habits on Everyday Life

Have you ever seen As Good As It Gets, the late-nineties film starring Jack Nicholson? In it, Nicholson plays a cranky, misanthropic writer in New York City, snapping at anyone who crosses his p...

Good habits are not made on birthdays, nor Christian character at the New Year. The workshop of character is everyday life. The uneventful and commonplace hour is where the battle is lost or won.

Living for what gives or maintains the greatest amount of personal comfort is our long-established habit. At the core, that’s what comfort is—it’s a habit, a way of life. Comfort has become the defaul...

A 2014 study by Wendy Wood found that approximately 40% of people’s daily activities are performed out of habit. According to Wood, “an important characteristic of a habit is that it’s automatic…We fi...

For the past two weeks, the Strachan family has been living, working, and playing in Southern California, primarily at the beach, thanks to a close friend (yes, I know how ridiculously blessed we are)...

To experience the richness of life in God's kingdom, we must reorder our lives. We need to see through the shallow promises of our culture, and we need rhythms, signposts, and practices that reori...

Most people I know who establish new patterns of healthy living do so in community.

Gracious, Heavenly Father, we are people who often live our lives in routine, but who rarely enter into the fullness of the abundant life. In Easter, You accomplished the impossible. You proved Your W...

Make it a point to do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

Martin Luther, whose actions sparked the Protestant Reformation, recommended a very manageable start to the day. He wrote: In the morning when you get up, make the sign of the holy cross and say: I...

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is...

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it this way. Each of us has what he called a habitus: a set of dispositions to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways, without mu...

To change one’s life: start immediately,  Do it flamboyantly,  No exceptions.

Ancient lighting took  Work I remember watching a movie (I think it was The Mummy ) where the protagonists descended into an underground structure built by the ancients. The structure was completel...

We often get into ruts, on treadmills, caught up in patterns and habits that aren't useful. We don't stop to ask, what can I learn from this week that will keep next week from essentially bein...

Experience tells me that people's hearts are seldom changed if they are not changed when young. Seldom indeed are men converted when they are old. Habits have deep roots. Once sin is allowed to se...

Holy Lord, High Priest over all people, You have given us everything we need to live a life of flourishing. You have met our needs and provided a model for what a life-with-God looks like. But we oft...

Blog post adapted from Necessary Christianity by Claude Alexander, Jr. Adapted from Chapter 5, "I Must Be Diligent" The life of Jesus reveals that God’s call and God’s claim on the belie...

What Determines Happiness?  Imagine a movie theater full of a hundred people. These hundred individuals represent the full continuum of happiness: Some are exceptionally happy, others less so, and ...

Preaching Commentary Ancient lighting took  Work I remember watching a movie (I think it was The Mummy ) where the protagonists descended into an underground structure built by the ancients. The ...

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it this way. Each of us has what he called a habitus: a set of dispositions to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways, without mu...

Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed. If you did it ri...

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit, because habits allo...

In one of his letters, the philosopher and psychologist William James shares a conviction regarding his focus not on big, grand things, but with the small “almost invisible” decisions: I am done wit...

In the film  Memento , we meet Leonard, who is searching for the man who killed his wife. He appears to be the typical Hollywood hero of the early 2000s. The hair is right; the jaw line, the atmospher...

Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.

In this short excerpt, author Ashley Hales describes the disembodying reality of being glued to screens, and a few ways to become back in touch with our embodied selves: Perhaps we look to a scree...

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

We become what we repeatedly do.

Finding Grace in Lent The practice of Lent has become a place of grace for me over the last number of years. While some feel that Lent is a failure to recognize that our salvation is rooted in gr...