365 | The Call to Friendship, Daily Rituals for Dads, and 10 Technology Practices (Justin Whitmel Earley: Part 2)
Episode Description
In the second half of this conversation, Justin Whitmel Earley shares the rest of his core daily habits, including prayer, time with friends, and date nights with his wife. Plus, he introduces the Hang Ten Movement. As technology continues to impact spiritual discipleship, these 10 simple practices can help you raise your kids to use technology for good.
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Justin Whitmel Earley is a lawyer, author, and speaker from Richmond, Virginia. His books include The Common Rule, Habits of the Household, Made for People, and more. Justin is married to Lauren and has four sons: Whit, Asher, Coulter, and Shep.
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· Good luck doing anything important in life alone.
· Your habits will not change God’s love for you, but God’s love for you should change your habits.
· The most important factor in your discipleship to Jesus right now is likely how you use technology.
· There are 10 simple technology practices you should implement in your home.
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· Send a Voice Message to DadAwesome
· Apply to join the next DadAwesome Accelerator Cohort: Email awesome@dadawesome.org
· Subscribe to DadAwesome Messages: Text the word “Dad” to (651) 370-8618
· The Common Rule by Justin Whitmel Earley
· Habits of the Household by Justin Whitmel Earley
· Made for People by Justin Whitmel Earley
· Subscribe to Justin’s Newsletter
· 253 | Reframing Your Parenting with New Habits (Justin Earley)
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Podcast Intro: [00:00:01] Being a great father takes a massive amount of courage. Instead of being an amazing leader and a decent dad, I want to be an amazing dad and a decent leader. The oldest dad in the world gave me this assignment which means you must be ready for it. As a dad, I get on my knees and I fight for my kids. Let us be those dads who stop the generational pass down of trauma. I want encounters with God where He teaches me what to do with my kids. I know I'm going to be an awesome dad because I'm gonna give it my all.
Justin Whitmel Earley: [00:00:39] It's not a lot for you to do it. For you to do all these, but it wouldn't materially impact your time. You have that time, it's just going other places. Because a lot of what you bring to parenting and your marriage is you. It's your body and how it feels. It's your body and whether you're praying, it's your mind and whether you're reading, it's your life and whether you're accountable to friends or not. This is about making sure that you're a disciple of Jesus so that you can then disciple your wife and children.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:01:05] Welcome back to DadAwesome. Guys, my name is Jeff Zaugg, and today we have Justin Whitmel Earley joining for part two, the second half of my conversation. Today's episode is episode 365. If you missed last week, jump back 22 minute episode, short and sweet and power packed. So get back, listen to episode 364 first, and then hop into today's episode. Quick two invitations for you guys. One is to get on our DadAwesome text list. I want to be sending you guys helpful DadAwesome wisdom right to your cell phones. Here's how you join that text list and you can unsubscribe, if it's not helpful. It's free and it's the prayer is that it' helpful for you guys. Taking nuggets of wisdom from the podcast and delivering them to a quick, you can read it in 10 seconds versus, you know, this is an investment giving 20,20-40 minutes of your time to listen to a podcast. The text message is like the lowest bar, just easy, ongoing encouragement to be DadAwesome. Simply text 651-370-8618. So send a message to this number 651-370-8618, just text the word dad and you will be subscribed. You're good to go. And that number is also in the, in the show notes. The second quick invitation is the DadAwesome Accelerator. We're almost, we're almost to the point of closing applications. So end of January, we're going to close the applications and would love to invite you guys to prayerfully apply to be a part of the DadAwesome Accelerator Cohort. Again, applications close end of January to learn all about the experience, it's a six week, like super condensed, everything we've learned in seven years of DadAwesome, delivered in six weeks through a weekly Zoom call and then practical homework. We've just seen so much positive, encouraging feedback from the DadAwesome Accelerator. I want to invite you guys, to learn more just email awesome@dadawesome.org. So send a quick email, it's going to auto response, send you kind of the whole framework and the expectations and the application link, email awesome@dadawesome.org to learn more. All right, let's jump right back in. Here's the second half of my conversation with Justin Whitmel Earley jumping right into him, sharing these core habits.
