225 Friendship is Essential as a Christ-Follower with Justin Whitmel Earley

225. Friendship is Essential as a Christ-Follower with Justin Whitmel Earley

 

**Transcription Below**

 

Genesis 2:18a (NIV) "The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone."

 

Justin Whitmel Earley is a writer, speaker, and lawyer. He is the author of the award-winning books Habits of the Household and The Common Rule, though he spends most days running his business law practice. Through his writing and speaking, Justin empowers God’s people to thrive through life-giving habits that form them in the love of God and neighbor. His latest book, Made for People, delves deep into the profound impact of friendship and offers transformative strategies to combat loneliness. He lives with his wife and four boys in Richmond, Virginia, and spends a lot of time around fires and porches with friends. 

 

Questions and Topics We Discuss:

1. How does becoming more like Jesus look similar to becoming more like a friend?

2. What are some questions we can ask our friends the next time we get together, in hopes of taking our conversation and connection to a deeper level?

3. Will you share your experience when you recognized friends are essential in the battle against evil?

 

Thank You to Our Sponsor: WinShape Marriage

 

Additional Recommended Episode from The Savvy Sauce:

90 Friendship with Drew Hunter

 

Connect with The Savvy Sauce on Facebook or Instagram or Our Website

 

Gospel Scripture: (all NIV)

 

Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”

 

Romans 3:24 “and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

 

Romans 3:25 (a) “God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.” 

 

Hebrews 9:22 (b) “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” 

 

Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” 

 

Romans 5:11 “Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.” 

 

John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

 

Romans 10:9 “That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” 

 

Luke 15:10 says “In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

 

Romans 8:1 “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”

 

Ephesians 1:13–14 “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession- to the praise of his glory.”

 

Ephesians 1:15–23 “For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.”

 

Ephesians 2:8–10 “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God‘s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.“

 

Ephesians 2:13 “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.“

 

Philippians 1:6 “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”

**Transcription**

[00:00:00] <music>

Laura Dugger: Welcome to The Savvy Sauce, where we have practical chats for intentional living. I'm your host Laura Dugger, and I'm so glad you're here. 

[00:00:17] <music>

Laura Dugger: I am thrilled to introduce you to our sponsor, Winshape Marriage. Their weekend retreats will strengthen your marriage, and you will enjoy this gorgeous setting, delicious food, and quality time with your spouse. To find out more, visit them online at WinshapeMarriage.org. That's WinshapeMarriage.org. Thanks for your sponsorship. 

My guest today is writer, speaker, and lawyer, Justin Whitmel Earley. You may be familiar with his recent books, The Common Rule and Habits of the Household. Today, we're going to focus on the art and habits of cultivating friendship, which is the wisdom taken from his most recent book, Made for People. I also love the subtitle, Why We Drift into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship. [00:01:18] So I hope you experience the eternal value through this conversation now.

Here's our chat. 

Welcome to The Savvy Sauce, Justin.

Justin Whitmel Earley: Thank you, Laura. I'm very, very glad to be here.

Laura Dugger: Well, will you just start us off by introducing your family to us, and tell us a bit about your journey that's led you to where you are today?

Justin Whitmel Earley: Sure. My family, me and my wife, Lauren, we've been married for almost 17 years now. 16, but going on 17. We have four boys, Whit, Asher, Colt, and Shep. They are 11, 9, 6, and 5 at the time of this recording. 

I'm a business lawyer by day, as well as a writer. The really short version of how I got there is, I actually felt called to be a missionary in China after I graduated law school, which was great. But then I had this calling experience in China where I felt the Lord actually pushing me to go back and live missionally in law and business. [00:02:24] So a big career change, but I felt like I was following the Lord into it.

I went really intentionally, but also quickly and intensely into law. I did really well in law school and got my dream job in mergers and acquisitions here in Richmond, Virginia, where I still live now. But I collapsed, I had a mental health collapse my first year of lawyering, where I was just becoming a mess of anxiety and panic and insomnia. 

This is a very condensed version of this, but it led to my first book, writing about spiritual disciplines and habits. Because in that year or so of struggle with mental health, I started to realize that while the architecture of my life was decorated with this Christian content of calling and my worldview, so to speak, was solid, the habits of my life, like the beams holding up that house, were just like everybody else's. [00:03:28] And it was only a matter of time before they collapsed. 

I started to realize that when your habits go one way and your head goes the other way, your heart will follow the habits. And I had really become converted to the nervous medicating lawyer through habit. That led to me really examining the spiritual disciplines and how much they matter, not just to our mental health, but to our overall walk with Jesus, our spiritual and emotional health. 

