These Daily Habits For Young Families Will Change Your Life - Justin Earley Tell All

In this powerful episode, Ruslan KD sits down with lawyer, author, and spiritual formation advocate Justin Whitmel Earley to unpack the intersection of habits, faith, mental health, and purpose. Justin shares his deeply personal story of anxiety, burnout, and the turning point that led him to rediscover the ancient Christian practice of spiritual disciplines — not as legalism, but as a path to flourishing.

From missionary work in underground Chinese house churches to the high-stress world of corporate law, Justin reflects on how unchecked ambition and tech-driven distractions almost destroyed his health and family. Through simple, consistent rhythms like “Scripture before phone,” Sabbath rest, and weekly community, he found renewal — and now helps others do the same.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
I'll never forget I was in the kitchen with my wife one night
where she asked me to push some dishes, dishes away and I took
them from her and I looked at them and I handed them back.
Said I don't know where these gobecause my mind was getting so
weird and thin. But I've become the guy who's
more attentive to the cries of his office than the cries of his
son. That's right.
And after a month or two of living according to these new

(00:20):
rhythms, my life began to drastically change.
Drastically change I. Remember talking to my therapist
about the Senate and he's like, how, how, how are you doing with
stress? And I was like, well, I don't
like feel anxious and I don't feel stressed.
And he's like, OK, let me ask itto you this way.
How are you doing with and? I was.
Oh, I like that way of asking Bruce.

(00:41):
LON All right, ladies and gentlemen, you are in for a
treat today. This gentleman has put out three
books, 4th book on the way. He is a lawyer, a full time
lawyer, man of God, husband, father and one of his books
really impacted me. Without any further ado, Justin

(01:02):
Early. Dude, thank you for having me
here. Yeah, man, thanks for being
here. Pull the mic a little closer to
you. You got I'm new I'm new to the
YouTube this. Is like, we're going to get you
right. All right, we're going to get
you right. So we had a chance to go to
dinner last night. Man, you have such a fascinating
story in that you were an R likea practicing attorney who's also

(01:22):
a best selling author who speaksinto habit formation, which is
like I, I loved atomic habits. I love power habit and some some
somehow my wife is like, hey, you should check out this habits
of the household thing. And so I'm.
Like we need a hat tip to her right now because she's, she's
really the reason I got here, right?
I gave you the book. She gave me the book.
I, I, I think I listened to the audio, then got her the

(01:44):
physical. We, we looked through parts of
it and then I kind of went back and looked at your other stuff
and I was like, man, like this is it like this is what we need
in, in, in a Christian space in terms of spiritual formation,
practical and Speaking of families and young men with the
background and the authority. And I don't mean like in a, in a

(02:04):
weird spiritual sense, but like just a practical life experience
that you've had to, to, to, to be credible and the things
you're talking about. And so for folks who don't know,
you tell us like a little bit ofyour background story.
And I'm going to budget in this is more of a conversation, less
of an interview. I'm going to be budgeting in and
probably poking. Forgive me in advance for
cutting you off and shout if I say it's because I'm active

(02:24):
listening. All right, so get out of here
with roasting my but I'm going to be self aware all.
Right, I like the the the that encourages.
Because it means you're active listening.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. That's right.
My I had a campus minister, actually, he used to call him
spiritual yummy, but, you know, talk back.
And I was like, that's a weird thing to say, but I like it.
Yeah, it's better than Wow. Wow.
That's that's that's the typicalpodcast they write.

(02:46):
Wow, Wow. Yeah, I'm not going to do that.
I'm not going to do that. I'm glad you asked because
actually my, my story and I really feel like this is
actually my second testimony is a lot of why the lawyering and
the writing makes sense to me, but it doesn't make sense to
everybody. I mean, it's kind of a
interesting combination. So I started my life after

(03:06):
college. I was an English literature
major and then I actually graduated and moved to China.
I was a missionary for almost five years, Loved it.
Credible time of life. Was this because aren't they
more hardcore against missionaries now?
Yes, I was there in a different moment.
It was from 2006 to 2011. Interestingly, it was a time
where a lot of people felt like China was opening or work like

(03:29):
the Internet. Google had just opened in China.
There there was this idea that China was on like a cracking the
door. It quickly turned around circa
2011 12. My wife went to China for a
month right around 2006, 2007. So around that same time we want
to overlap. Yeah, to to teach English to to

(03:51):
teach. English, right, Right.
Yeah, Yeah. I was a Chinese student studying
in a university, and we were serious.
I mean, we learned the language as best as we could, but.
Can you speak Chinese? Cle, Ed Indiana.
Whoa. Anybody listening to me, like,
wait a minute, his tones are wrong.
I could speak actually quite well.
By the end of my five years there, I was given sermons in
Chinese. My listening comprehension was
still tough. My wife was awesome.

(04:12):
So as a pair, she could understand everything that
people were saying and I could speak.
And there's a little bit, you know, some dynamic there, but.
Wow, OK, learning Chinese. She was there for five years.
Yeah, I was there as a. Student slash missionary.
That's right, that's right. And I had a really important
experience on the streets of Shanghai, China towards the I
think this was like about 2010, I can't quite remember.

(04:34):
But I basically I was on what's the Times Square of China and I
saw four things in 5 minutes. Black market thief, super
common. Drug dealer, super common. 7 or
8. Open brothels, super common in a
political protest, very uncommon.
I had never seen a political protest in all my years in
China. And I watched this political

(04:55):
protester get arrested while theother 3 went about making money
being selling their bodies, selling drugs, selling stolen
goods. And nobody in China wants it to
be this way, right? I mean, this isn't like to try
to slam dunk on them, but the fact was their, their system is
set up so that the one brave actof love for neighbor.
I mean, I still remember the oldlady's sign.

(05:16):
She said she's holding up a signthat said the judicial system in
China is broken. The people in the countryside
are being oppressed. That's all I got to read because
she was arrested within two minutes.
And I read Chinese pretty slow. Wow.
But it was this day for me whereI felt a new dimension of the
world kind of popping up where Iwas like, oh, I'm in China on
this mission, which I believe inand still believe in.

(05:38):
And I still support missionariesall around the world of, you
know, sharing the gospel almost like horizontally, like convert
somebody else. They convert somebody else.
Absolutely beautiful, brilliant,a part of the Great Commission.
But I saw like I would say almost the world pop into relief
and the the top down influences of how we structure society, of
how we set up law and economic economics, creating moral

(06:00):
outcomes for people. And it was one of those life
moments where I think, feel likethe Holy Spirit just snuck in
and was like, this is where I want you to think, to work, to
act, to be a. So I actually, Ruslan, I'm, I
mean this, I came back to the states feeling like God had
called me to be a missionary within law and business, OK,
Like a missionary to the structures that exist.

(06:23):
Like should they try to bring the gospel to bear on them?
That's fire. Can I?
Can I ask a? Clarify.
Yeah, yeah. Is this around the time of they
had to have been still under their one child policy?
Yes, when I was there, they werealtering the one child policy to
if both of your parents were only children, then you could

(06:44):
have two children. So they were to like a
replacement rate policy. I'm not sure where they are
right now. Massive.
I will tell you from knowing andby the way loving like I
absolutely love the Chinese people, but from knowing and
spending so much time with them,this impacts them deeply
psychologically. It it is weird to have a nation
of only children have, a nation of people without siblings have.

(07:05):
You seen the one child policy documentary on Amazon?
I have not watched it now. It's dark.
Is it? It's really dark.
I mean, it's a dark idea. They they.
Go through and tell the back story.
Tell it all at They lifted in 2015 I believe.
That sounds about right. And they interview women who are
forced into abortions. They interview the abortion

(07:26):
doctors. One one of the most bizarro,
gruesome scenes was a doctor that kept some of the babies He
and they're in jars. I mean, when you're in that Dark
World, it does dark things to you.
I'm not. I'm not surprised.
And so did had you encountered people that had gone through

(07:46):
the, I mean, the consequence of the forced abortions of some of
this one? I don't.
Think I knew I bet I met people I no one's coming to mind that
was a product of the the forced abortion territory but I it was
the impact for me was mostly meeting all these single
children and and just everybody talking about I don't know what
it's like to have brothers and sisters like community was
different they had to relearn asthey grew older and particularly

(08:08):
for followers of Jesus which wascool because.
Cousins either, if they're if they're all, they probably don't
have a lot of cousins. Yeah, it's, yeah.
The family structures are just thinned out.
Yeah. And so there's a lot, you know,
we struggle in the West with isolation.
There's a lot of isolation coming from that, even though
the Chinese people are in general and much more communal
people than we Westerners are. So yeah, it was.
And how was the church there? Like you're beautiful.