Justin Whitmel Earley: [00:03:37] Having number three I just, it's been incredibly meaningful for me to pray at punctuated times in the day. So, morning, noon and night. They're normally kneeling prayers beside my bed in the morning, beside my bed at night and then finding some moment in the middle of the day. Right now, it's actually, ironically before I go to the gym, just because it's a, it's a way to mark the moment of turning my hands up at my desk or wherever I am, sometimes in the car, and saying a prayer. And I'll leave that at that. But, you know, all of us think that we should pray more. Very few of us make it a habit such that we are praying throughout the day. And I'm a big fan of short prayers that are kind of without ceasing through the day and morning, noon and night, is a great way to do that. Number four, spend times with friends once a week. And I talk about this actually in all my books. My most recent book Made For People, it was just on friendship because I believe it is so physically and spiritually essential. And the first thing that go often when we get busy with our parenting years is friendship. But it's really the first thing we need to be good fathers, good husbands, good workers. I mean Christ, if you look at the story of friendship in the Bible, we're not created to experience God alone. We're created to experience Him alongside of others. I mean, the Genesis through Revelation, it's clear that when we're called to follow Jesus we're called to do it in community. So there's really not an option to relate to God alone. So I say this kind of sarcastically, but it's sort of like good luck doing anything important in life alone, right. I mean, it's a tragic endeavor. You can't parent well alone, you can't be a good husband alone. And again, taking vast concepts like the spirituality and importance of friendships and placing them in habits is, I think, the brilliant way, the good life in hanging out with friends once a week. It might be that morning coffee on Saturdays. It might be that kind of accountability. It might be a small group. For my best friend, Steve and Matt and I, we just hang out every other Tuesday night with each other. And usually, you know, the weeks in between, we're doing something with other people. So cling to that and then cling to a date night with your life, with your wife, that's number five. Do something, like this doesn't have to be complicated, but Lauren and I set aside every Wednesday night, and we know that we're, you know, if we're not going out to dinner and that's rare, we might just have a glass of wine together in the living room. We might watch a movie together. Last week, it was just let's sit on the back porch and talk about the things we've been meaning to talk about. So it's kind of like a working date night. And it was like talking about the kids parent teacher conferences that we divided and conquered and had. And she was filling me in on the ones that I missed. And but she feels so seen by that. She feels like there's a place for her to be updated. I'm also, you know, craving time with her. So those things, just to recap, read every day, exercise most days, see friends once a week, date your wife and pray regularly. You know, I'll probably just talk for ten minutes, I don't know what it is, it might sound like a lot, but these are so, almost invisible like in the routine once you start them. They're actually easy to work in your life, and they're not a lot, I guess, is what I'm saying. It's not a lot for you to do it. For you to do all these, it wouldn't materially impact your time. You have that time, it's just going other places. So, think about it because a lot of what you bring to parenting and your marriage is you, you know, it's your body and how it feels. It's your bod. And whether you're praying, it's your mind and whether you're reading, it's your life and whether you're accountable to friends or not. A lot of this is you. So this is about making sure that you're a disciple of Jesus so that you can then disciple your wife and children.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:07:30] And just to like reflect back on this is not intent. It's not I intend to do these five things, but the way you explained them, you actually are like you anchored, hey, before phone, it's this. We're going to use our phone at some point in the day, so like you've given it an anchor slot, exercise you mentioned it must be midday, you must take and put it on your calendar for midday. If your, if it's, if midday prayer is right before it. And then praying before bed, you're going to sleep at night. So, you've given yourself an anchor of right away and right the end of the day. Seeing friends, you actually told us, when every other Tuesday, I think is what you mentioned. And then the date night, you told us the when around that night.
Justin Whitmel Earley: [00:08:08] Wednesay night. Yeah.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:08:09] Yeah. Just, you didn't need to share those details, but by sharing them it's shows, it's how you're thinking about these five habits. You're thinking about them with tactical place within your 168 hours of the week. Am I right?