So that became a real passion of mine, thinking in terms of, how do I disciple the habits of my life to follow Jesus and to live missionally within law? That started my writing journey. There's more to that, but that's how I got into writing. And three books later, here I am today. I'm still a lawyer, as a business lawyer but I also write and speak and love, love doing that stuff.

Laura Dugger: Well, and a couple things there. I'm so grateful for your transparency, but also your obedience to step into this calling. [00:04:27] Because even completing this most recent book that's all about friendship, you share that one of your friends had encouraged you to be careful not to take on more responsibility than your life stage had space for. So as you're sharing your journey, I'm just curious, in this season of life with your four young boys, what does your personal writing schedule actually look like?

Justin Whitmel Earley: Oh, I love talking about that. My schedule now, it sounds... you know, when I try to say my job to people, it can sound overwhelming. But I now think in habits, and I no longer see schedule as a constraint to what would be a life of spontaneity.

This is how I used to think of it when I was in college and a missionary in China, and I hated structure. But now I really see it as the scaffolding on which you can build something wonderful. [00:05:27] So I think of my time and blocks and habits that are scaffolding to build a beautiful life.

For writing, I mainly think about my writing hour in the morning. I try to write when I get to the office at eight from about eight to nine. And sometimes that's actually writing. Sometimes that might be reading or researching. Sometimes it might be like editing an article or sometimes it might be true drafting. But before I start my law work around nine, I just generally... I would obviously say take or enjoy, like savor that hour where I feel like I'm allowed to write.

On the other hand, it becomes a real discipline when you're working on a manuscript because you get tired of thinking. You start to get a lot of self-doubt. Like, why am I even doing this? Nobody wants to read me. Like, who cares? Which is, by the way, spiritual warfare, I think, of the enemy talking to you and saying, you know, what you're called to do is actually not worth doing.

But during those times, it's a real rhythm of discipline to say, you know, no matter what, I'm going to write for this hour. [00:06:32] And slowly across time, you know, if you write an hour a day, you'll have a book or a couple by the end of the year. You know, if you read for an hour a day, you'll have a PhD in a couple of years.

It's just amazing things can happen in one hour every day when it's truly a habit that you put on autopilot. So that's what it looks like for me. Because most of the rest of my day is law and parenting.

Laura Dugger: Justin, I love that so much because it feels approachable if somebody else has that as a goal right now. I love you just cut through the excuses and built that as a habit. That's so great.

With your most recent book, I completely agreed with your theology on friendship. But I'd love for you to elaborate more on your claim from page 14 where you specifically write, "You need friends to be who God made you to be."

Justin Whitmel Earley: I've always sort of intuited that I would not be a whole person or a good person or even a safe person alone. [00:07:35] I've always sensed that I'm better around others and that I feel complete around others. I never knew how theologically accurate that was until I really started digging into what the Bible has to say about friendship.

Because I never really thought friendship was all that spiritual of a topic, honestly, until... Laura, honestly, it started to become so important in my life in my late 20s that I really started to think about it more carefully. I would say my favorite book of the Bible is probably Genesis and my favorite chapters are those early chapters. I think there's so much about who God is, who we are, what we were made for, what we weren't made for in those chapters.

One of the verses that I came to afresh was the idea that Adam was called "not good" because he was alone. There's all this kind of meaning that radiates from that verse. There's something to say about marriage. There's something to say about Adam's vocation and the world that he needed help. There's something to say about relationships, too. [00:08:37] 

When you look at that verse and think, Here's the setup of Genesis. God creates all these things and calls them good. And then He makes Adam in his own image, in the communal triune image of the Trinity, and He looks at Adam and says, this is before the fall, before sin has happened, that it's not good that Adam is alone. That "not good" is so striking in contrast with all the other good, good, good of the six days of creation.

It's odd, though, because Adam is with God. It's strange. Imagine yourself on a date with your husband and you say something like, "This is wonderful, except that I'm so lonely." Whoever's sitting across the table from you will be like, "Wait, but I'm here," right? And so it's interesting that God says... He's looking at Adam and says, despite the fact that I'm here with you, you have an aloneness about you. 

And that's what really struck the chord for me of saying, Oh, wait a minute. God made us such that we can't be who we were truly made to be until we have others around us. [00:09:43] We can't be who we're truly called to be, I don't think we can experience God the way that we're made to experience him until we experience him alongside others.

That is human community. That's marriage. That's family. But it's also friendship. It's the church. So it's just this deep abiding theme in scripture that we are not complete alone, which I think is, you know... this is longstanding orthodoxy. I'm not saying anything new, but I do think it's a minority report in our generation of Christianity. 

