What if the small habits you practice every day are shaping your faith and health more than the big moments ever could?

In this thought-provoking episode of the Collide Podcast, we sit down with Justin Whitmel Earley to talk about how intentional habits and spiritual rhythms can lead to healing, clarity, and deeper connection with Jesus in the midst of a distracted world. Justin shares about recognizing what our bodies are telling us, the power of small habit shifts, and how spiritual disciplines shape not only our faith—but our mental and emotional health. Whether you’re feeling overwhelmed by busyness, longing for healthier rhythms, or craving a more grounded spiritual life, this episode will remind you that meaningful transformation often begins with simple, faithful practices.

Meet Justin Whitmel Earley

Justin is a lawyer, author, speaker, and dad of four boys based in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of The Common Rule, Habits of the Household, and Made for People, books that explore spiritual formation, family rhythms, and the deep human need for connection. Justin is passionate about helping people build grace-filled habits that anchor their lives in Jesus, even amid chaos and digital overwhelm. His story is a powerful example of how ordinary practices can form extraordinary faith.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

1. Why your habits play a critical role in your spiritual, mental, and physical health
2. How to listen to what your body is telling you instead of pushing through exhaustion
3. The transformative power of small, sustainable habit shifts
4. How spiritual disciplines can positively impact mental health and emotional resilience
5. Why healing and formation often begin with simple daily rhythms

How This Episode Will Encourage You

If you’ve ever felt stretched thin, spiritually dry, or overwhelmed by the noise of daily life, this episode will offer practical hope and a gentle invitation to slow down. You’ll be reminded that God meets you in the small, faithful rhythms of everyday life—and that healing doesn’t require perfection, just intentional presence with Jesus.

Connect with Justin - Website | Instagram | The Common Rule

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Hey, friend. Welcome to the Collide Podcast. I'm so glad that you are taking time to make space for your own growth, your own healing, your own walk with Jesus.

It's so crazy with everything coming at us all the time, all our responsibilities, all our opportunities, all the things that we want to do, the things we need to do to really take the time to grow in Jesus, to be centered in his word, to turn on a podcast that is going to bring us hope and healing. I'm just proud of you for doing it. There's a million other things you could be listening to. You could, you know, be on that true crime podcast.

But nope, you're here and I'm glad you're here.

Today's conversation that I'm about to hand you I loved actually was like pressing buy on Amazon this book by Justin Whitmol early, before I even closed the interview, because I felt like it was fascinating. It was fascinating to hear this man who is a lawyer, he's an author, a speaker, he's written several books.

His latest book, the Body Teaches the Soul, it just, it spoke to me and I believe it will speak to you as well. Take a listen, Justin. It's so fun to have you on the podcast.

We just put two and two together and we couldn't probably be any further apart from each other in the United States than we are today.

That's right. But thank you for having me, Willow. I'm thrilled to be here.

Oh yeah, it's so good to have you. And I've been looking into your life, stalking you a little bit to figure out what we could talk about. It's really interesting to me even. Yeah. Uh oh.

You are a lawyer, author and speaker, and a dad of four boys. How did you move from this experience of being in law to now? You know, you've written several books. You just released a kids book.

How did this change happen in your calling?

Well, I always wanted to be a writer, so that's important to know. I graduated University of Virginia as an English Literature major.

So if my 22 year old self found out that I was writing Christian nonfiction that Amazon would mischaracterize as self help, he probably would have been horrified. Seems so uncreative. But there's a story there and it actually kind of explains what I write about.

Even so, I spent my early twenties as a missionary in China before feeling called to go to law school and So I ended up starting my lawyering career just before the age of 30, at 29.

And what should have been the best time of my life actually became the worst time of my life because I had a really, really difficult, dark mental health collapse in my early stage of lawyering.

Because while I had a really good worldview from being a missionary and professional Christian, if you will, in China, my habits got really thrown for a loop in my lawyering years, like law school and lawyering.

I just assimilated to all the typical habits and practices of incessantly being on my phone and staying up too late and not attending to my body and eating and sleeping, always doing more busyness, et cetera. And so it seems obvious now in retrospect, but to me at the time, it was a shock.

My body just totally shut down on me and I started to have constant anxiety attacks and insomnia, and my life really started to unwind. That was in my early 30s, horrible time of life.

