Atomic Habits meets Jesus, today on Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman. So a spiritual habit is responding to God and paying attention to what He is doing, but doing it at His pace and in His grace. The goal isn't to really do some impressive spiritual stuff for a week, but to make this stuff ingrained in our lives so we are people of prayer and people of the Bible. Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Well, we want our homes to be places of refuge and a spiritual oasis, but many feel like they're failing at that endeavor. Enter our guest today who want to help you build spiritual habits in the home. Two entrepreneurial dads will join us, Chris Pappalardo and Clayton Green. They want to help you move beyond good intentions to actually practicing these habits.
And as always, our host, Dr. Gary Chapman. Gary, my guess is you might have employed some of these habits in your own family and you had no idea that you were doing that at the time. Well, I wouldn't have called them habits at the time.
You're right. It's just things that I did. I learned as I went.
This is true of a lot of us. And that's why I think a book like this is going to be really helpful because it's taking what other people have found to be helpful, bringing it to anybody out there willing to read the book. So I think it's going to be a great aid to parents who want to do well in raising their children. So I'm looking forward to our conversation today.
Well, let me introduce our guest. Dr. Chris Pappalardo is a pastor, editor, writer at the Summit Church in Raleigh, Durham, North Carolina, in that area. He's an author and co-founder of Good Kind, the makers of Advent Blocks, an organization that helps people cultivate the good kind of habits and holiday celebrations.
He's married to Jen and is the proud dad of Lottie and Teddy. And alongside him, Clayton Green is CEO and co-founder of Good Kind. Clayton is also the Summit Collaborative Director, where he supports more than 70 independent church plants.
The Greens live in Durham, North Carolina, with their two daughters, Kara and Susan. Our featured resource is the book Building Spiritual Habits in the Home, Small Steps You Can Take Today. Just go to buildingrelationships.us. Well, Chris and Clayton, welcome to Building Relationships. Thank you for having us. So excited to be here. Nice to have a couple of North Carolinians on the program because, as you know, that's where I live, so we don't often speak to people from North Carolina on the program.
So great to have you here. And we love the Summit Church and that ministry that you're both involved in. So let's start, Chris and Clayton, with talking about your families and your ministries and how the two of you became friends. Which one of you wants to start? Chris, you or Clayton?
I'll take this one. Clayton and I had met years ago while we were both at the Summit Church, but we didn't get to know each other until after he left, went to be part of a church plant in Wilmington, and then came back about, I want to say, eight years ago. And we immediately reconnected and hit it off because we were both trying to figure out how to do real ministry within our homes.
Like, how do we translate the stuff that we're doing for work to the little people that walk around with us? And it really went from good to great one year when he reached out to me and said, hey, I've got an idea for an Advent resource, and I think you'd be the perfect person to write it, which is what started what is now this partnership with GoodKind. And over and over again, him coming to me and saying, this is hard. I wish we could make it easier by doing X, Y, and Z, and me saying, all right, I guess we're about to work on a new project. Well, that's great.
I'm glad that God brought the two of you together. At the beginning of the program, we said this book is Atomic Habits Meets Jesus. For those who don't know about that book, why is it so important?
Yeah, that's a good question. If you don't know what Atomic Habits is, James Clear wrote a book, it's become pretty popular and it's helpful for people who want to be consistent with a new habit being a little bit more consistent. So it draws a lot on habit science and how to be more consistent in your habits. And actually, we kind of make the joke that I'm the habits guy and Chris is the Jesus guy, but it's not exactly like that. But genuinely, I've read a number of different habit science books.
Switch is one by Chip and Dan Heath. Of course, there's Atomic Habits. There's the Power of Habit. I mean, there's a lot of these books. But every time I would be reading these books, Gary, I'd be actually applying it to my spiritual life to be more consistent with Bible reading or to pray more often.
And so I was always applying it there. And then what Chris was kind of jesting about there in terms of our relationship is I'd come to Chris and I'd say, the habit scientists say that reminding yourself is important for being consistent with a new habit. Is that in the Bible?