I think we've been influenced a lot by the Jesus movement and before the 70s, 80s Christianity, where there really wasn't emphasis on it's me and Jesus, quiet times are the apex of faith. And there's so much good stuff about that. I mean, deep personal relationships with Jesus and studying the scriptures, I will say amen to all day. It's just not the whole picture of the Christian life. And you can't be who God made you to be until you figure out who you are in community.

And that is what this Made for People book is all about. It's about understanding that at the deepest spiritual level, you need friendship. [00:10:55] 

Laura Dugger: Well, and you would say that that goes for all of us, regardless of life stage. I think a majority of listeners are parents with children still living in their home. So, Justin, would you agree that this does still apply to us in all seasons? And if so, what are some practical tips to make that happen even in those child-raising years?

Justin Whitmel Earley: Oh yeah. You know, I was sitting with a couple of friends on my back porch last night around a fire, and we were actually talking about this. We were talking about how lots of us growing up, college or like hometowns, high schools, it's just... it's a typical experience I think sometime in your teens or early 20s, where you realize the beauty of community.

And typically it's because something has stewarded you into that community. Maybe it was a great sports team, maybe it was a great church or good youth group, maybe it was a great college ministry, whatever it is. There are bright points in our life where we realize, Oh... you might not say it like this, but I think you would feel it. [00:12:02] "Oh, I was made for friendship. This is how life is supposed to be." And we look back at those times and we think, yes, yes, that's good. 

But what happens so often is your 20s slowly becomes this drift where you enter into what I call the current of American life, which is to become busier, wealthier people who used to have friends. All of us sitting around the fire last night, I think there was almost a 60-year-old, there was a 30-year-old, there was me, I'm 39, and then maybe there was a mid-40s. We had some age diversity, but all of us unanimously agreed that nothing is going to steward you into a life of friendship in our current American context.

It is absolutely a countercultural move if you want to swim against that current of loneliness. But we also all agreed that it was probably the most important thing in our walk with Jesus, as in, are we walking alongside somebody else, particularly in the parenting years? [00:13:04] And this is, I think, a lot of what causes people to suddenly realize that, is they get a couple years into parenting and they look up and they say, My life is so complicated and demanding. Like, I'm so tired. 

The last thing I want somebody to tell me is, like, you need to do something else, right? And so they're cautious or they might be, yeah, they might hesitate. Oh, well, you actually really need deep friendships in your life. But at the same time, they sense that. They sense, oh, I've lost something important.

I'm isolated, or I'm a person who used to have friends, or I have a lot of people around me, but nobody knows me anymore. Nobody's walking beside me. And I would absolutely look at anyone at any stage and say, Genesis is true. Still, you need other people to know God and to be who you were meant to be. But I would say particularly in the demanding stage of parenting, you need people walking beside you. 

Then if you agree with that... I think it's hard to disagree with it, but if you agree with that, then really we're just asking how, right? We're just asking, well, how does that actually work? [00:14:08] And that's where there's a couple simple habits. They do take intentionality, but they start to make friendship a real part of your life again. And those are worth considering. 

One of the habits is gonna be unsurprisingly from a guy who likes habits and schedules to really see the beauty of friendship that can grow through the seed of habit. And I tell people, think about devoting one of your 168 hours a week towards friendship. Really, that is not a lot. 

And I love this because everyone has an hour, even the most busy person. They could hand me their phone and I would open their usage stash and I would say, "Here, here, you were on Instagram for four and a half hours this week," or "Here, here, you watched half a season of Netflix shows."

There's time in our week where we're so exhausted that we just want to sort of veg out and be alone, particularly if you're somewhat introverted, which is totally fair. But friendship does take work. [00:15:08] 

I'd say last night, that was actually an interesting example. My wife and I were like, We have got a lot. I had a really early morning meeting. We had a bunch of stuff with the kids. But there was a hangout scheduled with a couple people. And I had to be like, "Man, I am actually kind of too tired for this." But on the other hand, every time I go to pray, I'm too tired to pray. Every time  I'm supposed to do a quiet time, I'm like, I don't want to do that. You know, all the most important things in life, you're going to feel some hesitancy, like, should I really do this? 

And I just want to say, friendship should be in that category of discipline where you say, you know, I'm going to do a coffee with this person each week, or I'm going to go to that accountability group or small group or whatever it is. And there's gradations. 

If you're not going to church, you know, there's your hour, start going. Start placing yourself in community. If you are going to church, but you're not going to the small group of the Bible study, then start going there. These are the ways we put ourselves in the way of community. But I think the richest version of this is to set up a rhythm.

