April 4, 2022

The compound interest of habit

I am popping into your inboxes today with a short reminder, this first week of the month, about the importance of habits.

Writing these letters to you is one regular habit in my life, and I practice this habit both to connect with interested readers as well as to give myself regular writing practice. Most weeks, I can feel a bit too time-pressured to get another letter out, and it’s always easy to say, “It won’t matter. It’s just another letter, another Monday.

But this is the paradox of habit, isn’t it? Any habit, parceled out into its smallest increment, doesn’t amount to very much. One workout, one daily Bible reading, one journal entry, one weekly letter, one church service, one dinner with friends: all of these, weighed individually on the scale of the important, don’t seem to have a lot of mass. But what about eight years of HIIT workouts? What about thirty years of daily Bible reading? What about thousands of pages of journal entries, a lifetime of church services, and hundreds of dinners with friends?

Any individual habit might be as small, as negligible as a mustard seed. But what can be harvested from a lifetime sown with good seeds?

Speaking of habits and longevity, this month I’m celebrating five years of letters to readers! My first newsletter, entitled Miscellany, was published in early 2017, and it included the announcement that we had our first teenage driver in the family—we now have three!—and a meditation on A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God:

“Self is the opaque veil,” Tozer writes, “that hides the face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. We may as well try to instruct leprosy out of our system. There must be a work of God in destruction before we are free. We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Savior passed when he suffered under Pontius Pilate.”

This seems like an especially relevant reminder as we finish our last weeks of Lent together. Speaking of Lent, I wrote about Lenten fasting for Christianity Today, and you can find that article here.

At any rate, I want to thank you for receiving these letters and reading them. And I want to encourage you to think of the small habit you can take up today—a habit that in twenty years, should you have that much time given to you, you’ll be glad you did.

Jen