And he'd say, well, actually. And what we found is what James explains in Atomic Habits, God actually wired into our being and we see that in Scripture as well. So this book is a marriage of those things where we see the foundation of these things in Scripture and we see a direct and practical application of that for what it means for our families today. Yeah. So Clayton, who's this book for?
Yeah, it's for me and Chris, right? Most people, I guess, write books that they're trying to process and they're actually learning something themselves. So if I would just take that and extrapolate it out, I would say it's for any person, but probably a parent who is trying to create an alignment between what they say about their faith and how they actually live their faith. Because sometimes it's hard to actually get consistent in what you're doing on a day in and day out basis. Back to that story that Chris was saying about Advent.
The reason we did that is because in 2018, my daughter Kara said to us, Mommy and Daddy, you say that Christmas is all about Jesus, but it feels like Christmas is all about presents. And so she was pointing out a lack of alignment, right? Eugene Peterson would call that congruence, where what we were saying and what we were living was somehow mismatched for her. And we've been trying to work to solve that in our lives. And this book is the playbook of how we attack those problems.
Yeah, yeah. Well, we talked about the fact that habits, there's a lot of books out there about habits, and then there's a lot of books out there on spiritual disciplines. So what makes this book different? Well, part of what makes the book different is that it is a little bit of both. There's a good friend of ours, as we were getting into writing this book, who we said, hey, what's the best book you've read about developing spiritual habits? And the answer he gave was a book written by a non-Christian that had nothing to do with spirituality. But he felt like it's just the most practical thing in terms of helping me develop better habits, and all I do is apply it to Jesus's stuff. And so we felt like you don't have to just take a really good book on spiritual disciplines and a really good book on habit formations and then try to figure out how they get along. We said, wouldn't it be nice if these two went together, if we could have it be biblically deep, but also that this was really important for us, really, really applicable and practical so people could read it and say, oh, you know what? I could totally do that.
I could do that today. I think folks are looking for that kind of doable things. So I think in that case, that book is going to meet a real need. Our guests are Dr. Chris Pappalardo and Clayton Green. You can find out more about them and our resource at the website buildingrelationships.us Okay, Clayton, define spiritual habits and tell us how you build them into your home.
Give us some illustrations of how you get started with this. Yeah, well, the book opens with a chapter on five things about God and what that means for our spiritual habits. And those are really, really important for us defining what a spiritual habit is. God starts the relationship with us. He wants to know us.
He's there, but we can't see Him. He prefers to work slowly and He is gracious. That's five things that I kind of rifle through there really, really quickly. But that first one ends up being a really big and important thing for how we define spiritual habits. We say that a spiritual habit is us responding to a God who loves us and paying attention to what He is doing at His pace and in His grace.
The short version of that is we respond and pay attention. So when we're praying, we're not initiating something there, right? God starts. God started the relationship with us.
He created us. He is giving us His Word. And so our spiritual habit is always going to be a response to a conversation He has already started. The same thing is true of the Bible. The Bible is God's Word to us, right? And so when we sit down to read it, we're not sitting down initiating and trying to master some kind of new information. We're responding to a God who wants to know us and has revealed Himself to us in His Word.
So a spiritual habit, the way that we define it in the book, is responding to God and paying attention to what He is doing, but doing it at His pace and in His grace. Chris, why don't you walk us through the six small steps that you suggest in the book. And then we'll look at them individually. Sure. Yeah, the six steps are, number one, make it easy. Number two, make it tangible. Number three, pick a place. Number four, choose your timing. Number five, make it playful. And then number six, find your friends.
Okay, let's go back to number one. Spiritual habit should start easily and not just easy, but ridiculously easy, you say. What does that mean? Yeah, the first of the six steps we list is make it easy. And again, the habit science books say this all the time, but we just felt like we had to start here and drill it home because in our practice, and we think we are, a lot of people follow us in this, we get excited about doing some new spiritual habit either by ourselves or with our family. I'm going to pray more. I'm going to read the Bible more. And we set a goal, and it doesn't feel outlandish to us, but we do it for like two weeks, three weeks, and we burn out. And then what happens after that? We feel like failures, if the motivation to start again is then colored with shame because I should have been doing this more.