I have this with my two best friends, Steve and Matt, where every other Tuesday night, we get together on our porch and just talk. [00:16:09] And it's just an hour or so, but it has such a wild impact on how I perceive myself. 

You know, when I'm able to confess to my friends how I really feel about life or what's really going on or the things I'm struggling with and I hear back from them that they're sticking with me, that they love me and God loves me anyway, there's this incredible thing that happens to you where you realize... and I think this is really important, Laura. So I want listeners to really think about this.

Through friendships, you realize that you can be fully known and fully loved at the same time. And that's why friendship is so important, because that is a way of re-believing the gospel again, because Jesus is the one who ultimately knows us fully and loves us anyway. 

And practicing that sort of full disclosure to be known in life with friends, even just through an hour of hanging out with people a week, to actually disclose your life to them and realize that you're lovable, even in your mess, is an incredible thing, because that's what we were made for. [00:17:14]  We were made to be fully known and fully loved. And an hour a week really gets you somewhere.

Laura Dugger: Again, this is so great. It's just a message of hope and people can problem-solve their own schedules to see how to begin these rhythms. 

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Laura Dugger: There's just countless benefits of friendship. But let's also discuss the responsibility that we have to also be a good friend ourselves. And as Christ followers, we're hoping to grow more into His image and likeness every day. So how does becoming more like Jesus look similar to becoming more like a friend? [00:19:14] 

Justin Whitmel Earley: That's such an important question to answer because it really gets at the nub of why I could claim that friendship is one of the most important parts of your spirituality. It's because Jesus said so. So John 15 is an incredible passage on this, and it's the place where Jesus says that I don't call you servants, for servants don't know what their master is doing, but I have called you friends because I've made known everything the Father has made known to me to you. And then He goes on to say that greater love has none of this, that someone lay down their life for a friend. 

Jesus is doing two incredible things there. One, He's describing His relationship to us as a friendship, like a shoulder-to-shoulder friendship where He's come down to us and disclosed everything to us.

And if you think about that, what is a good friend besides somebody who knows you fully, right? Like, who knows all your stuff and can laugh about it, who knows all your bad jokes but keeps coming to hang out anyway? [00:20:15] That idea like we disclose to friends, that Jesus has disclosed everything to us. He's made Himself vulnerable to us. 

And that's an ultimate sort of vulnerability, right? Because He went on the day after that John 15 speech that He gave to His disciples was the day of His crucifixion. So Jesus is ultimately vulnerable to us. And in that way, we are friends of God because Jesus befriended us, right? He is the ultimate friend.

When we think about the call of life, if you could sum it up, one way to do it would be to become more like Jesus, right? And if Jesus is the ultimate friend, then becoming more and more like Jesus necessarily means looking more and more like a friend. And what does that look like?

I talk about friendship in this book as one way to sum up the covenant kind of friendship that Jesus offers us is vulnerability and commitment, that we're actually willing to be fully known by our friends. And that's that first part of what we were made for, right? To be fully known. [00:21:18] 

Then the second part is to stick around, to be committed to covenant. That's the idea of saying I'll fully love despite the difficulties of it, right? So imitating Jesus's fully knowing nature and fully loving nature, that's I think where we become an echo of the gospel to each other. And that's why... You know, this isn't like a good idea in an age of loneliness, though it is, and America is suffering from a real epidemic of loneliness. It's not just a way to be happy, though it is. All the stats show that like real contentment in life, real happiness comes from relationships.

More than any of that, Laura, it's about looking more and more like the Jesus in whose image we were made. So if he's a friend and we're supposed to look more like Him, we got to look more like friends. And in that way, practicing friendship is a way of sanctification. It really is a way of becoming more like Jesus. That is why it's not just necessary, but also beautiful. 

Laura Dugger: Justin, I appreciate how you draw out different parts of Jesus as our friend. [00:22:21] I think of Him as the most inclusive friend. But then also, just what you had drawn out in the book about Jesus cooking for his friends and the fire being involved, is there anything else you'd like to add about that?

Justin Whitmel Earley: This would be hard to sum up in a podcast, but if people read the book, Made for People, I spend a later chapter describing Jesus' interactions with His disciples after He's resurrected and He meets them on the beach. It's just a really wonderful, wonderful passage to reread in the context of friendship. There's a lot of ways to read it, but one way is a friend that they thought they had lost who they meet again.

And they get one more grand day of hanging out with Him where He cooks for them and He talks with them, He counts fish with them. All these beautifully mundane things that we would do on a reunion weekend with our friends of rehashing old stories, of saying intentional words, of cooking for each other. [00:23:22] 

I just think it's so good for us to read the Bible like normal people and actually imagine it as a story that happened. Like there was a man named Jesus who cooked fish for His friends on a beach one morning. And we can learn so much from just the little ways He interacts with the people that He loves.

