Habits

Review: The Love Habit

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Cover image of "The Love Habit" by Rainie Howard

The Love Habit, Rainie Howard. Broadleaf Books (ISBN: 9781506496740) 2024.

Summary: Learning to manage emotions, expectations, and relationships through daily habits enabling becoming the love one desires.

Rainie Howard believes good people can learn to become addicted to unsatisfying lives. As a result, they approach life from a victim mindset that attributes both happiness and lack of fulfillment to outside circumstances. In this book, she argues that one can transform from a victim to a “victorious creator” through developing a new set of habits, centering around the love habit technique. Specifically, LOVE is an acronym Howard uses that may be applied in a number of contexts:

  • L-Learn. Listen to and learn from oneself about goals, feelings, passions, hurts in a particular context.
  • O-Optimize. What results from my habitual response and what responses can I develop to care for myself and relate in healthy ways?
  • V-Validate yourself. What can you affirm about your strengths, gifts, and actions?
  • E-Experience. What does it feel like to be the person you desire to be in this situation?

She develops these ideas in three parts, the first of which is “Reinventing Yourself.” So often, nice people are mistreated. However, Howard maintains we allow this mistreatment, and teach people to treat us that way subconsciously. She discusses different personality expressions of this behavior. Reinventing ourselves involves letting go of our worries about others and how they think of us, which we cannot change. Rather, we accept responsibility for our own lives, evaluate how we want to be treated, set boundaries that reflect how we want to be treated, and write out a vision for how we want to experience our lives and relationships. This last includes a set of self-affirmations to use every day. Howard then deals realistically with the reality that this new self may not always fit in with our old friends.

The second part focuses on habit techniques to form a healthy self image. She emphasizes confident habits that build belief in and trust of oneself. These include trusting oneself, knowing and understanding oneself, allowing yourself to try new things, taking actions to support goals, becoming comfortable with being different, and surrounding oneself with positive people. She then applies these ideas in the areas of romantic relationships and one’s work context.

Part three focuses on discernment. Negatively, she discusses identifying deception and manipulation. I thought the principle of looking at patterns especially helpful. If a person mistreats others, it’s very likely they will mistreat you! Positively, she encourages intentionality, vision, confidence, seeking support and self-awareness. She coaches readers in becoming more influential through preparing one’s mind, nowing oneself, speaking one’s truth, and focusing on one’s strengths. She offers insights on using one’s intuitions. Finally, she concludes with a chapter on connection, including some wonderful insights from how she and her husband have grown in their love.

This is an excellent example of the genre of self-help books emphasizing the idea of “change your thinking, change your life.” Howard offers an abundance of practical insights into self-defeating behaviors, setting boundaries in relations, and discerning toxic people. And she recognizes the power of habit and how the exchange of good habits for bad is part of personal change.

However, as I read, it occurred to me that I was reading an outstanding example of moralistic therapeutic deism, which sociologist Christian Smith observed in a study of the beliefs of American youth. Yes, there is a God, but we change through our own thinking and moral efforts. God is a therapist who affirms our intuitions. I think the book offers a shadow of the substance of good Christian teaching on the transformative work of God through his grace in Christ. Through that grace we are reconciled to God and other. Our minds are renewed and God’s Spirit progressively bears his fruit in our character. Thus, he enables us to truthfully love others. And we approach work and all of life as calling.

What surprises me is that a Lutheran publishing house is the publisher of this work. The gospel of self-help seems the antithesis of the gospel of grace through faith. Self reinvention seems a far cry from salvation by grace alone through faith. But this seems a sad commentary on the dearth of good and compelling Christian instruction. Rainie Howard is right about malformed identities. She rightly recognizes the harms fallen people can inflict. Moreover, she recognizes our human dignity. But she grounds this in self rather than in being the redeemed image bearers of God. Her book is good as far as it goes. But where are those who speak with her practicality about the renewed self, renewed relationships, and renewed work in Christ?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Common Rule

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common rule

The Common Rule, Justin Whitmel Earley. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2019.

Summary: Offers an alternative to the habits of our technological world that make us busy, distracted, anxious, and isolated by proposing a set of habits enabling us to live into loving God and neighbor, and into freedom and rest.

Justin Earley was a well-intentioned, missional Christian with ambitious goals who found himself having panic attacks and self-medicating with pills and alcohol and other destructive habits. A life of busyness shaped increasingly by technology was undermining his health and relationships. He recognized that he was being shaped by a set of cultural habits, ways of being that left him busy, distracted, anxious, and isolated. He saw that these habits were not only shaping his schedule; they were forming his heart. Along with some friends, he identified an alternate set of daily and weekly habits that they thought were consonant with their shared faith. He began sharing these with others, and eventually, in conversation with a pastor, realized that he and his friends had rediscovered an ancient practice going back to Augustine and Benedict of living under a rule of life, hence the name they adopted, The Common Rule.

The Common Rule Consists of four daily and four weekly habits. Two of each of these focus on loving God, and two on loving neighbor. Also two of each focus on embracing the good in God’s world, and two of each focus on resisting destructive cultural practices, even as we pursue a life of love. The eight are:

Daily:

  1. Kneeling Prayer morning, midday, and bedtime (Love God/embrace)
  2. One meal with others. (Love neighbor/embrace)
  3. One hour with phone off (Love neighbor/resist)
  4. Scripture before phone (Love God/resist)

Weekly:

  1. One hour of conversation with a friend (Love neighbor/embrace)
  2. Curate media to four hours (Love neighbor/resist)
  3. Fast from something for twenty-four hours (Love God/resist)
  4. Sabbath (Love God/embrace)

After introductory chapters explaining the rule, one chapter of the book is devoted to each habit, explaining the rationale for each habit and concluding with practical instructions for practicing the habit. He concludes the book with the observation of art critic Michael Kimmelman that the greatest work of art is the “curating of all of life as a single witness to something grand” (p. 162). Earley then applies this to the work of habits in our lives. He writes:

“I believe that paying attention to the work of habit is similar. It is best thought of as giving attention to the art of habit. It isn’t about trying to live right; it’s about curating a life. It is the art of living beautifully” (p. 163).

The book concludes with an extremely helpful set of resources for individuals or groups (Earley believes it is especially helpful to practice these disciplines with others who voluntarily enter in so that individuals can encourage each other). The resources include the habits in a nutshell, a guide to trying one habit a week, trying the whole Common Rule for a week or a month, ways congregations can use the Common Rule, prayers for those trying the Common Rule, and ways the Common Rule might be used in different walks of life for skeptics, parents, at work, for artists and creatives, entrepreneurs, addicts, and those with mental illnesses.

It may be a small thing, but I appreciated the typography of the book. The medium blue of the cover is used for titles, subtitles, diagrams, quote grabs, and headers, setting this book off from most mono-chromatic texts. More substantively, the practical application of James K. A. Smith’s ideas of cultural liturgies and the early fathers practice of rule of life makes for an inviting book grounded in rigorous thought and tested practice. Couple this with his own vulnerable example, and you have a winsome exposition of the practices that makes you want to start right away. The practices of scripture before phone, shutting off the phone for at least an hour, and curating media were both challenging and helpful for this reader whose life is too dominated by the smartphone. Whether you embrace the full rule, or substitute other practices, Earley’s Common Rule offers an important alternative for people of faith to the ways our technological culture may lure us into frantic busyness, distraction, anxiety, and isolation instead of helping us curate beautiful lives of love for God and neighbor.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.