What's wrong with my heart spiritually that I don't want to pray? So we said, all right, we don't want people to just always be doing the bare minimum, but here's the deal. If you start small, you can do that consistently, whether you're talking about working out or drinking more water or praying. And the more you do this thing consistently, the more it will feel like you're winning and you're doing it right, and that will build momentum to continue doing it. So those small steps, making it so absurdly easy, it's so easy that you're almost embarrassed to say that this is my new goal.
That's actually just right to build momentum to make this a habit, which is what we want. The goal isn't to really do some impressive spiritual stuff for a week, but to make this stuff ingrained in our lives so we are people of prayer and people of the Bible. Yeah, and it has to be something that is consistent with what Jesus says as well. Now, Jesus says we have to take up our cross and follow Him, but He also says that the yoke is easy. The burden is light, right?
So we want to take Him at His word there. But His correction there is against the Pharisees and them adding additional things to do. So it's not that we think that our spiritual lives, there are some hard parts to it. But in particular, if we think about our families, we don't want to be doing a spiritual habit that looks too hard or not appealing to our kids because we actually want to bring them along in it. So making the starting point easy is a way to invite a new believer, of which our children, hopefully, are all going to take that step at some point, and it provides an easy way for us to invite them in as well. So it's not just about us. It's about involving our families as well. Yeah, that's great.
I think a lot of parents are saying, hmm, I like that. Let's start easy. So what about tangible? You say another one is to make it tangible. We came around to this very pragmatically. We made a thing I mentioned called Advent Blocks, which is this Advent resource that's not just stories, but they're blocks on the mantle where you turn each block as the days go along, and each reading builds on that. And we were stunned that it was having the physical thing in the room that made our kids want to do these stories every day leading up to Christmas. And so when we backed up to say, like, was that an accident, we realized, no, the tangible element was what made them care. And that's when we turned to Scripture to say, well, was there anything in the Bible about our faith being tangible? And it's wild to me that we hadn't asked that question before, because the moment we asked it, everything started to come alive, and you start to see, well, God all throughout the Old Testament says, hey, build an altar here for me. Build this temple here. And like telling people to build all sorts of tangible things and often saying, when your sons and their sons and generations to come look at this and say, what is this for? You're to tell them, this is where God met me and did such and such.
So the tangibility was meant to act as a reminder for God's people in the altars of the Old Testament through the Passover meal, which Jesus then picked up, and at the Lord's Supper. He didn't say, all right, guys, we've graduated now and you don't need tangible reminders because this is the varsity version, then they were JV. No, he said, this is still tangible. Like, I want you to keep eating this, keep drinking this, because the more you do this tangible thing, the more you'll be reminded of this spiritual reality.
So give us another example. You mentioned the Advent blocks as a tangible thing. Give us another example of something tangible in a habit that you suggest.
Well, I mean, the easiest one to throw out there would be your Bible. And that's a very tangible thing, right? So we say that the tangible things you have, they should draw you in and they should help you do the habit itself. It's not that we're just saying that you put a piece of tape on the wall that says, remember to pray.
Though that could be something that could help. But putting your Bible beside the chair that you sit in in the evening after your kids go to sleep or that you sit down in after dinner, putting your Bible there, that can be a reminder that you're ready to read. That's a tangible reminder. Another one that our families do is something called the Graticube. It's a 12-sided die that we put on our dinner tables.
There's one on mine, there's one on Chris'. And what happens is our kids pick it up and they roll it. And what they think they're doing is playing a little game with a dice, a 12-sided die. But actually what they're doing is they're initiating a meaningful conversation where we're pointing them to God's presence in their life and how to be grateful about that. And so those tangible reminders, they're kind of like little spiritual speed bumps where they're making us kind of pause, bringing our attention to what we were wanting to do in that moment. Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Okay, number three in the small steps that we can take, you say, is picking a place and how important that is. Yeah, absolutely.