Justin Whitmel Earley: [00:08:22] That's very right. I didn't even think about that as I was talking. But you're very right. And I think for anybody who reads my writings, you know, I talk about the wisdom of habit all the time because I stumbled into it. This was not a thing for me until about ten years ago. But I realized for most of my life I lived with the idea of American freedom. It's sort of my North Star, and that is that I want to be free to do whatever I want in any given moment, that is the good life. You know, the freedom to choose. I subsequently realized that was actually a degrading form of slavery because we are not able to make meaningful choices every moment of our life. And actually what ends up happening is because of our decision fatigue and our confusion and by the way, our wayward desires. I mean, when we are free to choose in any given moment, the heart, which is deceitful above all else, is guiding our choices towards, you know, sloth and gluttony and lust and anger and for all that, you know. There's, there's good wisdom in those seven deadly sins. That's what we tend to do without something prodding us otherwise. And a lot of the wisdom of habit like this is to say, you don't need to be free to choose in the morning. No, you, don't go to your phone until after you've read some scripture, because then whether or not you're too tired to choose the right thing, you just start automatically doing the thing that is good for you. And that's where we start to see, that's how you grow as a person. We call that sanctification. And if we break down the theology of this, I mean, this is, this is really habit wisdom apply to sanctification to discipleship. And that is also really important because Dallas Willard put it like this, the gospel is opposed to earning, not effort. So the idea that we would put effort in and say, this is the good life, I want to walk this way. Just like with exercise or eating or working, anything important is going to require some trying and some work. And that's not bad at all. But where this is sanctification and not justification is that we're justified in the Christian life by faith alone. We're saved by grace through faith. There's no question that nothing we can do can contribute to the fact that God loves us and He's reached out and redeemed us. It's just that, what, in light of that, there's all these things that we ought to do and should do. And this is why the second half of all of Paul's letters are about like, you know, in light of the mercies of God's, stop lying, stop cheating, stop sleeping with prostitutesl, stop stealing and do all these things. And that's okay to say, because this is what, this is the cooperation with Christ to try to be, it's out of His love. It's sort of like, you know, we're the children and He's the parent and He wants us to learn to walk on our own. So I think it's really important to remember habits like this aren't going to change God's love for you, that's really clear. But God's love for us should change our habits. And for us to cooperate in our sanctification is not only honoring and glorifying to Him and the right response to His great mercy and love for us. It's also the best thing for our lives. I mean, it's, it's the way to live the good life. This is why David in the Psalms talked about I love Your law, because he saw it as a path to the good life. And so American freedom will lead you astray, in that sense. Being a slave to Christ is, you know, Paul puts it in Romans is actually the most freeing thing you'll ever do because you start to anchor your daily routines into discipleship to Him and you realize now I'm who I meant to be. I'm serving a Master who loves me back and His name is Jesus.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:11:53] Wow. Yes. It's so good that you kind of gave that set up, though, because it's not, yeah, we're not trying to earn. I sat with my three and a half year old yesterday. By sitting, I wasn't sitting, she was sitting looking at my phone, which was laying in the grass while I was doing pushups and being guided by an app that had a little circle timer so she could tell that it was, I hadn't finished my reps until I could take a break. And she's like, Dad, the guy is still doing his pushups and you're laying down on your chest and she's like coaching me. But the reason I bring it up, I want to move into your book Made For People and this great multiplier of relationships. And, and I just think my default without the app and without my daughter keeping me accountable and that moment she's just cheering and saying, you can't stop. He's still doing his, you've got to keep going. The, the default is I'll work out half as long if I don't have some form of accountability. And in the area of friendships, it feels like because of either decisions I've made or things in my past or failed attempts at developing friendships that there's a gravitational pull towards, it's good enough. It's good enough, I don't need to have these closer friendships. It's good enough. It's too painful to go there. And what I'd love to hear is, Justin, for you just to challenge me and challenge back why this is the great multiplier and the great legacy like without close friends, without developing those friendships, none of our other goals reach their full potential. Could you take us into why you wrote the book and kind of parallel it to that story about like, Hey, we want to stick with not stop short in this area?
