Making Room by Gather
Hospitality. What do you think of when you hear that word?
For some it's old school 'stuffy' entertaining for others it's something to do with the hotel industry. One thing is for sure, as a culture we're not talking about it much.
Food * Design * Relationships have seemed to have taken a back seat to what our culture focuses on and values yet...we find ourselves in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. Something has to change, it's time to get back to our tables, and we're making room for it!
Making Room by Gather invites you into a new conversation on everyday hospitality. One that rewrites the way we approach opening your doors and filling your tables. Shifting the narrative from 'how does this make me look' to 'how does this make you feel' these buildable conversations aspire to inspire connection through everyday gathering.
Kayty's chic and a little quirky interview style will make you feel like you're sitting with a friend talking about how to grow in confidence as an everyday host. You can expect conversations from navigating challenging relationship dynamics to foundational cooking techniques and everything in between.
Whether you are a seasoned host or looking to develop new friendships and grow in your skills for the first time, there is a seat at the table. Join us weekly for new conversations with expert guests and with Kayty in her beloved Date with Kayt episodes. Continue the conversation @gatheritentionalliving
Making Room by Gather
The Body Teaches the Soul: Change your Habits, Change Your Life w/ Justin Earley
Justin Earley found himself in a life rattling season in his early 30's. This unexpected, and at times, dark season reveled a profound truth: your heart follows your habits. Through this deeply personal, and relatable conversation we explore the habits that actually lead to the changes we long for in our relationships, health and overall lives. Through this conversation you will hear more on the topics of:
• living beyond labels and why naming is not fixing
• life as a garden not a machine
• breath prayer and box breathing to calm the nervous system
• practice your way out of what you practiced your way into
• pause prayers that lead to healthy parenting patterns
• eating, exercise, and 10 other new approaches to habits that lead to lasting change
If you're someone who has been longing for peace, healthy and change, or who learns about personal development but can't seem to find breakthrough...this is for you!
Get a copy of Justin's new release here
This Episode is Sponsored by:
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Oh man, Justin, I feel like this has been a long time coming. I've been, um, I feel like right when we when Wesley was born, we brought him home. One of the first words of advice people gave us was buy a copy of Habits, Habits of the Household.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, that's so cool. That's an honor. But that's that's really neat.
SPEAKER_01:Isn't it awesome? Yeah. So Wesley's two. So for two years, you've been kind of like on our radar.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Well, whoever recommended it to you, please, you got to pass along my thanks.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I will. I mean, it was a number of people. It wasn't just one. So um, that book has definitely changed a lot of homes. Um, and so I'm grateful for your work with that. But what I want to dive like right into, and I would love to hear it in your own words, is uh in your young 30s, correct me if I'm wrong, you had kind of like a life, I'll call it like rattling season.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Um, that kind of led to the book that we're gonna be talking about today. So put that season in your own words for us.
SPEAKER_00:Sure. I around my late 20s transitioned from being a former missionary in China to being a corporate lawyer, which is a very weird transition. Um, so my life before, like in my young 20s, um, was characterized by you know a lot of mission, um, a lot of reading and thinking, learning, um, living overseas, a lot of spontaneity. And then I went into law school where I'm learning and thinking, but like entering into a really structured environment of drivenness. And I, being a former missionary, like I think, you know, passionately, and I felt like a man on a call, right, in law school. And what I didn't realize had happened to me was that I had become somebody whose habits became conformed to the normal practices of modern life and law school and lawyering, which is probably pretty similar to a lot of regular American lives, but just like amped up, like the amp turned up to 11 sort of thing. And I had a terrible anxiety crash, like a really dark season in my life where my life became characterized by insomnia, panic, um, coping in order to sleep, like either needing to drink or take medication. And so I entered this very, very difficult and weird headspace in my early 30s where I was like the missionary who got converted to the nervous medicating lawyer in really short order. And the last decade of my life has been living in light of that strangeness and trying to figure out what happened to me. So, and I would put it like this I started to realize that your head can go one way, but your habits can go the other way. And when that happens, your heart will tend to follow the habits. So there's a split that a lot of us live with where we think one set of things in what I would call your spiritual life, or maybe your upper brain. There's a lot of words that you can use for it. But you practice a different set of things in your actual life or your practical life. We might even call it your lower brain or what you're feeling or intuiting in your body. And this um disintegration physically or this separation spiritually in your worldview and your habits tears people apart. And the weird thing is that we I think we tend to think that we become what we claim, you know, we become what we think. But there's a really important part of our lives that becomes what we do and what we practice. And as I started to learn this, I'm in my early 30s, and honestly, Katie, it has reshaped everything I know about my life. I think it's probably been one of the most, if not the most, important pivots in my life, where um to put it simply, is I've become very attentive to habit in everything. And that goes for my spiritual disciplines, my work disciplines, my family life. I've got four boys um who were really young at this time. Um but now they're uh seven, eight, ten, and no, seven, eight, eleven, and thirteen. Um and and most recently in my in my physical life, I'm thinking about the interaction of my um body and spirit, like living a holistic, soulful life. So pretty much everything I think about is about the that um soulful life that can come through habits. And I put that really carefully because I'm not talking about like a structured type A, you must do everything by rote life. I'm talking about a beautiful life that actually like beautiful works of art are constructed out of tiny little minute strokes. And your life is the same way. The little habits make up the extraordinary masterpiece that can become your life, and I'm pretty obsessed with that.
SPEAKER_01:Man, well, I was drawing down a few notes, but the first one is four boys. Oh my goodness. Like, are you okay?