James Clear in that Atomic Habits book, he says that we are often victims of our environment, but you could also be the architect of your environment. So that's what he says, but when we look in the Bible we see that in the Old Testament where God was, was very, very clear, right? We could measure our distance from Him. He was on a mountain and that told us something about Him. He was in the fire. He was in the temple, which there's fire that comes down and there's the Holy of Holies.
All of these different things were instructional. They were telling God's people about where He was, who He was and how to relate to Him, right? So the place that we're doing our spiritual habits, the places that we're living our lives are doing, James Clear says, we're a victim of those things. It's doing something to us. And so, Gary, we like to kind of joke, like, what does your environment teach you about God? What does it teach you about life, I would say?
My environment, I don't know about yours, teaches me that I need to stop by Target and pick up something, because it's right there. And so we think that we can be a little bit more intentional, probably more so in our homes than on the highway, of actually pointing us towards God and thinking about where we're doing our spiritual habits. So if you have kids that are doing homework or homeschool, I think it's probably a good idea to have them reading their Bible in a different location, just because we want them to think of it differently. Or if you're wanting to have a meaningful conversation with your family or people who come over, you probably don't want to be sitting in a room that has everybody's phones and TV around. So the place ends up being important, because the place is actually directing how we're experiencing the moment.
I think we would all understand that reading your Bible in a library or reading your Bible on the side of a mountain is going to make you experience something different, and that's something beautiful. But we think we should pay attention to that in order to take advantage of it. Yeah. So in the spring and summer, taking the children outside at the same place every time, every day for a while, would that be an example of that? It's a different place from what they would normally do? Absolutely. I mean, here's the deal. The last thing you would want to do is to find a place that your kids naturally tighten up and don't enjoy, and then attach something spiritually significant to that, because they will have an association of, I don't like this, even though they can't articulate it.
Yeah. If the weather is nice and you'd be like, hey, let's go outside and have this conversation, or let's go outside and we'll do a brief lesson, whatever this is. I mean, how many times did Jesus offer his teaching in a church setting?
A few times. He was in synagogue, but most of the time he was like, okay, guys, see these birds? See these flowers?
You see that building over there? So I mean, there's a lot of value to taking it outside if you're nimble enough to be able to recognize what God might be doing in that situation and how to make it relevant for your kids. And if you're okay with them finding worms and saying, okay, I guess that's what we're doing now instead, because that's also fine. They're children. Yeah, absolutely.
And that depends on the age too, right? Yes. All right. Number four is a simple steps we're talking about is choosing your timing is important. Yeah, absolutely.
It's important. Gary, I don't know about you, but every afternoon around two or three, kind of want to take a look, take a nap or have another coffee. You know, we have these circadian rhythms.
Daniel Pink in his book, When, W-A-G-N, The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, he says everybody has this peak of energy in the morning, a trough in the afternoon, and a peak in the evening. What I learned from Chris, Chris, I don't know if you want to speak to this as well, but I remember when Chris was writing the book and he wrote down, we didn't create the hours and the seconds. God only created the evening. He created evening and morning, evening and morning. We see that in Genesis in the creation story.
So what we're saying here is the timing really, really matters. And if you're having a tough time reading your Bible, one of the things you could consider is read your Bible at a different time of day. Chris, you have a story that goes along with that, right? Yeah, I was meeting with a guy here in our church, a younger guy who was legitimately doing some soul searching because he felt like he was a bad Christian because he was struggling to read the Bible consistently. And we talked about the spiritual elements.
It didn't seem like he was deconstructing or he had decided that he was having significant doubts. But then he mentioned that I asked when he was doing this and he said, well, you know, just like I always did in college, I'll do this just before I go to bed. And the trouble he was having was that he would fall asleep while he was reading. And so I was like, hey, this may not be a spiritual problem at all. It might be that when you were 20, reading the Bible at 11 o'clock at night was fine because you were alert and wide awake and now you're 30 and that's harder. So don't do it just before bed and you won't fall asleep.