In a lot of ways, this book, the grand theme is trying to get you to be a little bit more like Jesus by being a little bit more like a friend. Because I think that's an aspect of His divinity and beauty that we often overlook. So I just encourage anybody to go read that chapter and see what you make of that story of Him cooking for His friends on the beach.

Laura Dugger: I echo that recommendation. Even just that simple takeaway, I think it just struck me of how hospitality is such a pleasurable part of friendship. And we really get that from our creator who when He was walking on this earth, He cooked for His friends. And likewise, we get to do that and share with them. [00:24:24] 

But then also taking all of this information and then thinking as we are disciple-makers, we hope to pass this all along to our children as well. So Justin, what are some practical ways that we can make our homes into the schools of love that you talk about in your book?

Justin Whitmel Earley: Well, my book Habits of the Household, which came before Made for People, is full of all these sort of different thoughts on that. So I'll give you some thoughts, particularly on this part of life, about showing our children friendship and teaching them friendship. But you're welcome to push into any other parts because I love talking about parenting.  I just love being a father. I love children, so happy to go into that. 

But one of the things, again, actually, Laura, that we were talking about last night, I was sitting with the three people who were joining me on the porch. We're all either educators, principals, or teachers. And we were talking about how important it is to help children learn as young as possible the habits and virtues of friendship. [00:25:31] 

And I think typically we're trying to teach children the virtues of it. I mean, typically we're trying to teach them to be nice to others, to be honest with others, to play, to talk, to greet, all these things. But I think increasingly modeling the habits of friendship is really, really important. It's becoming increasingly easy to go through school focusing mostly on your education and mostly where you'll move afterwards and not necessarily being stewarded by your parents into really meaningful social activities.

This can look like a lot of ways, but my kids play sports not because I think that they're going to make millions of dollars as professional athletes, but because it's an institution of intertwining them with teammates. And we approach it as such. 

I don't try to overburden them with travel teams and schedules and lessons to get them to be an incredible athlete as much as I say, "You support your friends here. Be with them in their wins and their losses. Hang out with them before and afterwards." [00:26:35] My kids are young, in between 5 and 11 now, but as they get older, it'll be like, Oh, we go to youth group, not just because I want you to learn theology and more Sunday school answers, though I do, but because friendships are there. I want to put you in the way of people. 

I will not give my sons smartphones until probably either 16 or 10th grade around there because I want to protect their formative years of embodied interactions so that they start to learn what it's like to just go hang out with your friends, what it's like to just be in a room and have nothing to do but talk to each other or play this game or that game. I think there are a lot of ways where parents need to think hard about modeling friendship.

My son Asher came to say goodnight on the porch last night, and I love that. He came to say goodnight, but he saw that I was hanging out with friends. He sees this often. [00:27:35] 

I'd like to think that he's going to grow up thinking, "Oh, this is what a man does. This is what a father does. This is what his mother does. This is what people, this is what Christians do. They hang out in deep conversation with other people." 

But also I want them to see that. But I also want them to be stewarded into those kinds of interactions. Again, like the theme of this book, no one is going to do that for you. The American current is vicious and roaring towards loneliness. 

You and your children will become isolated individuals with all sorts of mental and physical health problems if you do not fight against the current of loneliness and fight for a communal life. And part of the way we do that is we intentionally steward our kids into those kinds of interactions.

Laura Dugger: I'll just share one of my struggles with this. I love friendship, and I do crave that time with other peers and adult conversation, ideally that's uninterrupted. [00:28:36] Our four daughters are between four and a half to 10. I can struggle with guilt if I am taking away time from being with our daughters to then be with my friends. Do you have any wisdom to share with that?

Justin Whitmel Earley: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can feel this too. I definitely think, in my experience, moms are a little bit more prone to this. I think dads can generally be more comfortable with the idea that, you know, I'm out working, or they don't need a ton of time with me. They need quality time at predictable rhythms. 

But I will say I too experience this, particularly if we have a stretch of nights where we're at a church meeting one night, they have a sports practice the next night, and then we have a friend hangout the third night. And I'm like, Oh, for three nights in a row, we've either done babysitters or somebody's, you know, leaving. And I think those are times where I see, Oh, yeah, my schedule is interrupting our family rhythm. [00:29:40] So I'm familiar with the feeling.

But when I look at times like that, I would probably say, what are the meetings or the activities that we can cut before I cut time with friends? Because it's sort of like... I would think of it like church. Like, I would never say, you know what? I need a little bit more time with my kids this week, so I'm just going to skip church. No. We go to church together. That's a family rhythm that's good for us, good for the kids. Despite the fact that we're going to be separated into different Sunday schools, and I'm not going to be with them, it's actually really healthy for them. 