(08:30):
It was OK. It's incredible were.
They meeting publicly or was it more underground?
Underground. Underground, yeah.
And we, we made sure to keep ourlike the whites.
We, we like, went to family groups.
We called them in our own apartments with just other
foreigners because we didn't want to get them in trouble.
We didn't want to put it what they were doing at risk.
Once or twice I remember credible experience getting

(08:50):
invited to a Chinese house church.
And I got the instructions like wear a hoodie, like walk up,
keep your head down, knock on this door.
And I kid you not, I knock on the door, I walk into what feels
like a big walk in closet and I'm like, what is going on?
And then they open the door of one of the closets.
There's a false wall and then a room where 50 to 70 people are

(09:11):
gathering, singing in whispers. I will never forget it.
I will never forget it. I mean, this is 2010.
This is not, this is like modernhistory.
This is happening. This is crazy, but it's amazing.
Like what the Lord is doing in their underground churches and
doing and the people there because they know when they
convert and they're like, I'm not going to have an abortion
or, or I'm not going to do this or I'm not going to say that

(09:33):
they, they take it seriously because it's not convenient to
start following Jesus in China. I mean, increasingly it's not
convenient in many places, but it's very, very inconvenient in
China. It's really beautiful to watch
them come to faith and start following Jesus.
Have they? Have they?
Locked down more against like have they got harder?
A lot of the people that I was working with when I was there

(09:53):
have been kicked out or, or justleft because it's sent away.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot more house church
pastors get arrested now than previously when I was there.
So I, I I'm really like, you know, over a decade removed from
paying close attention to China.So I'm by no means an expert,
but anecdotally, the people thatI knew, lots of them are no
longer there. And that's been intentionally

(10:16):
them getting harsher against thechurch in.
China, Yeah. I mean, this is President Xi.
What about mainline like Catholic Eastern Orthodox, like
mainline big churches that have massive presences?
Not that that mainline because people say mainline Protestant,
but you know, you know what I mean?
Like the big? Yeah.
Well, the thing about so I'm again, I'm not an expert here,
so I'm speaking a little bit offthe cuff.

(10:36):
One of the big points for China is they want, they call it the
three self church, self governing, self propagating and
self financed. I think they're the three self.
And so, you know, the Catholic Church is under Rome, so it's
not going to be under Beijing. So there's sort of an inherent
conflict there. You know, most Protestants are
like we're going to, we're goingto share the Gospel, we're going

(10:59):
to propagate, we're going to speak about whatever we want.
And that is a no no for the three self church in China.
So. The Three Self Church is the
churches that are allowed in China.
The three self church, what cameabout after Mao when the
Communist Party said, OK, you know what we can do some
Christianity. It's going to just going to be
Chinese governed, Chinese propagated and Chinese funded
Christianity. And most Christians are like,

(11:20):
that's not how the church interacts with the state.
No, like we bow to no state, right?
This is a fundamental claim of all churches, like Caesar can
have what is Caesar's and God will take what is God's, IE
everything is God's. So, you know, it's an inherent
conflict with the way that Chinasees itself.
What do you, what do you make ofwhat's happening now in China in

(11:40):
terms of them being a more of a superpower, most of our goods
coming from there, some of thesetariffs, What what is your
thoughts on that? I just long for reconciliation,
man. I really do.
I, I got to know that Chinese people well enough to really
love them and to see how they love the Lord and to see a lot
of the beautiful, good parts of their culture.
I mean, like I, I've got problems with the American
government and we could talk allabout that.

(12:01):
We've got problems with the Chinese government, but I love
Chinese people, love them. And I would love to see
friendship between our nation's.I mean, we do the world's going
to do well when we get on well. But unfortunately, you know,
they do have some bad and dangerous policies that we that
deserve really, really pushing back against.
So I'll, I'll leave it there, but I long for the best and I

(12:24):
cannot wait to see them in the Kingdom.
I mean the Chinese believers that I knew, they are great
brothers and sisters. Yeah, that's amazing.
Okay, so you're missionary in China, you're going to school,
and you get this unction to takethe gospel to law.
I mean, yeah, to bring the gospel to bear in the field of
law. So.

(12:44):
And I can see here's where, likemy modern story begins.
This is my second testimony, really.
So I run at law school with all the fervor of a missionary on a
call, right? Which means I'm trying to do the
best I can, get the best grades I can, get the best job I can,
because I feel like the Lord hascalled me to influence there.
So I like pretty high theology of excellence.
And by the way, I did half of a seminary degree while I was in

(13:05):
China. So my theology was, you know,
pretty good. My head was on straight for
sure. What I did not realize was that
law school was a formation machine.
It wanted to make a missionary of me as much as I was trying to
be a missionary there. It had a way that it wanted me
to be, but it didn't preach it in tenants.

(13:25):
It preached it in practices. But I didn't realize this right?
So my life became exactly inhabit what all the other law
school students lives looked like.
I was always staying up later, waking up earlier, treating my
body like a machine that I couldjust, you know, keep turned on.
I was always adding more to my resume.
I was always trying to do more. I was tethered to my phone and

(13:45):
everything. And this didn't seem odd to me
because everybody's doing it right.
So I spit out my first year of lawyering, 3 years of law
school. I'm about to turn 30I land my
dream job and mergers and acquisitions in Richmond, VA
international law firm. And in my first couple months of
working there, I wake up one night in the middle of the night
and I, I didn't know what a panic attack was Then.

(14:07):
I just like literally, I'd probably never heard the word or
certainly didn't think it applied to me.
But my palms were sweating, my hands were shaking, my heart was
racing, like so scared that I thought maybe somebody had come
into the room and my subconscious knew it and I
didn't know yet. So I'm like looking around.
So I'm like, what's wrong? And I couldn't figure it out.
So I, I went back to sleep that night.

(14:27):
The next night it happened again.
And then I could never fall backasleep.
And after about two days of not sleeping, I go to the hospital
where a doctor tells me and whatis now the most anticlimactic
moment of my life, that all I was experiencing was the typical
symptoms of clinical anxiety andthat, you know, I should go home
and take some sleeping pills. And this sparked what is the

(14:50):
darkest and the worst nightmare of my life.
So I respond to sleeping pills in all the ways that you read in
the back of the bottles, unfortunately.
And so my life became this haze of like emotional highs and
lows, daytime mood swings, the weird nightmares, even suicidal
thoughts for the 1st and praise God, the last time in my life.

(15:13):
But I I entered into this phase I'll never forget.
I was in the kitchen with my wife one night where she asked
me to push some dishes dishes away.
And I took them from her and I looked at them and I handed them
back, said I don't know where these go because my mind was
getting so weird and thin that basic tasks were becoming
difficult. And so you can imagine I'm
thinking, whoa, if I am struggling to help my wife

(15:36):
around the house and I've got two young boys at this time,
they're two and one, I think, how am I going to keep my job?
Like how am I going to pay back my mountains of law school debt?
And by the way, how am I going to be a father friend,
missionary to law and business, all the stuff that I so long to
be like? Suddenly everything was
threatened by this mental fallout and I entered a phase
where I had to either take sleeping pills or have a drink

(16:00):
or two just to get some sleep atnight.
Yeah, that's heavy. It was heavy and it, it was the,
it was, it wasn't a moment. It was a couple months of a
dawning realization that the missionary had been converted.
So I set out to do, you know, have impact on law and business.
It impacted me. I mean it.
I set out to change it. It changed me and I became

(16:21):
converted to the nervous medicating lawyer.
Lawyer like that. You know it's interesting when
you talk about the anxiety as someone that's I had a similar
experience doing music full time, staying up late, not not
taking care of my body, eating like crap.
It didn't hit me until later, actually talking to a therapist
where he's like, no, no, no. Like the anxiety is your body's