But I now call it my second testimony, because it was the time where Jesus showed me that if your head goes one way, but your habits go the other way, your heart's going to tend to follow the habits. Which is another way of saying that habits really shape you spiritually, physically, mentally, emotionally, everything.

And so I'm a lawyer who the Lord is convicting that his habits are important. I'm starting to work on them. And ironically, it's that collapse that leads me to start to write about the spiritual importance of habits.

And I had wanted to publish books and poems, and in fact, I actually had. In my twenties, I had published a lot of poetry and magazines and some short fiction and stuff.

But I got my first book contract writing about ordinary habits as extraordinary spiritual disciplines. And so that was about six years ago my first book came out. And so now I've been bivocational ever since.

I've been lawyering and writing for the past couple years and just loving it. Like, I really, really love it.

So many things I want to ask you, I definitely want to get into this conversation about habits that you mentioned. But before we can we rewind back to this time.

You're 29, I imagine you're like many of us where your whole life, you, you know, you work towards something, right? Like, you graduate from middle school, you graduate from high school, you go to college, then you go to law school.

You're like, I, I got my law degree and now I'm finally made it. And then your body and mind has this sort of breakdown. I'm curious if you knew in the moment what was happening, when it was happening.

Oh, very much not. I was so confused.

I was so confused because I think I had a view of life, that if things were going well up here, if you had the right ideas and things are going well circumstantially, that should filter down into your body and your experience. And so I was so confused.

Honestly, Willow, actually in the very early days, because it happened to me quite suddenly, like one night, I just started waking up with panic attacks, and it never stopped. It was like the beginning of the rest of my life. It's gotten a lot better now, to be clear. But it started so suddenly.

And I remember I told the doctor in a hospital a couple nights in, like, this must be something I ate. Like, this must be some flu or sickness. I mean, it happened so suddenly. So I did not know what was happening. I really did not.

And that's kind of precisely what my testimony, I guess, ended up being, was that I really didn't know that the body teaches the soul, like, that the body impacts so much of our spiritual and emotional health, and that when you have things going wrong in your head, it unsurprisingly, results in anxiety and depression. Like, your thoughts impact your body, but also your body impacts your thoughts.

When you have really unhealthy rhythms, particularly of technology and overwork and lack of sleep, et cetera, it can start to create anxiety and panic, even though you know the right things about the world.

And so, ever since then, I've been really interested in that dual process idea of, yes, like, our head is really important, but also our habits are important, and we just do best when we don't separate them, like, when we think about them together. But it was a long time to get there. I mean, I was very confused at first.

Yeah, I mean, I call those invitations that when things sort of start coming out sideways in our lives, they're often invitations from the Lord to say, hey, we need to deal with some things here. Right. So you kind of had this life.

Intervention where it was a big, blunt invitation.

Yes, a blunt one. How did you connect it to your habits? Cause I think there's a lot of things that people could connect it to. But you connected it to your habits.

How did that happen?

Yeah, that's a great question, because it happened very specifically about a year in to my crisis. So for the first year, I'm bouncing back and forth between trying medication, which I tried, and it didn't really move the needle.

In fact, I suffered a lot of bad side effects. So I quickly got rid of that. Not saying it doesn't help a lot of people, but for me, it was very unhelpful.

I also tried counseling, which I also heartily recommend, but it wasn't really moving the needle for me. And then about a year into my crisis. So keep in mind, this is a really long time, right, to be suffering with pretty bad mental health.

A year is a really long time, but unfortunately, it's pretty typical. These things take a long time to figure out.

But about a year in, I'm sitting at a table with two of my best friends around the New Year, and I ask them to keep me accountable to a new program of habits that my wife and I had come up with, just as a way to sort of keep my life in between some guardrails because everything was so chaotic. So I was just asking their help with a new program, like around the New Year's, of just trying to live a little bit more limited and healthy.

I didn't think it was going to fundamentally change everything. I really didn't. I was just trying to be, you know, a good boy, take one step in the right direction.

What's Wild Willow, is that in retrospect, that evening changed everything. I mean, asking a couple friends to keep me accountable to a couple healthy habits really started to massively change my life.