Justin Whitmel Earley: [00:13:32] Yeah, well, I mean, there's common sense wisdom to this. I mean, everything in the world is better with friends, we recognize that. We tend to not be able to accomplish anything we set out to accomplish without friends. And that's psychology and habit wisdom. I mean, anything from AA to just New Year's resolution wisdom would suggest you need other people in your life. So this is like very well statistically demonstrated that it's hard to accomplish hard things without friends. And like you say, you know, whether you're running a marathon or just doing push ups in the backyard, we tend to not push ourselves until somebody is watching and then we entirely change when somebody is watching. There's actually fascinating studies on this, too, about how much, you know, eating habits or how you talk or how you perform just changes when you're aware that somebody is watching. And that's all suggests that we don't really have the integrity we think we have with ourselves. We struggle, you know, we need other people. So there's a common sense practicality there, but there's also a really, really important spirituality there. I mean, for the Christian, I think we need to reckon seriously with Genesis 2, where Adam is in the garden, alone with God, and God calls this not good. Which is just an astounding theological statement on what it means to be alone. That is, that you can be alone with God in the Garden of Eden, and God will say, This is not good. You're in the presence of God. There is no sin. It's the Garden of Eden. Everything is otherwise perfect, but it's actually incomplete, and thus not good because you're alone. Which means that we're not meant to experience God alone. Which means that we can't. So we can't enjoy the world or Him as we were made to enjoy these things without other people beside us. And this is the magic moment of Eve. So this is certainly an ode to marriage, by the way, but it's also a, and this is not my theology. You can read lots of other, whether it's Hebrew scholars on this or Christian theologians on this, everyone regards this moment in Genesis as a comment on the communal nature of life and that we were meant to be with God and enjoy the world He gave us in community. And that right there is enough. I mean, we could talk more, but it's enough just to say your spiritual DNA, including your physical DNA, actually, because we'd die without friendships, the Western worlds epidemic of loneliness is showing that. But your spiritual DNA is such that you were made for other people, that, that's how God made you. And so I think we need to take that really seriously. And to the extent that it's hard, just a brief comment on that, of course it's hard. Anything worth doing is hard. And of course, you get hurt by friendships. But we, you can ask as many questions as you want about this, Jeff, but I'll just close on this idea of, you know, Jesus, in John 15, you know, gave this ode to friendship right before He died. Right before He died, He said, you know, I don't call you servants, I call you friends. And by the way, He was talking to the people who are about to betray Him that night. So Jesus is intimately familiar with the idea that friendship hurts. It's just that it's the shape of the gospel. You know, our friends are people who know us fully, through and through and love us anyway. And that's what Jesus does for us. He knows us fully through and through and loves us anyway. So this idea of we have some people in our life to whom we are fully disclosed, despite the cost, despite the fact that they may betray us, despite the fact that that hurts and that's hard. We do that and we actually commit to it. That's the merger of vulnerability and commitment to say, You can know me, I'll be completely vulnerable with you and I'm going to stick with you anyway. That is the gospel lived out relationally and I don't think we can understand the Gospel of Jesus for us until we practice it like that. I mean, we can receive it, again, we could be saved by it. But our, our call to live in Christian life, to imitate the gospel in all aspects of life is also a call to friendship and to imitate it in friendship. And we need it.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:18:01] We've been, as just kind of been cheering, but also kind of declaring at DadAwesome that pursuing the hearts of your own kids without brotherhood, without some other friends in your life, is not being DadAwesome. Like it truly is a short sighted approach to just bring intentionality on the home front to your kids actually will not last in the long term without these friends. And so what I'm going to do is actually pause on that as far as Made for People and the idea of the richness and the design and community being the way and move to one final question is just to set up the Hang Ten Movement. To me, when I heard what you're doing and how you're releasing this like concrete with even a leading practice, I have to at least give a sampling to our community at DadAwesome, and then send them there because you've like given all the resources away. Could you, why did you start that at the age of your boys right now and what you're seeing culturally and, and why is that resource available for dads?