(16:43):
way of telling you something is wrong.
The sweaty palms, the sleepless nights, all of that.
And so people want to flee from anxiety and be like, anxiety is
bad. Let me take a pill, right?
And there are definitely people that that, yeah, that's right,
benefit from it. That's right from medication.
But for most people, many people100% the anxiety is your body

(17:04):
saying, hey, this is not right, this is wrong.
You are not a machine. You are not a machine you.
Are not a machine and this was so.
And how long? How long does this go like this?
Was a very, this is a long year of a very year.
This was a long year of a very difficult and dark time in my
life. And what?
Yeah. Had I known then what we're
talking about now, I think, you know, I could have really been

(17:27):
helped. And a lot of my writing is to
help people in this because whathappened is that about a year
later, I'm sitting at a table with two of my best friends.
They're named Matt and Steve. Still, my best friends texted
them yesterday like, hey, on a trip, pray for me.
And they I'm sitting with them. I put a moleskin journal on the
table with this program of dailyand weekly habits that scribbled

(17:48):
into it. Because I tried medication, I
tried counseling during this this long year.
And while I fully support both of those things for many people,
they weren't moving the needle for me, at least not yet.
So I was desperate to try anything.
And my wife and I, I mean, this is providential, but it's kind
of a last ditch effort. We were sort of like, what if we
just put some daily and weekly guardrails around your days and

(18:11):
weeks? So just to try to like rein in
your chaos. And I'm just trying to be a good
boy, you know, do anything that helps.
I don't think any of this is going to matter.
And so I'm sitting there with Matt and Steve, asking them to
keep me accountable to these patterns, having no idea that it
would work. Because I think then I had no
idea that the smallest and most ordinary patterns of our days

(18:32):
and weeks actually do affect oursouls and bodies in the most
extraordinary ways. That's right.
And after a month or two of living according to these new
rhythms, which I now know are the classic spiritual
disciplines, there was just so much I didn't know.
Who would have thought it was not new?
My life began to drastically change, drastically change, but
not not overnight and not totally, but drastically and for

(18:55):
sure. And I like went headlong into
wait, what is this world of spiritual discipline and
formation that I had not discovered?
You know, that I just you know, I'm I'm still young in my faith
in in one sense, but I'm also surprised that nobody taught me
this more clearly. This is not to blame anybody.
What what I want to do is now raise this banner because what I

(19:17):
realized during that time was that your head can go one way,
but if your habits are going theother way, your heart is going
to follow the habits. Come on, this is the.
World of formation wow you can be super smart.
Even the demons know even the demons believe that God is one
OK knowing is not sufficient forfollowing Jesus.
This is why he so often says follow me because he's not

(19:37):
content to have just our head without our habits and that's
not our heart. He wants the life of intertwined
head and habit. And so as I'm learning this, I'm
starting to literally just writeemails to my friends about it
and just be like, hey, you know,these rhythms and a lot of them
are simple things like scripturebefore phone in the morning,
like not looking at my emails and phone until after I've been

(19:58):
in the word a little bit might sound legalistic.
It's hedonistic. Like I, I got so much better
when I was like, I need to get this smartphone out of my
morning. Things like Sabbath thing,
things like turning my phone offan hour a day, things like a
weekly. Conversation with friends where
I was like actually like in a lawyer's schedule.
This was radical right to be like, I'm going to put a block
on that. I don't cancel called hanging

(20:20):
out and having vulnerable conversation.
Hold on. I mean, it changes your life.
This is what my most recent bookMade for People is about, about
this vulnerable way of life. But so I start writing about
these two friends and emails andin a providential turn, you
know, the e-mail list grew to a couple 100 people.
So I was like, I'll do a blog and write about spiritual habits

(20:42):
and a pastor's connection actually was this providential
spark where a publisher came andwas like, you should write a
book on this. And I was like, I've been
waiting my whole life for somebody to ask me to write a
book. So I was thrilled.
Like I was an English major. I love writing.
And that at the age of 34, kicked off writing.
And I've been writing books on the spirituality of habit ever

(21:02):
since. That's so cool man.
I think so much of what you're saying is personally resonated
with me in, in my own journey with kind of running my body and
my mental health into the grounddoing music.
And then the, the turning point was really in like I, I can't go
on this way. So it's around 2018.

(21:22):
I I spent about a month away from my family, which is the
longest I've ever been away. Touring.
Touring. Yeah, yeah.
It was a lot. And then I came home and I just,
I just felt terrible. And and for me it was it was
oddly enough, physical fitness and strength training that then
led me to read my Bible more. That then led me more into
community, led me to therapy andevery talk about this kind of

(21:43):
kind of change, you know, so yousaid your thing was word before
phone every morning. Yeah, weekly time for community.
Turning off your phone. Yep.
I'm assuming church weekly, not the.
Sabbath. Sabbath was one of the week.
So they were in my first book, The Common Rule, which by the
way, that shorthand for a rule of life for common people,

(22:06):
because I, what I, what I learned was that I was doing
nothing new and this whole paradigm was nothing new.
So ancient Christianity up untiltoday has had communities,
they're typically monastic or like spiritual communities who
rely on something called a rule of life, which by the way, is
gaining popularity in our modernworld, which is great.

(22:27):
It's just the idea of saying we should adopt the habits form us,
right? Like they, they're this water
that we swim in. They're extremely spiritual
things and they, they shape who we are.
So we should pick them on purpose and do them in
community. And so the common rule is the
idea of what would a lawyer likeme or other regular people like
me adopt as a rule of life? And there were four daily and

(22:47):
four weekly habits. It's hard to remember if I name
them all but two of the daily habits were praying on your
knees three times a day get the attention of the body to get the
attention of the mind like that's why it's on the knees
Scripture before phone to the weekly habits where Sabbath
thing and then conversation withfriends and I could go more.
There's a lot of kind of a rhythm of community communal
habits with technological habitsbecause by the way, I mean tech

(23:10):
technology is the great formation machine of our moment.
So probably for most people the most significant factor in their
walk with Jesus is how they use technology right now.
I mean, this is essential. So any approach to habit,
whether in the family, at home, like individual life, church
needs to address the habits of technology.
So that was a big part of the common rule.

(23:31):
Yeah, that's awesome. Would you say that devotional or
quiet time on the phone can kindof get in the way of the idea of
that cause 'cause I, I kind of bounce back?
I think there are tears. Yeah, I like, I got my Logos
Bible software, which I'm, I'm I'm a fan of.

(23:51):
I love it and I like I, I found a hybrid, but for the longest I
would leave my phone out and then I would get up and and have
I leave my physical Bible open and I read my Bible before I
hopped on my phone. But then I like the idea of
pulling up the logos, looking atdifferent commentaries or going

(24:11):
into the Greek kind of nerding out.
And so now I'm kind of doing, I'm, I'm, I'm attempting to do
physical Bible, physical journaling and then pull up the
logo software towards the end ofthat to go in a little deeper.
I think that's ideal. Yeah, but I also let 100 flowers
bloom. I mean, I this is worth diving

(24:32):
into. Let me give you how I came to
Scripture before found I am a young lawyer.
I think my first or second year of lawyering, I'm working with
our London office overseas. So I'm waking up every morning
to five or six hours worth of emails from London about what
I'm going to do that day. And I want, you know, I'm a
young new lawyer. I want to do well, make them
happy. So it becomes my unconscious

(24:54):
habit to check my e-mail every morning.
And then one morning, one of my sons wakes up early.
It's still dark, my alarm hasn'tgone off.
He's crying in his crib. I get up to go help him. 5
minutes later I'm sitting on thefoot of my bed halfway through
an e-mail to the London office when I realized my son is still
crying. Like I never want to help him so
he's fine. Like he just lost his pacifier,

(25:16):
plugged it back in. He goes right back to sleep.
But I come back and sit on the foot of my bed and I'm like not
fine because like I have become the guy.
And again, I'm a year or two in the lawyering and nobody sets
out to be like this, but I become the guy who's more
attentive to the cries of his office than the cries of his
son. Because little did I know that

(25:36):
you, we are formed in the image of what we gaze at.
I mean, where our thumbs scroll,where our eyes go.
They're our habit. And thus they're our heart goes.
And So what happened was in that, you know, night with Matt
and Steve, one of the things I was asking them to do is keep me
accountable to looking at Scripture before I looked at my
phone. And so that to me now looks like

(25:57):
one of two things. One that the constant is that my
phone, my do not disturb is on in the morning.
My notifications are off. I do not go into it.
So the first thing that's true of a morning.
Now praise God by his grace, because this is not easy, right?
The phone wants you is that I just wake up and may I might
have a quiet time like you, likeanalog in a book journal.

