I'm not going to send you into a fight alone. I'm going to be with you. So nor will I send you to the internet alone. So but that's an embodied thing. It's about what places in the house can we take technology? What systems are we going to set up to watch over it? And that is not just protection, though it is, you know, we need to protect our kids from this world. It's also apprenticeship. It's teaching them this is how to live because you know what? Your dad, he's not alone either. My wife knows the passcode in my phone. So does my, you know, my, my assistant and Lauren have access to all my social media, you know, they can see what I'm doing. And I want to live like that. So I'm trying to teach them in an embodied way, be in community when you're online and on screen. So there's a box, right? Box for the door, no zones and some real embodied habits of being public on technology or three of the things that we found have been really helpful for our kids in our house. Just that's so good. You've given so many helpful and hopeful and practical reminders. And I'm wondering for the parent who feels like, oh, I'm not doing any of these things. I'm so behind. I don't know how to start a new habit. I don't know how to start a new practice. What kind of encouragement would you give them? What feels like a realistic place for them to begin? Well, first I would just give the really, really important theological encouragement that habits won't change God's love for you. The whole idea here is that God's love for us should change our habits. So none of what you're doing or not doing should be a reason for you to feel shame. That grace is the opposite. It's the, if you feel like, oh, I'm not doing this, that is the result of that. The enemy wants you to take that into shame. God wants you to take that as a small voice saying, I'm inviting you to live otherwise. Realizing that your life is not perfect yet is either an invitation to guilt if you follow the enemy's path or an invitation to movement and change if you follow the lawyer's path and say, well, what would he have me do here? And we are worried that his path is going to be heavy, but his burden is light. And what I would say to people is most of us think, oh, I can't do this stuff. Like I don't have time. And I want to say what Jesus' yoke is easy and his burden is light because what I'm talking about is doing less, not more. I'm talking about when we talk about like sleep and Sabbath. That means saying no to more scrolling and no more work. And those are your burdens. So like those are the things that I'm saying. Jesus' burden is light. So theologically, I just say this is an invitation into lightness, not into the million things you have to do. Practically speaking, I would suggest what I call the one, one, one rule, which is try one habit with one person for one month. Most habit changes incremental and small. That's probably the defining feature of habit. But the thing that people usually don't know is that it almost always takes another person to do it with. It is very, very difficult to change anything about your habit life alone. And the best habit research we have for the hardest habits that there are to change is probably in AA. And we know in Alcoholics Anonymous that one of the defining features of life change is walking through change with other people. And so this can be really simple. Ready? Here's a recipe for it. You send this podcast right now to another friend and you say, hey, listen to this. I want to try one of these ideas with you for the next month. Are you a game? That's a great idea. And you pick one together. Maybe you say, I want to try scripture before phone. Or maybe you say, maybe, you know, you're hearing this around the new year and you think, I really do think like I'd be a better parent if I started exercising two or three times a week. Like would you keep me accountable that you want to do that together? Almost everybody's like, yeah, I kind of want to do that too. And when you pick one habit with one friend for one month, you've got a really good shot at learning something. I've tried so many habits that just fall off and I drop because that's okay. I didn't need it with that one or it didn't work out. But when you experiment with people and you try things not just for a day, but for, you know, four to six weeks, that's about the time it takes for the upper brain to shift to the lower brain for something new to become a habit. You internalize it and you realize, oh, this is my new routine. I do scripture before phone now. You just, you go to it in the morning. And then it takes zero extra mental energy to add a second. And so just as we can all get into the downward spiral, most of us are familiar with that. There is also an upward spiral of virtue where you're just the world calls it habit stacking where you're adding one more thing now because it takes zero extra mental energy because your last one is already, you know, become habit. And I will say I'm a huge fan of devotionals and like habit planners that help you practice because most people don't know where to start. And one of the things that I'm really excited about with this book is that we've done a video Bible study guide that also includes a 40 day devotional and it is coming out, I think the last day of 2025. So if you're in 2026 hearing this, then it is ready for you. If you're hearing it early, then you can go pre-order it. But it's a six week Bible study guide that walks you through the habits and it's got videos with the each week's Bible study. But there's a daily devotional every day in the morning and it would take five minutes or less. But it's going to give you an idea of like, let's practice this habit this week. And again, now let's practice this habit the next week and you're doing it with a friend. There's like accountability questions to ask. And we spent a lot of time thinking, how would people actually practically practice this stuff? Like how does it work out in real life? And so this is like a template. So if anybody wants to check out The Body Teaches of the Soul, just look for the study guide on Amazon or wherever you get your books. It's there and you can watch the videos online and do the devotionals with a friend. So that's a really great practice. If you want something to help you start, go check that out. Awesome. We're going to put a link to that in the show notes to help folks. Yes. And we'll wait easily to it. Justin, you're reminding us again while we love and trust your voice, how much we enjoy being in your company. Absolutely. We're going to get it on record though right now. This last time we're going to talk online. Okay? We're going to make it a hard rule because we enjoy you so much. You just always have to be a Nashville when you're going forward. I agree. And I was thinking, I really want to be in that room. I love that room. I've been in that room. I want to pet that dog and I want to get a taco afterwards. Yes. Let's put that on the calendar for sure. All of the above. Great. Well, I love that. It's so good to see you. It is so good. Thanks, y'all. Y'all are the best. David, what a team we have that we get to call friends who help make this podcast possible. Chris Sterrett, our engineer. Our management team at KCH. And we are thrilled to be a part of the That Sounds Fun Network. Our music was created by the insanely talented Dave Haywood of Lady A. 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