I think probably what I know, at least that moms around me experience in my friend circle, is I constantly hear them say, you know, when I actually discipline myself to go hang out with other people or get a weekend away with the girls, I come back a better mother, a much more present mother, a much more caring mother, because I've had that really essential, important adult interaction time. [00:30:42] 

I know Lauren thinks this, and I know I think this. And I think lots of times we just need that encouraging reminder of one of the things your kids need from you most is for you to be a healthy communal person.

They don't need your constant hovering presence. They need your solid, quality presence of a person who is walking alongside other people. And I think it's just really helpful sometimes to say, Oh, that's worth being away for. You know, I'll come back. This is just an evening away or this is just an hour away. Kids really, really need that. 

I do think this is a whole different discussion, Laura, but we are trending generally in America as parents towards over-prioritizing the amount of time we spend with our children. There's actually a great book by Jonathan Haidt coming out about this this year, just the ways we don't take more risks letting our kids develop alone. [00:31:40] And that might be playing into it.

But at the risk of giving a really long answer here, I think it's totally understandable to feel that guilt, but it's really important to realize you need this to be a good mother and father. So go embrace friendship.  Your kids will be better for it.

Laura Dugger: Well, sincerely, thank you for that. I feel like one of my friends was saying when we were spending time with Chris and Rachel Allen, they said, how God oftentimes will speak to us through our thoughts, that's the indwelling Holy Spirit in us.

And even as you were sharing, and I feel like what you shared was truth, and some of this guilt is the false worldly guilt that's not true. And what I sense, I'm assuming it was the Lord speaking it to me, so I want to share in case this encourages anyone else. That I felt He was saying the gospel is for you too. And just how you're sharing, friendship is part of the gospel, and it models the gospel, and that is for each of us, whether we are a parent or not. [00:32:44] So thank you for that.

Justin Whitmel Earley: Oh, what a good word. I'm glad. Thank you for listening and speaking and listening into what the Lord is saying. I think that is true. I think it's especially important for any of us when we sense guilt, right, when we say, "Oh, I would do this, except I feel guilty about something," to do what you just exemplified, Laura. Be quiet for a second and lean in and just ask the question, says who? Whose voice am I listening to that's making me feel guilty about that? Because that's not how God talks to you, right?

If you're feeling guilt, that's probably a good sign that it's somebody else's voice in your head. If you're feeling conviction or repentance, that very well may be from the Holy Spirit. But if you're feeling this sort of vague sense of, "I'm not living up or I can't do that," I encourage people to just pay attention. Whose voice is that in your head? [00:33:44] 

Because lots of times with stuff as important as friendship or other spiritual disciplines in our life, we're so good at making excuses about why right now we can't actually do that. And the enemy loves that stuff. He loves to whisper little excuses in your head. Like, you don't need to wake up early to read the Bible. You're tired. You can skip church this weekend. You don't really need to go hang out with that person. It might be awkward anyway. And those are precisely the things that God wants us to do to encounter Him and others. So listen to those voices.

Laura Dugger: How did you find out about The Savvy Sauce? Did someone share this podcast with you? Hopefully, you've been blessed through the content.

And now we would love to invite each of you to share these episodes with friends and help us spread the word about The Savvy Sauce. You can share today's episode or go back and choose any one of your other previous favorites to share. Thanks for helping us out.

Well, Justin, intentional questions just seem to be one really practical way that we can take conversations and relationships into a much richer and more enjoyable realm. [00:34:55] So I know that you mentioned some in your book, Made for People. Can you share just a few questions that we can ask our friends the next time we get together in hopes of diving a little bit deeper?

Justin Whitmel Earley: Oh, yeah. I love that. You know, some fun ones that I really like. What expression is God making when He looks at you right now? What do you think God looks like when He looks at you? Because sometimes I ask you, how's your walk with the Lord or how's your prayer life been? I think it says a lot about people when they say, what does God look like right now? 

One of the things that I just really encourage people to try to do is to be comfortable with being awkward. You know, there's always a turn in conversation where you get from talking about the weather or it's just so easy to talk about other people or public events. But the real mature relationships start to confess, divulge, really talk about themselves. And a fun way to get talking about your spiritual life is, what does God look like right now when He's looking at you? [00:36:00] 

Another question I love to ask my friends is, what are you worried about when you lay down at night? What do you think about? Because I know for me, if you're asking, how are you doing, I'm just sort of talking generalities. But when I lay my head down at night and the thoughts start scrolling, like all the insecurities, "Did I do enough today? Did I finish it? What happened with that?" That's just a place for me that is one of the truest versions of my mind is what's going through my mind as I lay down at night. And so I like to ask other people, what are you thinking about or what are you worrying about? 