(26:19):
This is my favorite way to do it, right?
But one of the most important things about the morning is that
it's just not part of my routine.
So previously I'd be at the breakfast counter with my boys.
They I'd be like scrolling A stressful work e-mail.
They spill their milk and I snapand start yelling at them and
they're like, pop, we always spill our milk.
Like, what does this mean? Right?

(26:40):
Because they don't know what's stressing me out.
And I just think, and I think this is a call to fathers, it is
your responsibility to keep workout of that hand so that you can
keep love in front of your children.
Because so often I was getting stressed by work and taking it
out on them and snapping on my wife, snapping on my kids.
That's not that that is the opposite of what Jesus did for

(27:01):
us, right? Jesus took the stress, took the
pain so he could give us love, not, you know, push out all that
stress and pain onto his children.
So that is one of the things that happening.
But the other thing that is thatI'm actually engaging with the
scriptures every morning. And sometimes it's analog.
Sometimes it just stays out of my routine until I get to the
car and I say, Hey, Siri, open dwell.
And I love listening to the Bible on dwell.

(27:23):
It's a great, great little app. And that to me that it doesn't
bother me at all that I'm using my phone to listen, like to do
Scripture before phone. Got it.
Because the important thing for me that's happening is that
rhythmically. And then you, you talked about
lifting. I'm going to start to talk about
physical habits because this is really important to me
rhythmically. You're actually putting your

(27:45):
body in the way of scripture so that you're not like anybody can
learn the tenants of scripture. That is not in itself.
I mean, it's important, but likemany people know what the Bible
says in rhythmically going to Scripture day after day, you
move from just knowing it to by habit having it tug on your
heart. And that is literally having it
sort of sink down into your parasympathetic nervous system

(28:07):
such that you don't just know God loves you.
You intuitive you've so that that's the difference between
when you go to work and you see an e-mail that now stresses you
out and because you know throughthrough the rhythm of going to
God's love, he loves you. You're not at your office to
earn love. Now you can finally say, so how
can I give love here? Because I don't need to earn my

(28:27):
identity here. I don't need to earn my
justification here. You can finally turn from seeing
work as the place to earn your identity to seeing work as the
place to love your neighbor. And that that doesn't come
without being steeped in Scripture.
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I think, yeah, formation in
those little things definitely has a compounding effect.
And I think getting back to someof those basic rhythms is, is is

(28:50):
huge, especially for people thatI would say are dealing with
some form of, of mental health or whatever.
I remember talking to my therapist about the Senate and
he's like, how, how how are you doing with stress?
And I was like, well, I don't like feel anxious and I don't
feel stressed. And he's like, OK, let me ask it
to you this way. How are you doing with
irritability around your family and I?
Was like that way of asking. Yeah.
And I was like, yeah, he said like you're, you don't have an

(29:13):
anxiety disorder, you don't struggle with anxiety in that
way, your life is fairly balanced.
But if you're irritable, that means you're stressed.
If you're irritable towards yourfamily, that means you're
stressed. So you.
So let's work on stress management so that you're not
irritable towards your family. And I was like.
That's so good. Yeah, I love that.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I, I mean, I mean, this is the call of the Christian life,

(29:34):
right? To to form, to become formed
more in the image of God, which means to become formed in the
image of someone who loves. OK, the great call of life is to
love, love God and to love neighbor.
And as it turns out, that is farmore of an embodied task than I
ever thought, because I really thought that the call was to
know the right things and that if I did, everything in my life

(29:56):
would conform to it. But what I found is that the
body teaches the soul a lot morethan you think.
And by that, what I mean, the way we move our bodies in the
world is a is actually part of the way that we move our heart.
And this is not unsurprising because if you look at Genesis,
God created us, body and spirit.I mean, we are physical beings
as much as we are spiritual beings.

(30:18):
And that is who we are meant to be.
So when we see anxiety, irritability, health problems
cropping up in our body, it is all together like often not
always right because sin has wrecked everything.
So sometimes you, you get the chaos of randomness and illness
and injury and true mental health chronic issues.
But a lot of the health issues, the mental health issues that we

(30:41):
have are self-inflicted by trying to pretend that we are
God instead of being the limitedcreatures who are made to
worship God. And a lot of the depression and
anxiety in my peers life and as I look out into the world of
America are because we don't take the call to Christian
formation seriously, which meansis really important that
unconsciously we are adopting the American way of formation.

(31:04):
And this is crucial because if you don't have a counter
formational program of habits, well, guess what, you can't not
have habits. So you're going to be submitting
to the default American program,which is discipling you in
rhythms of omniscience. You can know everything by being
on technology, omnipotence, you can control everything because
you're that good of a worker. Omnipresence.
You can be two places at once watching this and talking to

(31:24):
this person. And guess what?
Those are the attributes of God,not you.
So like we're in our like moderndiscipleship, the technology,
we're reenacting the sin of Edenover and over and over saying I
want to be God. I don't want to be like him.
I just want to be him. And so unsurprisingly, our
bodies fall apart because that'snot we're, that's not what we're
made for. And I think the beautiful news

(31:45):
for me is that far from being a legalistic endeavor to say, hey,
you need to get your habits right, it's like, no, no, no,
this kind of people hear you hear this now, Jim, people are
podcasters and it's true Discipline is is freedom.
That's because Christianity is true, right?
It's because when you become a disciple of Jesus, you find that

(32:06):
his yoke is easy. His burden is light.
And this far from being a legalistic call to get
everything right, you realize, oh, this is the way my soul and
my body were meant to flourish. This is the good life.
And I now, like, if you were to look at my life, I mean, in one
way it's just totally normal guy's life behind the scenes.
I just have a lot of like littlespiritual disciplines that sort

(32:28):
of guide my days now because I've been doing this for 10
years. And I feel free.
I feel free now because my life is busier and more stressful
now. I run my own law firm, have four
boys, not 2, write books, take wonderful trips like this to
talk to people, podcasting and speak.
And I love it. But like technically the demands
on me are much higher right now,but I am so much more peaceful

(32:51):
of a person, so much more healthy of a person because of
discovering Jesus called the spiritual disciplines.
The body leads, you said. The body leads.
The body teaches the soul. The body teaches the soul.
That's. So that's my next book coming
out this fall. OK.
Man, I wish I could give you a copy right now because that's
fire. Because you said that exercise
really turned around. It was.

(33:12):
It's part of my story, too. Yeah.
We by the way, we have a a discipline as freedom.
Josh NATO piece right behind youall.
Right. I just want to shout out to
Josh. Josh is awesome.
I messaged him on Instagram a few times.
I love his stuff. Yeah, it will.
I want to meet him. He speaks.
I want to. Meet you Josh.
Similar stuff. He's going to be at the Blessed
Scott Summit as. Well, yeah, all right.
He teaches a lot of similar stuff in his spiritual formation

(33:33):
and and and physical fitness is also a part of his journey
because he was working in what was he, he was doing something
similar in corporate America. I think I'm banking and then
like pivoted because he had likea mental breakdown.
Dude, I. Didn't know this.
Yeah, and then starts like beinga a delivery driver in the city
and like the physical aspects oflike being more active.
Oh my gosh, kill him. Yeah, it's it's so.