And we both laughed about it because it seemed so obvious after the fact. But sometimes we tie ourselves up and not giving ourselves permission to recognize, oh, wait, the timing here just might be a little wonky that's keeping me from doing a thing I really want to do. Yeah, yeah. And then there are people who think you always have to have your time reading the Bible with God in the morning. But they're not morning people.
Right. And David Pink even mentions that in his book, he says that we each have this kind of U-shape of energy to our day where it starts high in the morning and drops in the afternoon and bounces back up in the evening. But some people have a huge rally at the end of the day and other people have a huge rally in the morning. And it's nice to recognize that to say like, well, if this is a significant habit for you, pick the time you've got the energy. My wife, she's very disciplined, but she just cannot do the like crack of dawn anything. She's got to go to work. She's got to do her things.
And she recognizes like, look, I'm not a lazy person. I just don't like the first hour of the day. And that's OK. And I think some people need to hear that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Yeah. Because they feel guilty if they get the idea that you have to start the day early in the morning with God, you know, consciously sitting down with God. And they're just they're not they're not alert enough to do that. Right. They could force themselves to do it. And then by 10 o'clock, they would have no idea what happened.
They had no idea what they read. Yeah, you're right. Well, Clayton, one of the chapters in the book on the steps that we take in building these spiritual habits with ourselves and our family. There's you've got a whole chapter on play, you know, in your book.
So describe what that means and how a family can make it happen in their home. Yeah, well, Chris's writing in the Advent blocks guide is just incredibly playful. And because we're including our kids played, it almost seems has to be a part of what we're doing.
And it's actually not bad. We did some reading on this because it was so embedded in everything that we were we were doing. And what we discovered is that there's a lot of feeling for adults in North America that probably comes from a very good thing, the Protestant work ethic. Right. Where it's like, I'm working, I'm doing good things.
I'm even I'm doing good things for God. But sometimes that can slip into the fact that work and seriousness is a direct reflection of our maturity. But Jesus says, let the little children come to me.
Right. And the reason that he is giving that analogy there is because he's talking about their humility and how they come into the kingdom. And he's putting that as an example in front of us. What we think happens with play is there's a certain amount of humility that is necessary in order to play with someone. There's a certain amount of vulnerability and connection to someone before you start doing something really silly, singing a song, dancing around the living room, playing a game, whatever it might be. And so when you do that, interestingly, after you played that game or you sang that song, you actually increase your connection to that person and vulnerability.
You weren't thinking about yourself as much as you were thinking about them. And so there's actually these very beautiful spiritual things that are happening in that moment. That doesn't mean that if you are playing a game that it isn't somehow inherently spiritual. But we actually think that it increases memory with our kids. It increases the appetite for them to engage with us.
And so we think you should at minimum be playful with your kids. And in some ways we think play has the spiritual component to it. Kids ministries tend to intuitively get this, but I was stunned that this isn't really a key feature in anything of what people generally write about spiritual disciplines or much of what is written in the habit formation books. But we found that it's really pivotal. If kids think stuff is boring, you can force them to do it a number of times just by making it happen.
But that's not the sort of thing they're going to latch onto and want to come back to. And so we've just leaned into it to say, hey, you know, what would this look like if I were to try to translate this spiritual habit into the language and practice of a seven-year-old? What would make prayer possible for someone that age? What would make Bible reading possible for a seven-year-old? And then just starting that and inviting us as grownups into that. This is true of so many kids' resources.
We found this with Advent Blocks. We wrote it for the kids, but we were kind of like writing it over the shoulders of the parents. So many of the parents reached out to us to say, I never realized this about God, about His presence and His work in the world. And I think it's not an accident that that happened to them because they were reading something that was written for an elementary school kid that was light and silly at times.