Another one is, what are you hoping for? I love asking people, what are you hoping for? In this season, maybe in a new year or in the summer, whatever season you're in, gosh, I love hearing what my friends are dreaming about and what the good of their marriage they're hoping for or what the good of their family is or what refuge they need or what they're hoping for. So yeah, their thoughts, asking about God, what they're hoping for. I love all these questions. [00:37:04] 

Laura Dugger: Well, Justin, you share various powerful ways that God has come to you throughout your life in the form of a friend. Will you share your experience when you recognize that friends are actually essential in the battle against evil?

Justin Whitmel Earley: Yes. This is a story I tell in the last chapter of the book. I would encourage people to read it at length, but I'll give the short version here. I woke up one morning to a phone call from a friend telling me that a mutual friend was stuck in a hotel in Mali, Africa.

He was traveling for work and that terrorists had overtaken the hotel and were going around. They had shot the guards and they were going through the hotel, trying the rooms of guests and shooting unarmed guests. And my friend had been able to email us saying, "Pray for me" because the Internet had stayed on in the hotel. [00:38:02] 

My other friend saw it first. He called me, woke up, and we all... I just remember walking down to my living room that morning and laying face down and just starting to pray for, plead for the life of my friend. You know, it was one of those moments where all over Richmond, there were people like me and my other friends just, you know, on their knees on the ground praying for my friend.

We would later find out that at that time he was on his knees leaning up against the barricade he had built against the door as he felt a gunman try the knob. Praise God the barricade held. And when he did finally open the door, it was to a UN special ops rescue team that led him out of the building.

And so, yeah, it was just, you know... obviously a really difficult time for all of us, but it was also a wonderful time when he came home weeks later and we threw a big party at my house and celebrated that he had been snatched from the jaws of death. [00:39:04] 

That story for me... you know, for him, it's his own story in so many ways, right? There's obviously so much trauma and fear and difficulty there. From my side of the story, the Lord has really used it in my life to show me a lot about friendship. Not just that it's true when, you know, one friend is in trouble, we all go down on our knees together. But also it's become a spiritual metaphor for me because I think about my friend leaning up against the door where evil wants in. And that actually is what life is like.

You know, we're told the enemy prowls like a roaring lion. God tells Cain that sin is crouching at his door, but that he can overcome it, right? But thou mayest overcome it is one of the neat Hebrew translations. [00:40:08] I think so often about how we need other people in our life to beat back the heavy, heavy evil. We can't do that alone. We can't survive moments like that alone, physically or spiritually. We are in need of rescue. And obviously Jesus is the ultimate one who snatches us from the jaws of death. He's the ultimate covenant friend who comes for us.

But I think about this often as a metaphor for how we are Jesus in other people's lives, how we're commanded to go be like Him, to go to our friends in times of need and say, "I'm with you. I'm praying for you. You're not alone." It's a difficult story in a lot of ways, but it's been such a meaningful thing for the Lord to give in our lives, to show us the glory and the necessity of His friendship and ours. So I always remind people, you know, Jesus is the ultimate covenant friend. [00:41:10] You know, receive his friendship and then go extend it to the world. That is what being Christ-like is like.

Laura Dugger: Wow, that is so powerful. Just wrapping up this whole conversation, you can refer back to Habits of the Household or Made for People, but what is the one habit you want to charge us with when we complete this conversation today?

Justin Whitmel Earley: Ooh, well, my favorite habit to recommend to people is scripture before phone, because it is probably my favorite habit. That's for a couple reasons. It's the simple practice of saying, before you open your phone in the morning, read some scripture first. I, without irony, do it on my drive to work. I ask Siri to open the Dwell app, which is a Bible-reading app, and I listen to it on audio. [00:42:09] 

So it's not to say you can't use your phone to read the Bible, but it's this idea of keeping emails or social media or news or updates, just all the things that might say, Hey, this is where you're going to get your love or your justification today, like how much you're going to get done or how to live up on social media or what's going on in the world.

There's so many ways our phone tempts us daily to say, this is what's important about today. That's because phones are incredible habit-forming machines, right? The designers of our iPhones, as useful as they are, know the power of habit.

I like recommending this habit because it's sort of one of those keystone habits. In it is the theory of habit of saying, no, make a habit to look for the love of God before you look out to what you think you need in the world so that you can... once you experience the love of God, now you know you can go to the world to give it. [00:43:09] You're not going to the world to look for it anymore. That order makes all the difference. 