And they were little things, like changing the way I use my phone. I started to try to practice a rhythm of scripture before phone.

Not opening my phone in the morning until after I had spent a little time in Scripture. I committed to turning my phone off for an hour each day, like, just try to spend some space in silence.

Committed to doing a Sabbath, like spending a day off from work every week. And there was more. I started rhythms of fasting, like changing the way that I was eating.

But I never would have thought that any of this would have mattered so much because all those things just seemed kind of like too little to matter. But in the wake of that moment with my friends a couple months later, I realized my body and mind were feeling extraordinarily differently.

And that was my first clue that maybe ordinary habits could be more extraordinary change points than I thought. And I began to, like, sort of really read on the spiritual disciplines, and I read on the psychology of habit.

And I started reading on, you know, neurologically, like, what's happening during habit? Why do our bodies work this way? And I basically, like, dove into the deep end of habit spiritual disciplines and why these things matter so much.

And then once I realized that they were far More spiritual than I thought. I started doing more and more of them and then writing about them. And it's all kind of spiraled, but I want to say spiraled upwardly.

Like there's, you know, we're all familiar with times where you spiral out of control. This was almost what you call the virtuous cycle where you start to build and you realize, oh my gosh, like, I'm actually trainable.

My body is trainable. I can learn new patterns. And it was such good news to me because I was in such crisis.

I would imagine that when you were in the state you were in, just to see any forward movement and momentum was hopeful.

Oh yeah. I mean, I really thought this is a big thesis of my new book, the Body Teaches the Soul.

I really thought I was stuck with the mental health that I had. I really thought I was stuck with the problems that I had. I didn't, you know, I sort of in theory believed in the gospel that God can change you.

I thought that was like for later, not now.

And so I was overjoyed to realize that God built grace into our brains in the form of neuroplasticity and that I wasn't stuck and that he wanted to work with me to change these things. And yes, it would be really slow, but yes, it would be very real change.

When I think about women listening who, you know, you talked about, when your head goes one way and your habits go another, what are some indicators for them that that might be them?

Well, if you're like me, the indicators is that you sort of feel like chronic guilt and frustration with your day to day routines.

As in, I knew I didn't want to eat the way that I was eating and that was sort of constantly like eating to feel better because I was so stressed, but I couldn't stop it. So there's this nagging idea that, like, why am I eating so badly? And I have a metabolism where it wasn't like I was gaining a ton of weight.

But I was always feeling mad, exhausted and vaguely guilty because I was eating to medicate my stress. I was always feeling guilty about my phone rhythms. I mean, I was always on the phone around my kids.

They were little at the time, but I was always multitasking and I never felt good about scrolling in bed or waking up and checking my email first thing. But those things bothered me. And then. No one likes. Seems so silly to say, but nobody likes mental unhealth.

I mean, anxiety and depression are some of the most sad and frustrating things in the world.

But all these things put together were signs that my ordinary patterns were not in tune with what I actually wanted, which is the fundamental human struggle we so often are. Like Paul in Romans, why do I keep doing what I don't want to do? And why is it that the things that I do want to do, I don't do?

And if any of that resonates with you, I just say, there's your sign. There's your sign that, like all regular human beings, you know better. In what we call your prefrontal cortex or your frontal lobe.

You know better, but that's like, we all know better. That's the thing, the part of our brain that knows better, our upper brain, is not the part that's churning along in habit. Our lower brain.

And this is how we become divided people who are doing the things they don't want to do, and the thing that I want to call attention to is that we.

When you experience that you can't think your way out of a problem that you didn't think your way into, you're talking about a problem of habit, of rhythm, at worst, of addiction, right? So those are the kinds of things where you obviously know better. That's why you are so frustrated.

But you didn't think your way there, so you can't think your way out. You practiced your way there. So we need to practice our way out. And that's where I want to say, so let's start working not on just new cycles.

Let's stop the cycles of shame and talking to yourself and saying, I just need to believe better in myself. I mean, I agree with that, but you need to practice your way out.

We need to start some new habits together and realize that the habits move the heart. And so let's start some new eating rhythms. Let's start some new work rhythms. Let's start some new phone rhythms. I didn't.

I thought that was all legalistic. Like, I thought. And I thought it wouldn't matter. But now I see why Jesus so often says, follow me.