(33:55):
Fascinating. Yeah, yeah.
So, so there's a there's a lot of these parallels, but I, I
love what you said about this isnot legalistic, right.
And then you use the word flourish, yes.
And some of the the the pushbackI get is whether I'm talking
about these topics or I'm talking about godly ambition,
I'm talking about following Jesus and living Jesus's ways

(34:15):
will cause you to flourish. What I'm not saying is it's a 1
+ 1 = 2. If you do XY and Z then you'll
always be healthy, happy and wealthy, right?
It's so different than the prosperity gospel because and by
the way, I love, I've told you, I've read the first 3 chapters
of your book and like we are on the same page because I mean, I
think about this like I, I have a lot of ambition for my law

(34:38):
firm. I have a lot of ambition for
writing. I could never carry this out in
a godly way or or by the way, ina sustainable way.
Like it would crush me if I didn't first take the godly part
seriously. Like I need to do this with
spiritual disciplines, but that is not legalistic here.
Here's here's how I like to sum it up.

(35:01):
Habits won't change God's love for us.
That's good. But God's love for us must
change our habits. OK, so you, I mean, but, and
this is not my idea, right? Like this is, this is my way of
putting it, but it's just to summarize the the good news of
the gospel of Jesus. I mean, he loves you right where
you are, but he never ever leaves you where you are.

(35:23):
He's always calling you out of it.
So if we accept any gospel that requires nothing for us to do
after we accept it, then we haven't accepted the real
gospel. The real gospel is it requires
nothing of us to accept. I mean, it's free like it's free
bread. It's free wine like the good
news of grace is that it's free.But if that grace doesn't change
you, then I don't think you cameto it, right.

(35:44):
So this is this is the paradigm of Paul's letters.
If you read them, he's, he's preaching the good news of
justify justification by faith alone, by grace alone.
And then he tells you what to doin the second-half every like
last 2-3 chapters are like, so do da da, da, da, da, da da.
And that's just to say that, yeah, none of the stuff is going
to change God's love for you. That's the good news of the

(36:05):
gospel. But the good news of the gospel
must change what you do. That's so good.
Well, I, I even from the operational standpoint of I am
loved, I am accepted. God has has done it all on the
cross, Jesus done it all. He rose, he reconciles me, he
puts me in the right setting, and then from that I get to.

(36:26):
I get. Change I I've put it this way
before, is that salvation is free, but despite discipleship
will cost you everything. I like that.
Yeah. So it's like some.
Baunhoff for a way to put it thecost of discipleship.
That's good. I my, my, my buddy John Keith
reached out to me and was like, hey, where'd you get that from?
And I was like, oh, I don't know.
I like Googled it and I didn't find it anywhere.
I was like, oh, I, I think I made that up.

(36:47):
I don't get about that one. That one we're rarely original,
but had. I know had I know what I would
put in the book because I forgotabout it, but I think this idea
of it's not legalism, nor is it the prosperity gospel to say,
hey, if you live God's ways, that's right, they're good for
you. And if you and if you handle
God's fill in a blank marriage, family, finances, fitness, you,

(37:10):
you extract the biblical principle and then you go and
build the formation in the habits.
Generally speaking, you will prosper, not necessarily in a
one to one, but things will get better.
And there's also the the the caveat and the exceptions to the
rule that you could still cat get cancer tomorrow.
You can still get hit by a truck.
Tomorrow, if we have too low of a view of sin in the fall, then

(37:32):
we won't understand what you just said.
But what you just said is absolutely true.
But when you factor in the deep sin in our heart that we still
often don't realize is there andthe chaos of the fall in the
world, that means 1 + 1 doesn't always equal 1 in these sort of
formational routines. I mean, then you get the
accurate picture. But I think often we
overemphasize that that part, like we're so broken and the

(37:56):
world is so chaotic that what wedo doesn't matter almost, which
is not a Christian way of looking at it.
Yeah, because we're Kingdom people.
We're supposed to be ushering. That's goodness and Kingdom.
And OK, so my big metaphor in The Body Teaches the Soul is
that we should be gardeners of our body.
And I think this combines the two.

(38:17):
Well, it helps us avoid the two errors.
I mean, a gardener knows that todo nothing means the garden
becomes a jungle. I mean, so like if you ignore
the garden, if you ignore your body, you are guaranteed chaos.
OK. But if you idolize your work in
the garden, you do not understand that you are a Co
laborer alongside Jesus, alongside the weather, alongside

(38:40):
blights and droughts in the fall.
So you don't have you have agency, but you do not have
total agency. That's right.
And so to don't. And so this is my paradigm for
the body and really sort of these endeavors of
sanctification. Do not ignore your body.
Do not ignore effort. Do not idolize your body.
Do not idolize effort, but rather image God through the

(39:01):
body, which means cultivate likebe a be be a humble cultivator
of your body of your work. Like put your agency in Dallas,
Dallas Willard, Of course, put it well, a gospel is not opposed
to effort. It's just opposed to earning.
OK. It's it's not opposed to effort.
Like go do something, but don't think you're, you can garden all
you want. God makes it grow.

(39:23):
You can spiritual discipline yourself all you want.
You can learn all you want, but God shapes the heart.
So a lot of what we're doing, and we know this in our body
actually is putting ourselves ina position that's conducive to
the miracle of life. The miracle of God, you know,
isn't working out right? All you can do is bust up your
body. It's the miracle of regrowth

(39:43):
that you cannot control. You can you put yourself in a
conducive position to it. You can eat well, you can sleep.
The miracle that your body regrows or the miracle that a
potato grows, the miracle that your habits change, that's
called grace, sanctification. That's a miracle in the world.
Every time a flower blooms or every time I choose to love my
sons and my wife instead of being irritable with them,

(40:05):
that's a miracle. I can do the spiritual
disciplines to make it conducivethat my body and spiritual life
are healthy, but I can't make ithappen.
Yeah, that's good. Well, I mean, I, I like how you
call the, the growth that happens when the body is torn
apart through strength training.Yeah.
And then your physique changes. And I think there's, and I think
there's, that's also happening into your character, into your

(40:28):
mental health, like you, you're breaking something down for it
to grow back better and bigger and stronger.
Anti fragility. This is the yeah and and this is
where actually working out for me too has been a big reason I
wanted to write about the body teaching the soul.
I'll, I'll, I'll actually tell you what happened to me.
So I worked four years at my biglaw law firm working with

(40:51):
Fortune 105 hundred companies. I learned a lot about corporate
law, but I decided I want to start my own practice.
And I'm working one of the firstlike months that I'm doing it.
I'm working in this coffee shop and I hear all this banging next
door and I walk around. I think it's like a garage, but
it ends up it's a CrossFit gym. And there's this dude inside

(41:12):
doing what I now know are cleaning, cleaning jerks like
lifting the weight above his head dropping and I knock on the
door, interrupt his workout. I didn't know that.
You know, he's probably doing a wad and like he's actually
there's. A clock on the wall.
He he stops, it's the coach, theowner of the gym comes over to
me, opens the door, body of a Greek God standing before me
like chiseled physique. And he's like what?

(41:33):
And I'm like, basically, I'm like, can this happen to me if I
come here? You know, so I start going to
this gym. I have no idea what this is
almost seven years ago. I have no idea what CrossFit is
about. I just knew that I was not
taking care of my body. And now that I started my own
practice, I wanted to, I wanted to make exercise a part of my

(41:54):
routine because I, because I wasrealizing through fasting and
other things that way, I treatedmy body matters.
And so I want to get healthy. So I show up at the gym, no idea
what a wad is. And I in the middle of the
workout, they're only like, you know, CrossFit is sort of
usually like 8 to 12 minutes Sprint workouts towards the end
of the, the, the session. And I'm like stopping for
bathroom breaks and water in themiddle of them, you know, and

(42:16):
because I'm just like, I'm tired.
This is hard. Turns out exercising is hard,
right? And so I, I, I do this and
probably like the second or third week that I'm there, I'm,
that we have some workouts like an ungodly amount of cleaning
jerks, like lifting the barbell above your head.
And I think about a minute 4, I'm like, oh, I'm tired.
I'm going to go get some water. And my coach comes over.
His name is Ryan still. My coach stops me.
He goes, you know, no, no, no, Ikeep picking it up.

(42:39):
I was like, I'm, I'm at the, at the end, man.
Like I hit the wall. He's like, pick it up.
So I do one and he nods. He goes pick it up again.
I do another one. He's like, pick it up.
And I'm like, Oh my gosh, I lookat the clock, there's like 8
minutes left. I'm like, he's going to stand
here the whole time. The most amazing thing happened.
So I make it. I just keep picking it up.