And people might say, well, yeah, but it's such a small habit. How could it actually matter? And I say, try it. Try it for 30 days. It is one of those things that, for me, is an example of how some of the smallest changes in our lives have the biggest effects. That's why I love recommending this habit because it opens the whole theory of that you should be discipling your life to Jesus through habit. Your habits are not neutral. Your smartphones are not neutral. The American culture is not neutral. They're all trying to take us somewhere. And we should be fighting to say the current I swim in is of discipleship to Christ.

That's going to look like swimming upstream to the world. That's going to look like moving against everything else. But that's what it means to follow Jesus. That's a very dear habit to me, and I'd recommend anybody try it.

Laura Dugger: Well, thank you for sharing. And this has been such an enjoyable conversation. [00:44:08] So if anyone wants to follow up after this chat and learn more from you, where would you direct us to go?

Justin Whitmel Earley: My website, justinwhitmelearley.com. And if you Google "Justin Earley Author", you'll find the right spelling. If you can subscribe to my email list there, and that is... I always tell people the best way to hear more, learn more. I send emails out a couple times a month just with thoughts or with book ideas or new books or things that are coming out. It's a great way to follow along. 

I'm also fairly active on Instagram, posting videos about friendship, about parenting, about habits. I have my own set of habits around how much is too much on social media, so I'm careful with that. But I am active on Instagram if people want to follow along there too.

Laura Dugger: Wonderful. We will add all of those links in the show notes for today's episode. Justin, you may be familiar that we're called The Savvy Sauce because "savvy" is synonymous with practical knowledge. [00:45:10] And so as my final question for you today, what is your savvy sauce?

Justin Whitmel Earley: My savvy sauce is that habits won't change God's love for you, but God's love for you should change your habits. And I hope that helps.

Laura Dugger: I love that so much. This time has been such a gift. So I just want to personally thank you for being so disciplined to take that hour to write this book. It was so beneficial. Upon completing it, first of all, I put it over on my husband's bedside table because I knew he would enjoy it next after me.

Justin Whitmel Earley: I love it.

Laura Dugger: But it also gave me permission to intentionally schedule in friend time. And so even when that felt luxurious, it just instantly paid off after being inspired by your book. So thank you for your inspiration and your reminders. And thank you so much for being my guest today.

Justin Whitmel Earley: You're so welcome, Laura. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. [00:46:10] Thanks for your podcast and everything that you do.

Laura Dugger: One more thing before you go. Have you heard the term "gospel" before? It simply means good news. And I want to share the best news with you. But it starts with the bad news. Every single one of us were born sinners, but Christ desires to rescue us from our sin, which is something we cannot do for ourselves.

This means there is absolutely no chance we can make it to heaven on our own. So, for you and for me, it means we deserve death and we can never pay back the sacrifice we owe to be saved. We need a Savior.

But God loved us so much, He made a way for His only Son to willingly die in our place as the perfect substitute. This gives us hope of life forever in right relationship with Him. That is good news.

Jesus lived the perfect life we could never live and died in our place for our sin. [00:47:12] This was God's plan to make a way to reconcile with us so that God can look at us and see Jesus. We can be covered and justified through the work Jesus finished if we choose to receive what He has done for us.

Romans 10.9 says that if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. 

So would you pray with me now? Heavenly Father, thank You for sending Jesus to take our place. I pray someone today right now is touched and chooses to turn their life over to You. Will You clearly guide them and help them take their next step in faith to declare You as Lord of their life? We trust You to work and change lives now for eternity. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. 

If you prayed that prayer, you are declaring Him for me, so me for Him. You get the opportunity to live your life for Him. And at this podcast, we're called The Savvy Sauce for a reason. [00:48:14] We want to give you practical tools to implement the knowledge you have learned. So you ready to get started? 

First, tell someone. Say it out loud. Get a Bible. The first day I made this decision, my parents took me to Barnes & Noble and let me choose my own Bible. I selected the Quest NIV Bible, and I love it. You can start by reading the Book of John. 

Also, get connected locally, which just means tell someone who's a part of a church in your community that you made a decision to follow Christ. I'm assuming they will be thrilled to talk with you about further steps, such as going to church and getting connected to other believers to encourage you. 

We want to celebrate with you too, so feel free to leave a comment for us here if you did make a decision to follow Christ. We also have show notes included where you can read Scripture that describes this process. 

Finally, be encouraged. Luke 15:10 says, "In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents." [00:49:16] The heavens are praising with you for your decision today. 

If you've already received this good news, I pray that you have someone else to share it with today. You are loved and I look forward to meeting you here next time.