Justin Whitmel Earley: [00:19:06] Lauren and I just started the Hang Ten Movement because we both think that our discipleship to Jesus and our children's discipleship, to Jesus is probably most impacted right now by technology. So put another way, I want every dad who's listening to consider this, Probably the most important factor in your discipleship to Jesus right now is how you use technology. Almost certainly that will be true for your children. That is a hypothesis. I could say for certainty that the most important factor in your children's mental health will be how they use technology, how you raise them to do it. There is, just there's probably no more like single thing that is impacting our our spirituality, our physicality, our emotional and mental health more than technology right now. So parents intuit this, right. They kind of know that something is serious here, but we don't know what to do. And that's understandable because it's so new. I mean, really, we are all, I don't know, roughly like 15, 16, 17 years old when it comes to technology, given the iPhone came out in 2007. So we're adolescents and I don't know, a lot of adolescence making great decisions. We need help, right. So, Lauren and I have been, you know, looking at this, thinking about this in our own lives, you know, paying attention to the research on this. And I think it came together for me in the past year thinking that I've done a lot of work thinking about my personal habits of technology. It's good. It's not that I'm perfect at it, I've just done a lot of thinking about it. Scripture before phone, for example, is one of my primary habits. I've done a lot of work thinking in the household, and I wrote about this and Habits of the Household, of how our family's rhythms of technologies need to happen. And they're not perfect either, but we're working on them. But my kids are starting to get to the age where they are now meeting the world. And it's one thing to say, you know, hey, you know, as a six year old, you're going to have the iPad maybe once or twice a week or this is how it's going to work, we'll watch movies here and then and you you have these, you know, helpful rhythms for your house. But now that my 12 year old wants to text his friends and he's going over to other people's houses where there are computers and devices and now we're in conversation with parents about, well, when are you getting a phone? And we suddenly realize that we can't do this alone, that it's not enough to have individual rhythms, though it is necessary. It's not enough to have household rhythms, though it is necessary. You must also have communal rhythms. And this, I think, is sort of the trifecta, if you will, of forming children well in technology. And so there's a ton here. We're ending on this idea. So everybody's got to go to the hangtenmovement.com to, to read more about it. But the basic idea is to say technology is deforming generations of children right now. What if the church was the place that did it differently? And in that way, we were a light to a very dark moment in the world. And the way we would do it differently is to think in those categories, so the Hang Ten Movement has three categories of practices, communal practices, household practices and individual practices. And altogether there are ten practices, hence the Hang Ten. But it's based on the core practice of hang ten, wait until 10th grade to give your children access to smartphones or social media because of that right there, that right there is an incredibly revolutionary idea for a church to do together or a neighborhood group of parents to do together, or a Christian school to do together, a homeschooling co-op to do together, to say we're going to totally reform our children's experience of childhood and totally reclaim the possibility of their gospel formation by not letting the adult world come into their ears and eyes like, you know, five, ten hours a day through smartphones and social media, but rather to say, we're going to do this differently, we're going to wait till 10th grade. This is very data backed right now. So anybody reading and probably everybody right now has heard of Jonathan Haidt's research on on this stuff, which is good. But we're going much we're going quite a bit farther and saying that this is not just about protecting mental health. It's not just about waiting until the right time that those are important. This is about creating Christian formational communities that understand how to apprentice children into the use of technology, which, by the way, is very different than just saying protect them from it. It is protecting them in their younger years from it, but it's also apprenticing them in their older years into it. So we can send boys and girls out of the house that are now men and women who know how to act with integrity online, how to use it for good things, and how to put it away at the right time so that they can live embodied lives with each other. And the Hang Ten Movement is ten simple practices to help you get there. So if this is sparking a, oh I need to think about this. This, you know, is not necessarily easy because as we've talked about a couple of times now, anything worth doing is har. but it is simple. It is kind of simple. There's like, there's ten simple ideas to work into your individual life, your household life and your communal life. So go to hangtenmovement.com, check it out and subscribe to the email list because we have a lot more coming there of, of telling you okay if you're going to wait until 10th grade to have a smartphone, what kind of dumb phones might be useful for seventh and eighth grade? Or if you're going to have an ethic of public screens, that's one of the principles and household use of saying we're not going be alone on screens, we're going to be accountable to each other on screens. What kind of filter software might you use? What kind of, you know, what kind of phone might you buy that allows you to do that? So there's a lot of software intensive, hardware intensive things here that you can subscribe to our email list and we'll be talking more about.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:24:58] Justin, Thank you. I never mind going into a new topic right at the end of a conversation. We could have spent the whole podcast on it. Never mind when, when there's an action step of ten minutes of a dad, just scrolls through, clicks in, they're going to, they're going to understand and be able to engage and get on your email list. And so I just want to say thank you for this time and just your passion and your, the body of work that you've pulled together to help us at DadAwesome. We're like often sending people your way. Would you say just a short prayer as we say goodbye?