Because he wants you to walk alongside him in order to understand who he is, not just understand who he is. And thus you'll automatically walk alongside him. It's both. It's what we call dual process.

Let's be friends, like the kind of friends who tell each other everything.

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I didn't. I thought that was all legalistic like, I thought. And I thought it wouldn't matter, but now I see why Jesus so often says, follow me.

Because he wants you to walk alongside him in order to understand who he is, not just understand who he is. And thus you'll automatically walk alongside him. It's both. It's what we call dual process.

This is so interesting to me. Practice our way out. Can you tell us like, we're listening and we're like, yes, I'm what you're talking about.

I am divided within myself and you're inviting me to practice my way out. All of a sudden my brain is flooded with, are you going to give me a list of 100 things to start? Do I start with one? How do we do this?

Yeah, yeah. Well, let's start with all the things that we are doing, right? Because otherwise we're going to get overwhelmed really quickly.

The really, really important thing for people to realize is that you already have a regimented program of habits that is defining you physically and spiritually. The thing is, most of us just don't know what they are, okay?

So when we have conversations like this, we don't want to think, oh, no, this guy's going to give me 100 things to do. What I want you to realize first is there's a hundred things you are doing. Everybody lives by habits.

About 40% of our lives are made up of unconscious choices. Like, this is fact.

And so what I'm talking about is looking at those unconscious choices and saying, let's replace them with what Jesus calls the easy burden or the light yoke. I mean, have you ever. Have you ever wondered this? Why did Jesus talk about setting us free?

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. And then also say, I need you to carry a yoke, a burden? Because he's saying that humans, we are made to worship.

So we're always going to look for something to hold up above us. We're always going to look for something that we want to serve. This is why Paul calls it be a slave to righteousness.

We're constantly taking on things that burden us where our lives are filled with a thousand habits to invisible masters. The problem is they don't love us back like Jesus does.

And so anything that I want to talk to you about, to say, let's start some healthy spiritual habits in your life and some healthy physical habits in your life. Because, by the way, the spiritual is more physical than you think and the physical is more spiritual than you think.

I'm saying it's another way of saying, let's take on the light burden of Jesus.

Let's do things that honor a master who loves us back, instead of serve an invisible master on the other side of your phone or on the other side of the food product that you bought or the person on social media who's telling you if you just do this skincare routine or just do this sleep routine, then your life will finally be good again. No, these people are invisible masters that don't love you back.

And what I'm talking about is moving those out to take on the light burden of Jesus, which there are things to do, there are things to do.

But you're going to feel so much better because now you're carrying the easy yoke, and it's easy because he's underneath it with you, like he's working with you. You're not alone.

I love the idea that you're not piling more things on top of things we already do, but you're talking about replacing that feels really freeing to me as I hear you talk about that.

I think a lot of people's mentality around spiritual disciplines or like, doing things to be in a better place with God feel very like, I have to do these things instead of I get to do these things.

Yes.

How do you speak to that mind shift of moving away from looking at things that are good for us as like these heavy burden, obligation.

Yeah. I mean, I'll take two examples. Let's say scripture before phone.

This was one of the key rhythms that really started to change my mental health and then sleep, because I always want to pair something that sounds spiritual with something that seems physical and show you how they're both. One of the realities in my early life when I was in crisis was that I spent every morning waking up and checking my work email. Okay.

And I didn't notice this habit. That's the defining feature of a habit that it's sort of invisible to you. It's just something you do. Right.

90 or, I think 89% of Americans start their morning in their phones. So most people listening, that's just what they're doing right there. You're waking up and you're starting to scroll something.

And so that's right there. So I'm not talking about another habit to add. I'm talking about, let's swap. Let's make a switch.

Let's take that habit of opening your phone and starting to scroll Instagram or TikTok or your to do list or your inbox and say, no, we're not looking first thing in the morning for someone to explain to us, is the world going to be okay today? Because cable news is going to tell you, no, it's not okay. Twitter's going to tell you, no, it's not okay.

We're not looking for somebody to tell us, like, are we going to measure up today? Because Instagram and TikTok are going to be like, nope, you don't measure up. You need to do these things.