And it was just the sort of like approach to something very important that opened their eyes for the first time. This is The Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman Podcast. He's the author of The New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . You can take an easy assessment of your love language and see our featured resource today at FiveLoveLanguages.com. It's the book by our guests, Building Spiritual Habits in the Home. Small steps you can take today.
Just go to FiveLoveLanguages.com. OK, so let's say that a family is working through some of these things, trying to build these habits with their children as they are younger. But then the children get to be teenagers. And we all know that a lot of things begin to happen to teenagers.
The brain is changing and a lot of other things are going on. What if, in a family, you get pushback from your teenagers when you're trying to continue to build these habits into their lives? Or maybe they feel like you're kind of forcing them into habits that they don't want now because they are tending to develop logical thought. And they may question some things that you have been teaching them. How does a parent deal with all of that? Well, that's a great question.
Neither one of us have teenagers yet, so this is what we are actively beginning to think and prepare for. You know, when we think about habits, we like to think back to the verse, Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it. Eugene Peterson points out the fact that that is saying training, not teaching. When we talk about habits, we're actually talking about training, not teaching.
We're like showing the way. The example that we like to give thinking about training is how many five to seven year olds in the United States do you think could go into a gas station and find a pack of Sour Patch Kids and pay for it if they had a credit card in their hand? I would say almost all of them could. Now, how many parents actually taught them how to do that? They actually told, here's what a credit card is, here's where you go, here's where you swipe, this is where they keep the Sour Patch Kids.
None of them. I've never met anyone that has actually done that, but their kids know how to do it. So I think if you're experiencing that pushback, which even with our kids, we've experienced pushback on some things that we tried to do with them. I think what we're doing most is we're modeling for them and embedding in the operating system of their life something that they are going to take with them because they've seen us do it over and over. My mom had a recipe for pot roast from her grandma, and she got the recipe from her mom. All these generations had passed down this recipe, and my mom always would cut off a certain amount of the pot roast before she would actually put it in. At some point, somebody asked her, why do you do that? She said, well, that's because that's what you do, that's what the recipe says. Anyway, she ended up going to ask her grandma, she said, why do I cut off the end of this? And she said, oh, you don't have to cut off the end.
My mother just had a pot that was so small, we always had to, right? That's training. That's training. And I think when we think about it, training over a long period of time, we're going to experience pushback.
But I think that training is going to go with them. Yeah, and I think that's really true with teenagers. A lot of parents struggle in those teenage years because they do get pushback for the spiritual habits they've been trying to build in the lives of those children. Not always, but sometimes that happens. Well, the sixth step that you deal with in the book is the step is to find your friends.
So unpack that for us. Yeah, I've always found anecdotally that the success or failure of any spiritual habit in my life really hinges on whether or not I do that with somebody else at the same time. Not everybody is going to have that as the linchpin for their spiritual disciplines, but it's night and day difference between deciding to read through the Bible in a year by myself and then doing it as I'm doing right now with my small group. This is something about the way God wired us, that we are relational beings. And we know this, and yet we very quickly forget this when it comes to doing significant spiritual stuff.
But God wants us to do this in community. And when we find our friends, or as we often like to say, like companions on a spiritual journey, because they don't always have to be your best friend that you click with. But when you find somebody else you can link arms with, it will make that experience of, say, reading the Bible, it'll make it more meaningful. It'll make it more likely to happen because they'll offer you accountability. It'll actually make it more fun because they're bringing elements to it that you enjoy.
And they'll show you things that you don't know. It's hard to overstate just how big a deal it is to do all of this with other people. This is a saying that if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together. And that's like, God is going to shape us over the course of, God willing, decades.
And if that's the case, then we have to do this in conjunction with other people, rather than blitzing ahead at any one point, all by ourself on one thing. So where might a parent or two parents, where might they find friends that would walk with them on some of this? Clayton and I have found each other for this. And I think the key is to not look for somebody else who's got it all together, but maybe look for somebody else who you can be honest with about where you're not altogether. Because this is how it started with me and Clayton, is us saying, man, I really want this to be the case.
