The Common Rule by Justin Whitmel Earley

Author:Justin Whitmel Earley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Habits;Technology and faith;Spiritual disciplines;Rule of life;Christian practices;busy;busyness;Friendship;technology;screen time;anxiety;depression;routine;common rule;spiritual practices;a rule of life for daily Christian living;Benedictine rule;crafting a rule of life;good habit;bad habit;breaking habits;break a habit;the power of habit;breaking the habit;weekly habit;daily habit;habits of the mind;habits of successful people;how to break bad habits;how to acquire a habit;changing habits
ISBN: 9780830873388
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2019-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

The Power of Time

The vulnerable friendships that embody the gospel don’t happen because we wish we had them; they happen because they’re cultivated over time. They grow because we arrange the trellis of habit that allows them to flourish.

Friendships are hard when you don’t actually have time together, which is why friendships are not just about vulnerability but also about time. While Lauren and lived in China as missionaries and then in Washington, DC, during my law school years, most of my friends were migrating back to Richmond. It’s an amazing city, but most of them were moving there not for the city but for each other.

When I started law school, Lauren and I imagined we would move to wherever the most prestigious job was. I figured it would be a move to New York or maybe back to Shanghai. But a nagging question kept coming back, especially as having our first two kids narrowed our free time immensely: Why live far away from your friends, unless there’s a really good reason to?

Put more generally, why do we arrange our geography and our schedules in a way that makes putting consistent time into friendships so hard? For me, the reason was career. I wanted the best job, but I began to wonder whether a life with the best job was worth a life without a best friend.

The Lord had called me to China and called me to law school; there was no doubt about either of those in my mind. They were good reasons to be away from my friends. But toward the end of law school, I didn’t hear God calling me anyplace instead. Absent that calling, Lauren and I began to consider moving for friends instead of for jobs. I felt a clear call to arrange my life for the sake of friendships, so we decided to commit to Richmond, where our friends were, and to try to find a job from there.

My second son was born the month we moved. Because I was experiencing a deep sense of the importance of friendship, we named him Asher Stephen Matthew Earley. Asher means “the happiness of God” or “the blessing of God,” and Steve and Matt are my two best friends. They are also the names of Lauren’s brother and a close family friend. We liked the way it blurs the lines of friends who feel like family and family who feel like friends. Asher was thus named as a praise and a prayer: a praise that we had found the happiness of God in friendship and a prayer that the same would be true for him.

I am deeply grateful that I live in a city where my friends live, but it’s far from perfect. Just ask them. We all have kids now, we are deep into careers, and we meet new friends and have new obligations, so the time that friendships require becomes exactly what is so hard to give. We often feel spread impossibly thin.

That’s why cultivating habits of devoting time to friendships is so important.

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