We're going to put it away and we're going to work on a habit of just saying, let's go to the love letter of the Bible and remind ourselves that you're loved, you're a dearly and beloved child, and you don't need to do anything today to justify your existence. God loves you just the way you are.

And practice inhabit the great flip of Christianity, which is now you can go to the world offering to give love instead of looking to get it right because you've reminded yourself you've soaked in that love of scripture. And I'm guessing most people listening to this right now know in their upper brain that God loves them.

They're aware of that claim, probably even believe it.

But what I'm talking about, Willow, is the idea of by habit, through repetition, soaking morning after morning, even if just for a couple minutes in the words of scripture, so that that truth that God loves us actually starts to sink down into our parasympathetic nervous system. And I mean that literally, physically, biologically and spiritually, so that we don't just know he loves us, but now we intuit it.

Like, we intuit that, oh, I don't need to go to Instagram to compare myself. I'm loved by the King of the universe. I'll go out to whatever. My job is now to give love.

Okay, so that's a way to practice your way out of something that you already. You are already in a practice loop of comparing an endless examination of whether you can get everything done today.

And then so, on the other hand, let's just talk briefly about that as a sleep rhythm. So many of us are stuck in the mental health and exhaustion loops that we have because that habit of phone use is crowding our sleep out, right?

So we're scrolling in the evening and staying up later for no good reason. And we all know it, right?

And then we're starting our morning and some of us, God forbid, but some of us are actually even checking in the middle of the night, we wake up and we open our phone and scroll for a bit.

And when we remove that from our bedroom, literally, and that you might consider, like actually get an alarm clock and just take your phone out of your room so that you can honor the physical place of rest. You're not just doing something that is wildly healthy for your body that you are.

I mean, your body needs typically at least seven and a half hours, if not eight. And for women, sometimes even more than eight.

Men and women are a little different here, but most of us need between seven and a half and eight and a half hours of sleep at least. Every outcome in your life is going to be improved by it. But you're also doing something incredibly spiritual by saying, oh, I'm not limitless.

Like, I can't just push my body to all ends. I actually am a limited creature that God made frail and dependent on things like sleep and on things like God.

And you honor this dependent rhythm of your life of saying, I just need to lay down for like about eight hours of the whole day and rest. And that that physical act is a grand spiritual reflection of who you are.

And that is that you need to calm down and rest, that God loves you and just be still and know that he is God. This is the Psalms.

And when we pair these kinds of things together, like a healthy waking rhythm of looking at the scriptures with a healthy sleep rhythm of actually giving yourself enough time to sleep, it's incredible to find out how much of our anxiety, depression and other problems of life are coming because we are spinning out our minds in the Internet and killing our bodies with lack of sleep.

And the body can teach the soul in these places where we practice these rhythms and find that actually we're starting to unfold again through the love of God because of paying attention to these little habits in our life.

I was just going to ask you, and then you said the phrase paying attention. I was going to say it feels like the title of your book is inviting us to pay attention to our bodies.

And that will lead to being in a better place with our, with our souls. Are you, are you hearing from people as you're teaching this message that they have been very non self aware of what's going on in their own bodies?

Because I think there's an element, at least to a lot of us and I'm just speaking from personal experience, but I remember a few years back, long story, but I end up in the ER in Covid, and my gallbladder has to be removed.

And the surgeon that came in is a friend, and he said that I had so many gallstones in there, like so many, and they were so large, they had to make a way bigger incision and all this to get it out. He said they'd been in there since high school, and I'm 51, and he said, have you been in terrible pain your whole life?

And it brought up this huge realization that my entire life I wasn't invited to pay attention to my pain, pay attention to my body, pay attention to how I feel. That's what was going on in my family of origin. So as you're teaching this message, the body teaches the soul, are you running into this.

This sort of idea that there's a lot of us who've sort of been invited to not pay attention to our body and not pay attention to our pain and it's almost like a rewiring?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that is a very typical narrative, which is kind of scary, right?

And I think it's really helpful even for listeners right now to say this is not just the realm of mindfulness and self help and some sort of, like, I don't know, Eastern guru nonsense of like, you know, pay attention to your body. This is the way to spirituality. I'm saying the God of the universe created you with a body. His name is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God the Father.