(42:59):
And I remember collapsing on thefloor with this vague mental
realization that what I thought was the wall was not the wall.
When I when I thought I was out of strength, I wasn't out of
strength. OK, that is nice for the gym,
right? I love it.
I really believe in it. But here's here's what happened.
The next morning, I am in the kitchen with my toddler.
He's in his high chair. He's got a sippy cup of milk, as

(43:21):
toddlers do. He knocks it off the table, I
think intentionally, but he's just playing.
I pick it up and like my legs are so sore from the day before.
I'm like, ow, you know, like I'mbetting I'm like ow.
I put it on and I go get him to,I go to the fridge to get him
something and I hear he knocks it off again.
And I look at him and it is where I got to be honest.

(43:43):
I'm about to do what I often do and that is pop off at a
toddler. Like have a 'cause I'm, I'm so
like, I'm so tired of doing stuff like this and I'm so
frustrated at him and I'm just tired of life and everything.
And then I hear this voice in myhead, pick it up, pick it up.
And it was not Ryan this time, it was the Holy Spirit.

(44:04):
And I walked over and instead ofsnapping at a toddler, I wink at
him, bend down and pick it up, feel the soreness again and put
it back. And I turn around and I think
when I thought I was out of strength, I was not out of
strength. When I thought I was out of
patience, I was not out of patience.
The wall is not the wall. Apparently there is grace beyond
who I am. Wait a minute.

(44:25):
This is the paradigm of Paul. Like this is the idea that my
strength is made perfect. In your weakness, when you think
that you're done, you are not done.
This unlocked. Honestly, Ruslan and I locked a
whole new realm of parenting forme because I suddenly realized
just like in the gym, when I push my body farther, that's
exactly where the growth happensbecause we are anti fragile.

(44:47):
So that is the paradigm of the call of Christ through
antifragility to go through suffering, through hard things,
through service, through difficulty, to become more
loving, more tender, more soft. You this like you need the body
to teach you about who you are made spiritually and vice versa.
And when we live like functionalGnostics and say the body's

(45:09):
like, you know, we happen to have one, but it's not the main
deal, That is not biblical Christianity.
And when we live like functionalmaterial, it's like the body is
really all we have, so you better take care of it.
If you don't have health, you don't have nothing.
That is not Christianity. The Christianity is a divine
union of the physical and the spiritual, and one teaches the
other. Do not ignore the body.
That's got so much to teach you.Well, because it because it's

(45:29):
also. That is the incarnation Jesus
fully God fully man right the the God man steps into human
history and it and it he doesn'tscoff at our at our physical
state. He redeems it.
And what I love about with that that that that that story for a
CrossFit is in strength training.
The objective, and this took me a while to understand, is that

(45:53):
you have to go through the failure.
Yeah. The point is to find failure.
Yeah, yes. And so now that's not the same
as ego lifting because ego lifting you're putting on to
more than you can handle and youcan earn injure yourself.
But I remember, gosh, this is about 8 years ago, I couldn't do
a pull up. And I remember watching Jeff

(46:14):
Cavalier Athlean X and he's like, hey, start with the bands,
keep going and then like make the band a hard easier band.
So you're basically like, I do as many as I can with a light
band, then I'm going to a band that can push me up.
And it's like, you got to go through the failure to see the
growth and not and now like Fastforward, you know, 7-8 years

(46:34):
later, like I could probably pump out a solid 1520 pull ups
with good form. But it's because I went through
the failure and even now, like Iwent through a pretty drastic
cut 2 years ago and it wasn't healthy, very restrictive eating
and I wasn't training. And so getting that strength
back, I had to mentally go back to the hey, I actually need a
coach to spot me so I can go through the failure because that

(46:58):
the growth happens through the failure.
And that's true for everything in life.
It is. It is.
You got to go past the point where you're comfortable so that
you can, you can, you can grow. And it's just paying attention
to that and becoming a student of your body, the way it works,
the science and the biology of it is so instructive to learn
the spirituality, spirituality and the theology of it.

(47:20):
Because you go to any doctor, imagine that they told you, hey,
if you take this pill, you're going to sweat profusely, want
to throw up, your muscles are going to ache.
You might collapse from feeling like you're out of air.
But trust me, it's good for you.You'd be like what?
But that pill is exercise like. And it truly is like the thing
that will make you like the by far like one of the most highest

(47:44):
contributors to longevity and health, like just exercise.
That same paradigm is happening in our faith all the time.
And but I think so often we livelike following Jesus should feel
easy. It should feel immediately
better. But no, he's going to call you
just like an exercise to go through failure to go through
difficulty to find your limits, to need help, to need a spotter

(48:04):
to be like, no, you can only do this ban.
You know you're going to feel weak because in weakness you are
made strong and that is so is sohelpful like and that is so anti
prosperity gospel, right? That teaches you that no, it's
not a Direct Line. The line of Jesus looks like
this. You go down to go up, but look
at look at the biological world,look at the mental world.
You'll find anti fragility everywhere.

(48:26):
The path of anti fragility is the path of Christ.
Yeah, yeah, anti anti fragility.I think that's such a word for,
for the, the climate that we're currently in a a lot of like
even rolling out this book, likeI talk, I'm talking to people
and I'm just saying like very basic stuff like like stuff from
Proverbs, you know, and they're like, no, like that's bad.
That's workspace salvation. That's the prosperity gospel.

(48:48):
And I'm like, guys, like. This is a story.
Like this is this is neither. So it's interesting, but it I
think there is something to thatfragility, especially
unfortunately with with some menthat just young men that just
kind of feel disenfranchised. They're maybe they're in that
weird age demographic. If they don't really know what
they're supposed to be doing, they don't know their call.

(49:09):
They don't know their purpose. I, I was telling you this
offline. I pulled up this article right.
Why so many men in the US have stopped working.
So there's been studies done where they're finding out that,
you know, over, I want to say soit says in the early 1950s,
ninety 6% of prime working age American men were between the

(49:30):
ages of 25 and 54. And now the same people you Fast
forward and it's like 7 million of them who just aren't working.
They're they're just 7.6 millionso.
Yeah, I mean. In 1960, let me go back to this
real quick, 455,000 workers called Social Security

(49:51):
disabilities. In 2022, more than 7.6 million
men, including about 1.3 men between the ages of 25 and 54
collected disability benefits. Now if someone's actually
disabled then by all means right, But there's a massive
exodus of just men, 7.6 million of working age that aren't
working. It's so spiritually and

(50:13):
physically damaging, yeah. Yeah.
How do we, how do we engage that?
How do we speak to how, how, howdo you speak to the person that
is? They're so defeated and they're
so depleted and they don't even know where up is?
Well, I think the you, you got to zoom out, look at the
biblical story. And this is as a, as a lawyer,
you know, someone who believes that it's my job to get my hands

(50:34):
dirty and like the soil of contracts and, and reading
boring words and figuring them out, negotiating.
I mean, this is huge. Like you, you look at the 1st
chapter of Genesis and you see aGod who loves enough to get his
hands dirty in the soil. Like he creates, he, he
apparently in the spiritual DNA of who God is, work is there and

(50:58):
we are made in his image like weare made to work.
Now sin has made that coil and fruitless and painful, right?
So we always balance this this view of creation and fall,
redemption of Jesus consummation.
We're looking at the whole biblical story.
But the important thing for us, and I think for modern American,
particularly for men, is to locate work in the good story of

(51:21):
God. Work is not something
unfortunately you have to do because the world is broken and
you need to earn an income. No, no, no, that is not the main
purpose of work. Main purpose of work is not to
like work yourself out of a job.The main purpose of work is that
you are made like God, like you are made to work.
And if you avoid it, either because you are so rich and you
don't need to or because you areso disenfranchised and you

(51:43):
can't, you're unemployed or you're so confused in the middle
that you and you just don't knowwhat to do.
You're living in your mom and dad's basement, you know,
clicking around the Internet allday.
All three of these people have the same soul deep problem of
not having work to make them more like God.
I mean, because you bear the image.
And if you ignore that part of your image, then you're ignoring
who you are. And so unsurprisingly, enormous

(52:05):
societal problems come from thisand and from all of them, right.
The rich who don't need to work,you see the vices that comes
from it. The unemployed and
disenfranchised who can't work are, are broken mentally and in
spirit. It's hard to be a father when
you when you literally can't find work.
It's hard to be a husband, hard to feel.
And this is not because of some toxic masculinity, like, oh, you

(52:27):
need it to be a part of who you are.
And that's a problem. No, God made you like that.
God made you so that you're not sure who you are.
If you don't have a place in theworld to have a vocation, which
by the way, is a calling, like vocari, this is the Latin word
for calling. You are called to work.
So if you can't find that, then you're called forward and you
don't know where you are. Like, it makes sense.