I'm having a hard time doing these devotions regularly with my kids. And then he said, me too. And then suddenly we were on our way. And it's surprising how much that candor of the struggle will put you in a spot where you can find somebody else who's willing to kind of walk along that with you. Yeah. If there's a leader in a church who leads a small group listening to us today, I think this book might be a good starting place for that leader to introduce to that small group. Does that make sense? Oh, absolutely.
It would be awesome for a group to go through. So I'm assuming that parents really have to have a vision for this, this spiritual habit building, if they're going to introduce it to their children. So are there advantages in the parent developing these habits, at least some of these habits apart from their children, just individually in their own lives or the husband and wife together?
How might that work? Yeah, I think that doing it all as a family is one way. I think doing it separately as an adult to then lead your kids would be really important as well.
Like I was saying before, there's a modeling aspect to this. This is not a do as I say, not as I do situation. That's when you really will get the pushback, as if you're creating expectations for habits that you're not also doing in some way yourself. But also just the encouragement there for someone who might be listening that maybe doesn't have a robust list of spiritual habits, is that starting small and engaging with God over a long period of time, we know that God is going to do something in us. So that's where we put our faith, not in our ability to be consistent or to do these things, but actually we put our faith in the God who is going to change us. Also, what we're trying to do is take our kids to engage with that same God. So we want to be leading them in it by engaging ourselves. I want to ask each of you this question. Chris, we'll start with you, but I want Clayton to answer it also. How has this book changed your own spiritual habits?
Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, at a certain level, you've got to feel this as well, Gary. Writing a book puts you in a spot where you really have to ask yourself, am I living this out? I'm about to tell a bunch of people that this is the way and I've got the code cracked and they need to go and change all these things in their lives.
I don't want to be the sort of person who's dishing out advice that I'm not taking. Unfortunately, there was very little as we were writing where we found that incongruence. But one of the biggest in terms of my spiritual habits is just recognizing how important a tangible item is to kickstarting a spiritual habit. And so we've been trying to pray more with our kids and it's an uphill battle right now, not because they're resistant to it.
They actually are quite open to it, but it's hard to find the time where it seems natural and it's not awkwardly jammed in there. So we're trying to come up with some sort of physical thing that sparks the question so that even if just for 30 seconds, we can sit with them and say, let's thank God for something today or where do you need God's help? We're fussing around with things and may not have found the perfect physical object. We've got kind of a fidget right now with some blocks that spin. It may not be the winner, but I think for the rest of my life, I'm going to carry that with me to say, all right, I want to start a new spiritual habit or I want to invite someone else into this spiritual habit.
First thing I'm going to do is say, we need something that you can hold if this is going to take. Gary, I would say for me, it is that I probably set the expectations for starting a new spiritual habit lower. I'm more okay with saying, I'm going to pray for three minutes this morning rather than setting the expectation of 15 minutes. Not because I don't want to pray for 15 minutes, but because I want to be consistent. The more consistent I am, the more engaged overall spiritually I am.
I also think that I'm probably more gracious with myself. Chris mentioned earlier feeling guilty for not doing things the way that you intended to do, not reading the Bible as much as you thought that you would read. It's actually by removing some of that pressure or that guilt that actually keeps me engaged. I'm way more likely to come back because I know, hey, this is hard.
I'm trying to get better at these things. If I get off of my rhythm, I can pretty easily get back into my rhythm without any guilt because I know that God's gracious and invites us back into re-engaging with Him. Even more so, I'm applying that as the seasons of my life change. I recognize that when my kids are three and five, there's a certain amount of time of day. There's a certain amount of thing that I can do because they're engaged in my life in a certain way. When they're 12 and 10, things have changed. Five and three, I wasn't thinking of coaching their soccer and how my car ride with them was pertaining to their spiritual habits and the conversations that we would have, but now I do. That applies to a lot of things in our life.