Jesus took on a body. We were made with bodies. We're going to be resurrected to bodies. The Bible tells us the story of Christianity is incredibly pro body.

So it stands to reason that we actually might stop and reflect and say, okay, what does it feel like, actually?

Because whether it's like gnawing hunger right now because you didn't make time to eat today, or exhaustion because you didn't make time to sleep last night, or let's be honest, because your kids kept you up all night last night. But that's holy. By the way, Jesus stayed up all night in the garden for us. We sacrifice sleep for those we love. I just wanted to throw that in there.

Maybe it's like a knot of anxiety and we're not even sure why it's there yet. The beginning of figuring out what's happening in our mind is often figuring out what's happening in our body.

And yes, I think the story of modern life is that we have jumped so quickly from Distraction to distraction, from numbing agent to numbing agent, that we are very, very inclined to either scroll or snack our way to the next dopamine high, not really noticing that there's some problem underneath, like, why do we feel so anxious? Why do we feel so sad? And one part of letting the body teach the soul is trying to practice. I write about this in many of the chapters.

Trying to practice things like stillness, things like rest, things like meditation, things like fasting, like little ways of being still and depriving your body. And by the way, I guess I haven't mentioned yet, the chapters in this book are all practical things like that.

The chapters are breathing, thinking, eating, sleeping, exercise, sex, technology, worship, death. There's also a chapter on sickness and all the things that go wrong with the body.

But there's many places where I just want to ask people to, like, slow down and stop and pay attention to their physical rhythms, because the more you understand them, the more you understand what God is doing also in the spiritual rhythms, because there's not a separation between the two.

Well, Justin, if I wasn't interviewing you right now, I'd be on my Amazon app ordering your book, because I don't say that to everyone I interview.

I'm truly fascinated by what you're talking about, and I think I could see where it could probably move the needle in so many of our lives in ways that we. We don't expect it.

I'm curious, as you have been teaching this message, what are some of the hopeful stories you're hearing of ways it's changing people's lives?

A lot of people are like me in that they really do believe and long for peace to walk with Jesus, but are really stuck in mental health struggles.

And I think that one of the most encouraging things that I'm hearing from people is just how much little spiritual disciplines change their mental health. I often tell people what I already mentioned once, I just want to mention it again, that God built neuroplasticity. That's grace in your brain.

That means that you can change and you're not stuck with the life that you have right now.

And I just hear so many encouraging stories of people who are not like, oh, my gosh, my mental health got better overnight, but rather, oh, I'm persevering now. Like, I see some hope, like the Lord. I feel like I'm working through this stuff. I also hear, like, a lot about people with their children, you know?

So I write about this stuff in many of my books. The body teaches the soul is Hyper focused on embodiment and physicality.

But in my book, the Habits of the Household, there's a lot of embodied rhythms with children, like nighttime blessings of sort of going over parts of their body and talking about how God made them, ways of trying to be attentive to your approach to discipline, like getting on your knees to talk to a child, like ways that hugs can help you reconcile.

And I've just been thrilled to see how many parents find these little ordinary habits with their children to be extraordinary ways to move relationship more into a place of love rather than constant stress. I mean, let's be clear. Children are raising children is like the hardest thing anybody can do.

So it's going to be a lot of stress, but just the way that the meaning can come into those moments of stress. And then I'd say the last one, this is a conversation with everybody. I talk to probably guys more than because I'm a guy.

I talk to a lot of guys about this, but I hear from women all the time just how much an exercise routine has become a spiritual discipline for many of the friends in my life and many of the people that I talk to online and about the book. A big part of my story is about seven years ago I started taking exercise seriously to try to get better in my mental health.

And honestly, I tell people it is a spiritual discipline. I exercise four to five days a week now.

Not because I want to live super long, though I do not because I want the best body image that I can have, though it's a perk to feel like you're taking care of your body. I do it because I feel like when I voluntarily suffer, which is kind of what exercise is, you do something that hurts, that makes you tired.

I feel like I'm taking on a new mental space as a sacrament every day of saying, oh, good things in life are on the other side of hard things. You know, peace is on the other side of pain. Often the things that we want, you have to go down in order to go up.