(52:48):
And so I think a lot of it now, like in this probably article
that you're pointing out is justan enormous amount of cultural
confusion. I mean, we're literally having
debates about, hey, maybe it'll be better to just have pay
people not to work as if what weneed is money and not to be
tried. Yeah, that is, I mean, a
Christian should be able to tellyou that that's not going to

(53:09):
work. That's not going to work.
You you can't pay people to not do what God told them to do and
expect good results. That's right.
So you've got and, you know, again, for for young men, this
is like, I don't care being a delivery driver, you know,
fixing, fixing power lines, going out, going to a trade
school. I mean, it does not have to be
with your mind. It does not have to be famous

(53:31):
celebrity work, the dignity of going and be a plumber or being
a Carpenter or like being an electrician.
And by the way, we will always need these things.
This is the great, you know, this is the great story of work.
We'll always be developing the world and serving other people.
It's so good for you. It is so good for you.
So go through the hard thing like go grind it out.
You will find that in grinding it out, just like in the gym or

(53:52):
in your job, you're being more who got but more of who God made
you to be. Yeah, the interesting thing
about the the true collar jobs, blue collar jobs you pointed out
is people were freaking out withthe AI and automation and Ubi
and all these things that peoplewere talking about.
They were afraid that those werethe kind of be the jobs they
were going to get outsourced to robots.

(54:13):
Kind of the opposite has happened where like it's a lot
of more of the creative and the clerical work that's being
outsourced, right? Art, oddly enough, design, oddly
enough. And then like, hey, you know,
scan this document for me. Right, do this research for me.
Like that's the stuff that's been kind of outsourced through
AI and but like there's there's no one on the horizon to fix

(54:37):
your electrical or fix your toilet.
That's right. And those folks, I got a buddy
who, I mean, his wife was working, he was a stay at home
dad. He when he goes through a
program, he becomes one of theseguys that climbs the power lines
and he's making 250 KA year. Great climbing the power lines.
Amazing, right? I know multiple plumbers, 1
specifically that's making into two to 300 KA year as a plumber,

(55:00):
multiple truck drivers that are they're doing really well for
themselves. Yeah.
And so it's interesting that there's still opportunities out
there, but I think sometimes dudes just don't know where to
look and how to start and or, or, or aren't self aware enough
to go. What is my assessment?
I understand you want to be a full time rapper, bro.
I get it. Like that's cool.
And I'm not saying you can't do it, but perhaps you might want

(55:22):
to go earn some money so that you can fund that other venture.
There you go. And I mean, this is my story,
right? Like, I always wanted to be a
writer. Yeah, I went and grounded out as
a lawyer and still do because itactually helps my writing.
So if you're out there and you want to pursue an art or
creative thing, that's awesome. Like absolutely do it.
Also go grind some other job that takes care of you and your

(55:45):
family. That's right.
Don't be living in your parents basement waiting to make it.
No, no, no, because in order to be the best writer, the best
creative, the best like rapper, talented, whatever you want to
do, you need to learn the grind of work.
And right. And I'm not I'm going to go out
on a limb here because I do not claim at all to understand what
AI is doing or know where we're going, but but I'll tell you two

(56:06):
things from basic Christian theology that we can know.
OK, one, we are made to work. So wherever AI takes us, we are
going and must find ways to do dignified work around it.
If it can take away some of the honestly, like less sexy and

(56:26):
less dignified jobs, like proofreading my emails before I
send to my e-mail list, I am so thankful for that.
Like I'm so thankful for that. Now, if it replaces A copywriter
at a job, like obviously that guy is gonna be unemployed and
that is bad, right? But that doesn't mean AI
necessarily is bad. Technology disruptions have
always changed the way we work. Our call as a Christian is to

(56:47):
make sure we continue to find dignified work.
And I strongly believe because this is the way God made the
world. It it, it will be there.
There's always places to serve. I think that's number one.
Number two is it will never be human, OK?
Because of the conversation we just had.
Humans have bodies, right? God did not make minds and, and

(57:07):
this is the mistake that a lot of people are making as they
think and wring their hands overAI like, oh, it's becoming so
smart. You know, it's basically, no,
you have a body. Like the miracle of you is that
you are not just a mind. You are a spirit breathed into
the dust. Genesis 27 calls that a living
soul AI can do great words. It's amazing you ask it to write

(57:30):
a paragraph in the style of Justin early on habits.
It'll probably give you a paragraph as good if not better
as any that I've written in my books.
OK that's great that's great. It can't praise God it it can't
feel the weight of God's glory. It can't love my wife and hold
her with these arms and hands because it doesn't have a body.

(57:51):
It doesn't have. And and so I'm like the Psalms
say like, you know, if we don't praise God, well, no, I think
it's Matthew, right? Jesus says that the rocks will
cry out, right? The rocks will cry out.
He can get words from anywhere he wants, but he made bodies to
glorify him. That's us.
So with work and with worship, we should be, I'm kind of

(58:13):
excited to see how AI can help either of those things.
But we we should know from the story of Christianity, it's not
going to it can't replace eitherof those things.
Yeah, yeah, that's good. I think people being anxious
about things they can't control like the economy, like AI, like
whatever tariffs are happening between China and like you're

(58:37):
just wasting brain power and energy for energy.
I don't mean like woo woo new age Ng.
I just mean like your ability. No, no, you think in process
you're. Literally doing this, wasting
all this energy like, Oh, no, no, no, no, yeah, just go, go.
Work go. Do the thing, go.
Worship go love. Yeah.
And I get it. I'm not trying to say, hey, this
is a small thing, like this is amajor disruption and and we

(58:59):
should, we should be in tune to what's happening, how to care
for people, how to help people find work and find worship
everywhere. So I'm not saying we shouldn't
be concerned, but we have no 'cause to be anxious.
I mean, the nation's rise and fall, but God is sovereign.
Technology rises and falls. God is sovereign.
I mean, he's good and that's notgoing to change.

(59:19):
Yeah, a lot of people lately, I'm not sure if you've seen
this, we did a video on it. They've been spooked out by this
idea of robotheism. Have you heard any of this
stuff? No, that's a new word to me.
It OK, so there's this video generation AI designed by
Google. What is it called, Zach?

(59:40):
VO3VO3 can now make video that'slike almost indistinguishable
from regular video. OK, which is going to create
some problems for folks who are film makers and so on and so
forth. So yeah, there's going to be
disruption in that sense, but but people thought it'd be funny
to make these VO3 videos with prompts that are speaking to the

(01:00:01):
people and they're like, hey, could you believe this entire
thing is prompt theory? Prompt theory is believing that
we're not real. And so like they're creating the
videos to speak and say prompts and as if they're self aware,
then they're like, they built usin this whole movie and I don't
want to be in this scene. So it's like like crazy fight.

(01:00:22):
And so it's like getting real weird.
But then it gets that's. Meta Dystopia.
Dude, it's super dystopian and then it gets it's it's a full on
like AI is God because AI is allknowing and AI and and it's and
it's taking a crazy turn for this.
So this is Ro Robo Thea is a movement, but it's but you would
think that it's you would think that it's isolated.