Justin Whitmel Earley: [00:25:27] I would love to do that. Let's let's pray together. Jesus, You have given us one of the most extraordinary privileges to be husbands and dads. I pray that we would see, for everybody listening, that they would see this place of the home as their primary place of mission and discipleship to form their children into lovers of God, a neighbor to love their wives as You have loved us. And Lord, may we see that You have parenthood us so well with all the grace and truth. And may we turn to our children, to parent them in that grace and truth, may we be directing them and our wives, our whole households to Your love, may we be living in it. Would You form us in it? We love You and we appreciate this conversation and the gift of it. Thank You for Your Son and the power of grace and His resurrection power to actually live into this call. It's in Your name we pray, Amen.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:26:25] Thank you so much for joining us this week for episode 365. The conversation links, the transcripts, some of the key points and quotes, and of course, all the resources that Justin offers are going to be at dadawesome.org/podcast, and then just look for episode 365. Guys, thank you for being dads who are taking action. Thank you for being dads who are pursuing the hearts of your kids. But not just with intent, but with Hey, take one practical thing from today implemented as a dad, that is being DadAwesome. We're not perfect, but we're growing together. Want to encourage you one more time to send me an email, send an email to awesome@dadawesome.org to learn about joining the DadAwesome Accelerator. There is no way you would finish six weeks of being a part of an accelerator cohort without being changed as a dad and change now leads to years and years and decades of your kids benefiting from you being that dad who took a courageous step and said, I'm all in for six weeks. So, want to encourage you guys email awesome@dadawesome.org to learn about the upcoming DadAwesome Accelerator Cohort. That's it for now. Have a great week guys. Thanks for being DadAwesome.
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· 13:37 - "Everything in the world is better with friends. We tend to not be able to accomplish anything we set out to accomplish without friends. And that's psychology and habit wisdom. Anything from AA to just New Year's resolution wisdom would suggest you need other people in your life. Whether you're running a marathon or just doing push ups in the backyard, we tend to not push ourselves until somebody is watching and then we entirely change when somebody is watching. There's actually fascinating studies on this, too, about how much eating habits or how you talk or how you perform just changes when you're aware that somebody is watching. And that's all suggests that we don't really have the integrity we think we have with ourselves... That is the gospel lived out relationally and I don't think we can understand the Gospel of Jesus for us until we practice it like that. I mean, we can receive it, again, we could be saved by it, but our call to live in Christian life, to imitate the gospel in all aspects of life is also a call to friendship and to imitate it in friendship."
· 19:21 - "I want every dad who's listening to consider this, the most important factor in your discipleship to Jesus right now is how you use technology. Almost certainly that will be true for your children. That is a hypothesis. I could say for certainty that the most important factor in your children's mental health will be how they use technology, how you raise them to do it. There is no more like single thing that is impacting our spirituality, our physicality, our emotional and mental health more than technology right now."
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