And this is true with loving your spouse in marriage, with taking care of your children, with doing hard work in your jobs. You have just like Jesus came down and suffered on the cross in order to bring us up to redemption, we have to go down in order to go up.

And I tell everybody with a straight face, like exercise teaches me that in an embodied, bone deep, soul deep way that I don't get anywhere else. And so this way of thinking has just changed how I think about mental health. It's changed how I Think about parenting.

It's changed how I exercise, and I long to invite people to it because so many of us are just stuck on body image. All we're thinking about is, well, what does my body look like and how do I feel about it?

And I just want to set you free from that and say, this is not about that. This is about body as image of God.

It's about this window into the world of how to live and love and serve and find that beauty of the life that comes with living how God made you. And body image is like you're stuck in front of this mirror.

You're closed off thinking about yourself, and I just want to smash it and say, none of this conversation's about that. Like, there's so much of the world of love when you think about body as image of God and so much of a world of shame when you're stuck in body image.

And yet all of these practices can help you break that mirror and shatter that and sort of get out into using your body for what it's made to do. And that is love.

Justin, for people listening as we kind of come to a close on our time together today, who feel overwhelmed. They feel like you're talking right to them.

Yeah.

They feel like their body is letting them know there's some things that are off, that their yoke isn't easy and it doesn't feel light. What's your invitation as we close today?

Well, I'll give you one practical and then one spiritual encouragement, practically.

I would genuinely invite you to pick up the book because most of us long for stuff like this, but we really, genuinely don't know where to start, because the typical program of American Habits has just been a raging river current that takes us downstream, and we're doing all these things we actually don't want to do, and we don't really know how to do things differently. Well, I really wanted to write a book that was practical for people. And so the eating chapter has plans for new eating rhythms at the end of it.

And the sleeping chapter has plans for how to improve your sleep routine. And the exercise chapter has ways to think about exercise for the sake of love and not for the sake of body image.

And so every chapter is literally saying, here's an idea, here's an idea, here's a habit. And you're not going to do all of them at one time, of course.

But I think my invitation would be, if this sparks something in you, you really are going to be helped by picking up a copy of the book and looking at the little small to dos that you can try and it's redundant. I know I've said it a lot, but it's those things that are going to help you practice your way out.

Just thinking about this is not going to cut it though. I'm glad you're thinking about it. I'm glad you're listening. So I would say that.

But I would also leave you with the spiritual reminder that habits don't change God's love for you.

So none of this is going to change the key fact that God loves you just the way you are and all the brokenness that you have right now and all the frustration and the shame and the pain that you are, he loves you. And none of this is legalistic or something you have to do because habits won't change God's love for you.

This is just that God's love for you should change your habits. This is an invitation to live differently alongside of him, which is going to be the most freeing thing that you ever do.

Like that easy yoke that light burden is the way to freedom.

So I don't want you to take it as something you have to do, but I do want you to take it as something that you get to do and that you can do and that I've got, you know, a lot of ideas to help you with. And I think that you'll, you'll find Jesus there. I think you'll find his light yoke there.

Justin, thank you for hopping on today and not only sharing the way that the Lord has shown up in your own life and brought healing, but also you're inviting us to come alongside you to seek more of his help in healing and developing habits that are good for our body and our soul. I just appreciate the work you're doing.

Well, thank you, Will. It's been so nice to talk about it. I hope it helps people. And if it does, join my email list and drop me a note about it.

You can find me at justinwhitmelearley.com or if you do Instagram, I post videos about this stuff there. So drop me a note there. But I'm. I'm so glad to talk about it and I really hope that it helps.

Thank you.

I love that the Lord is in that with us and that there are invitations from him on some things we can do that will actually lighten our load and help us to feel freed up and hopeful. And so I don't know where you're at today, friend, but my hope is that maybe you'll consider some of the things that Justin just had to say.

Maybe the Lord has laid on your heart one or two habits that you need to swap or replace. Maybe he's inviting you in to more rest in one really practical way. I don't know how he's speaking to you, but I'm very confident that he speaks.

I'm very confident that he speaks to you and to me. And he can even use our bodies to do it. So I wonder, what is he saying to you right now through your body? Listen to what the Lord has for you.

He wants for you life and goodness and hope and health and wholeness. I pray for you this week. Keep colliding and we'll catch you next week.