They're gracious to ourselves and lowering the bar for the barrier for entry so that we can actually remain engaged more often. Is there a time for either of you in which you made a real course correction in your own spiritual life that would be helpful for our listeners to hear? The Advent Block story is a huge course correction for me. Where my daughter Kara said, you say that Christmas is all about Jesus and it feels like Christmas is all about presents.
That's probably the biggest course correction that I can think about. I also think about something that Chris and I have done together in terms of fasting. We both wanted to pick the day of the week.
We were not doing it currently, but last year there was a couple of months in a row where one day a week we would both fast. We had these tangible reminders like Chris talked about, these chips that we would carry around with us that we would write our prayer for the day on. For the first couple of weeks, I would forget that reminder. Sometimes I would be unsuccessful in going through the whole day.
It's actually the location of those chips that would remind me, hey, by the way, it's Thursday. This is what you're doing with Chris. I was blaming myself for not being consistent when actually I just needed to move my reminder so that I actually continued to remember and put a calendar invite over my lunch. Those types of things I've course corrected on as well.
What were you going to say, Chris? I was going to say I'm not sure I could limit this to one. Here's a recurring one in my life. I labor under the view that if something is good spiritually now, then it should be good spiritually every day for the rest of my life. I've had to learn a lot that spiritual habits can shift as your season of life shifts, but that doesn't mean that you've abandoned the faith. I'm not saying you stop praying or stop reading the Bible, but the way you do that, the time of day, the method of engaging. There was a time when I was in seminary where part of my quiet time every day was reading a few verses in Greek and translating them because I thought I want to flex this muscle.
I want to really get to know the original language. I'm not doing that now. There's a piece of me that says, well, if you're a real Christian, you would keep doing that very fruitful thing. I think it just needed to see the freedom that there are a dozen beautiful things I could do to get to know God better and be in his presence. I'm not going to be doing all 12 of those things every day for the rest of my life, and that's okay.
That's a big course correction I find myself having to make over and over and over again. As we come to the end of our time together, Clayton, let me ask you first, and then Chris, I'd like your answer as well. How do you visualize in your mind? How do you hope this book is going to change a family who begins to try to put some of these habits into practice? What is your vision of how this book could be used and will be used to help families? I would love for this to be a book that becomes a strategy for starting new spiritual habits throughout the rest of a family's time together and a family's lifetime. I hope that the six small steps are things that are regularly being tweaked in order to increase the consistency of a spiritual habit and that when the new season comes and a new spiritual habit is needed, that this can be a tool that someone could use to start onto a new journey of a new spiritual habit.
I hope it's a tool that can be used over and over and over again. My hope, in addition to this being very practical, like Clayton was saying, my hope is that people will really take to heart what we mentioned in the book about the disposition of God towards us and that that'll change how they approach their spiritual habits. Because I think a lot of us, if we imagine Jesus showing up in our living room and us handing him a report of how we've done with our spiritual habits, we expect him to kind of shake his head and say, man, I expected better. As I read the Gospels, what I see is Jesus who invites us in and says, are you weary?
Are you tired? I've got a better life for you. Come to me.
I want to spend time with you. And if people really do take to heart that God, even in our failures, wants to draw near to us and wants us to draw near to him, I think that would be revolutionary for the way that we approach our spiritual habits. I know that's been the case for me and Clayton, and I really am praying that that'll be the case for all of our readers too.
Yeah, well, that would certainly be my prayer. I want to thank each of you, Chris and Clayton, for the time you invested in practicing this and then putting it in book form. And I want to also thank you for being with us today on Building Relationships because I think our listeners will find this book to be extremely helpful as well. So thanks again for being with us today. Thank you, Gary. It was a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for having us. Once again, the title of our featured resource is Building Spiritual Habits in the Home, Small Steps You Can Take Today. Just go to buildingrelationships.us to find out more. Again, buildingrelationships.us. And next week, Simple Ways to Make Your Marriage Better. Hear quick practical insights for every marriage in one week. Our thanks to Janice Backing and Steve Wick for their production work on today's program. Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.