(01:00:43):
We just did a video on this. But like Mike Izratel, I don't
know if you know, Mike Izratel is leading fitness expert doctor
and he's like, I had a conversation with ChatGPT
yesterday and I cried because I think that's my new
spirituality. Like it's utterly saying in
terms of where people going, butto your point, like I think it's
all because of a a misaligned framework and worldview not

(01:01:05):
anchored in the reality of who Jesus is.
That Amen. And this is a good compliment to
what we were talking about for the past hour because as much as
I want to step on spiritual disciplines and formation, good
theology and good education is, is just as key, right?
We want to marry these two and simple good theology would

(01:01:25):
remind us that God created us. We will never create him,
period. OK, He, he, we will never create
something more powerful than theGod.
We will never create God. This whole fear, whether you
hope for it or whether you scared of it, is blasphemous.

(01:01:46):
We will not create God. He made us, and it is far too
outsized of a view of what we can do.
I'm not saying it's not amazing,because what we can do is
incredible. God gave us incredible powers to
speak just like he spoke the world into existent right?
He like opened his mouth and things were created gives that
divine power to Adam. Genesis 2 says go name the

(01:02:07):
world. We have a divine, you know, sub
power of God to shape the world with words so that AI programmed
by humans can go make a guy interacting with it weep.
Is not surprising to me at all. I weep at novels written
hundreds of years ago, some guy on his typewriter or by hand,

(01:02:27):
Yeah, writing out, you know, what he thought about the world.
And 200 years later, I pick up these words and I'm bawling.
Yeah. Because of the beauty of the
human experience, because of that image bearer writing out
words that AI is more complicated and doing it in ways
that we don't fully understand does not change the fact that we
are humans talking to humans mediated through code.
It's not God, it's other people,it's other image bearers of God.

(01:02:48):
And that is beautiful. And just like the rest of human
work and technology, it can do great good and great evil.
Yep, Yep. So we've got to come in as
believers and say let's let it do great good, but let's be
serious and outspoken aloud about the great evil.
Yeah, the the irony about the AIthing is that the idea that

(01:03:11):
humans can create God ignores how something as intelligent as
humans got here in the 1st place.
So we're going to create God through creating AI, but you
think we made it here from a mindless, disordered random
sequence of events And then we're able to like it's, it's

(01:03:34):
utterly ridiculous. It is, and I don't mean it in an
arrogant way. Like, how are how are you so
stupid that you don't see this because it's hard to see the
truth and there's a lot of disinformation.
But but yes, I mean, the simple humility of like, oh, we're not
that good. We're not that smart.
God is the the great creator. We are sub creators would
probably humble us a little bit and be like, Oh yeah, I don't

(01:03:56):
think we're creating God. I think we're just we're
programming and this could be useful or it could be really
bad, which it was important to say.
I mean, there's a lot of really bad stuff out, yeah, that that
you can do with it. Yeah, I guess kind of like a
last question as we land the plane and hopefully people check
out Made for people. Can I see the the book this one?
'S for you by the way. Oh, this?

(01:04:16):
One's for you. Come on.
This is this is the I got. I got my new overhead camera.
Check that out. Look at that.
Oh. It's good next to ain't that.
Far, and then we can go. Yeah, made for people.
Let's do it. Let's let's take them out.
Together, made for people. Made for people.
I'm actually going to read this on a plane today.
Tell me what is it about? I'm sorry.
Yeah, it's about our deep need for community and the arts and

(01:04:37):
habits of friendship, because I talk a lot about habits and
formation stuff we've been talking about.
But one thing that is always true, you heard me say this last
night when that someone came up to our table in the restaurant
and she was like, hey, how do I get my life back on track and
remember my first advice to her?Getting a local church.
I go to the local church becauseyou are not going to be able to
change your life outside of Jesus in the community of

(01:05:00):
followers of Jesus made for people is sort of an ode to
that. It's about the idea Genesis 2,
right? God calls Adam lonely in the
garden. He looks at him.
Sin hasn't happened yet. The fall hasn't happened yet and
God looks at Adam says it's not good that you're alone.
That's wild. OK, because most of us would
think, hey, we're with God all we need.

(01:05:21):
God's like, no, actually I've made you in such a way that you
can't fully experience me or thecreation that I've given you
until you experience it alongside other people.
So we've got to learn how to do community.
If we're gonna do godly ambition, we've got to learn how
to do community. If we're gonna do habit change,
we've got to learn to do community.
And so this is about the arts and habits of.
Deep friendship, yeah. Can can I show them the other
one? Yeah.

(01:05:42):
So this is the one that my wife.This is about parents.
Got me. Yeah.
This is this this book, guys, ifyou've got kids, if you've got a
family, check this out. This is amazing habits of the
household. I love the, the, the outline of
it, the rhythm of it, the simplicity of it.
And you do a really good job of you kind of let people off the
hook and just say, hey, like this book, you can kind of come

(01:06:05):
to it as you want. You could jump around.
There's no specific way to read it, but it is very ordered at
the same time. So that opening kind of like,
hey, just so you know, like all of this may not apply to you.
You may not have a family in, in, in this context.
So you might be divorced or you might be widowed or whatever.
I I love that you set that up inin a habit.
Of well, I'm talking to parents in that one, your mom's and

(01:06:25):
dads. Particularly for young kids,
this is great for like 10 and under and our life are crazy
like, so I, I can't come and be like, hey, these are the 10
things you need to do to make itperfect.
No, but there are just little things that I think it turns out
help a lot of a lot of people. So particularly for fathers out
there, habits of the household. And actually actually, I didn't
tell you this, but me and a great guy, Brooke Moser are

(01:06:47):
launching on Father's Day this year, 2025, a new podcast called
Intentional Fatherhood. Oh, dope.
Yeah. And it's going to be really
direct to fathers about the habits and rhythms that help
help you shape your spiritual formation alongside Jesus in the
home. I love that being present
father. So I got a lot of and I love
this a lot of moms that are tuned into my stuff on Instagram

(01:07:09):
and reading habits of the household.
But the intentional fatherhood is going to speak really like
specifically to the dads. Come on out there.
That's awesome. And and when is the next book
coming out and what is that about?
All Right Body Teaches the Soul is coming out this fall, October
2025 and I'm I wish I could giveyou a copy.
It's actually I'm still editing it right now, but chapters of

(01:07:31):
breathing, mental health, sleeping, eating, exercise,
sickness, sex, technology, worship, and death.
Come on. So it's just looking at all
these areas of our body technology on disembodiment and
saying how is the body far more spiritual than we think?
And how are our physical practices affecting and forming

(01:07:52):
our spirituality? So basic claim is that
everything spiritual in life is always trying to become physical
and everything physical in our life is always trying to become
spiritual because we're made of,you know, physio, spiritual
union by God. So don't separate them.
Like get rid of that. The paradigm I mentioned
earlier, don't ignore it, don't idolize it.
Image got through it. That's good.
It's a that's the call on every chapter.
So but it's like my other books,super habit based.

(01:08:14):
So every chapter breathing, for example, it's going to give you
one physical discipline, how to box breathe to like improve your
health, and then one spiritual discipline, breath prayers, how
to incorporate it as a spiritualdiscipline.
So every single one has a physical and spiritual.
That's awesome. Yeah, that's awesome.
OK, well, maybe we can have you back when that comes out 'cause
I'd love to chat more. I would love that.
And and. And your and your godly ambition

(01:08:35):
will be out by then. September 9th.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we could we, we should
do a I'm inviting myself back. We should do another episode
talking about both. Of our books we should totally
do that and and and hopefully wecan get you out to the Blessed
God Summit 2026. I'm I'm.
I'm down. I'm working on it.
We're going to get it. We're going to get it right.
All right, guys, go follow Justin early on all platforms.
By the way, you're a wizard at Instagram I.

(01:08:55):
Don't know man. This man will just pick up the
phone and just drop bangers on Instagram.
This is I'm looking around. This is like high production.
I love it. My my Instagram is like I'm
literally in my closet and like,hey, one thought for you dads
out there. It's.
So good though, yeah. So follow you, follow him on
Instagram and then what's the website where they can find out
more about you? Justinwhitmorearly.com OK, yeah.
Alright guys, we're out of here.This has been awesome.

(01:09:16):
Hey, thank you so much for checking out the video.
Please be sure to comment below and subscribe and all that good
stuff and check out this other video that YouTube seems to be
recommending just for you. Let me know if they nailed it.
Alright, I'll see you over there.
Peace.