SPEAKER_00:It's a really fun, it's a really fun house. It's not the house that my wife and I expected. First of all, we didn't expect to have this many kids. And um, they're just they're like very stereotypical boy boys, like sports and wrestling and loud. Um, and that's not entirely what we expected either, but it is really fun. It's really messy and it's really chaotic. A big lesson in this whole life is how messy everything is in your actual life. Um, like from dinner times to discipline, it's it's messy, but uh there's a lot of grace and a lot of goodness that happens amidst big messes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yesterday I posted very quickly because I could not believe my day. My son started off brushing his teeth with my mascara, and then we walked. Yeah, I walked in the bathroom, I was like, I've never heard of a kid doing this before, and here we are.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, they'll surprise you. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And then the day just kept going, and it always happens when my husband's away too. And so of course, yeah, I just picture that times four, and I'm like, wow, you guys are in it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. My wife was gone last night to a book club and she came back in late at night and she was like, How is Shep, our youngest? And I was like, Oh my gosh, he had an amazing day. She was like, Well, he was horrible for me. Of course.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so I took pictures and sent them to my husband, and I was like, Okay, I won't send any more, but just so you know. Oh gosh. Um, but then also on a more serious note, I forgot we kind of share a missions background. So my husband and I served in Chiang Mai, Thailand, so Asia for Yeah, so for four years.
SPEAKER_00:I didn't when was that? What years would that have been?
SPEAKER_01:2015 to 2019, right before COVID.
SPEAKER_00:Oh wow. So we never overlapped, but I did visit Chiang Mai a couple times. It probably would have been like 08, 09, 2010.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Okay. Yeah, we weren't there just yet, but it's so interesting. I remember learning the heart behind the book. And yeah, so we served on the missions fields, came back, went straight into business, and that's when my panic attacks started. And I just remember thinking, like, man, I've never heard anyone in my family talk about these, our friend group, and here I am. You know, what's wrong? What's going on? And then um learning very quickly uh through um a dinner that I went to with friends. I was like, man, I'm I'm actually not the only one going through these. So what's what's the answer? Um, because people very quickly go to medication, and I know there's space for that, but I was like, there has to be, there has to be another approach to this.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. So um I can wholeheartedly tell you there is another approach.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And this isn't like a pro or against like medication conversation. I don't want people to hear that, but I just want you to hear, hear another way.
SPEAKER_00:So um Can I can I uh chime in on that for please a second? I mean, yeah, I a couple things are happening to me in my early 30s when this happened. Um one, I also didn't have a lot of good tools of how to deal with a mental health crisis. Um, I think maybe at the time, this was 10 years ago, there was maybe a little bit more stigma, but I actually think that people have done really well. Or collectively, we've done really well at, you know, talking about these problems. One of the problems that comes with that, though, is that simply naming it or simply making it normal or simply saying a lot of us struggle with this, you know, it's very normal, is not necessarily any solution. You know, it it helps you start to talk about it, which is essential. But by itself, that can lead to just sort of like a um almost like embrace your problem as a badge of honor sometimes. And, you know, I'm really convinced, you know, a healthy person, we're not made to live like this. And but the fact is that modern America, particularly in modern lawyers, we have three to four times the average of anxiety and mental health struggles, are it is extraordinarily common to live with um a one, a head that is, you know, thinking all the right things, quote unquote, but a body that's continually in panic and anxiety. And what I learned, and I did try medication, I did do do counseling, I mean, there's there's really good places for both of those things. But what I learned was that a lot more of our problems are living in our body and our habits than we think. There's a reason that so many people with so many different worldviews, okay, like like no matter what you believe about the world, have really common mental illness problems right now because we live in a current of habit that is taking us towards depression and anxiety. And these things are habits like constantly scrolling our phone, um, shorting sleep at night in exchange for screens, not, I mean, we we live in a world of um, you know, sugar and ultra-processed foods that uh drive our brain and body like haywire. And I and I could go on. There's lots, there's lots of things. But if you just take those two things, for example, sugar screens, let's make them three, sugar screens and sleep. Conveniently, they all start with us. Um a wild amount of our lack of peace, our disintegration, our anxiety is actually coming because in our habits, we are thinking we're machines, we don't need to sleep. We're thinking that we're, you know, basically made for pleasure, not for health. And so we like just indulge constantly. And we think we're made for distraction rather than discipleship. And so, like when we distract ourselves and uh consume vast amounts of sugar in short sleep, it's unsurprising that your body and your mind start to go haywire. And a lot of my life has been realizing that I can tell myself the truth all I want, but until I actually practice that truth in lower body habits, um, your head doesn't meet the habit. But when your head meets the habit, your heart, your heart really starts to change. And that's like a full-bodied look at how to solve mental illness, which, by the way, is is demonstrated to be at least and typically more effective than any medication. I mean, if if you go to a psychiatrist, um, anyone worth their salt, they will tell you if if they could give you a pill that would do all that sleep, communal conversation getting off screens would do for you, like they would give you that would be the most successful drug in history because because just learning these embodied practices are actually a solution to the vast amount of mental illnesses, certainly not all of them, but the vast amount of the middle ordinary ones that people like you and I experience.
SPEAKER_01:Man, it is like obviously it's well, maybe not obviously, but it's the the path that takes the most work, right? Like the most That's right, that's right. Right. But it's like the longer, it's like um, how am I trying to summarize here? Like it's it makes your life fuller, right? I mean, it's it makes your life richer and um gets you back to the state probably that you're missing and craving and hoping for.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. I mean, so a lot of my theory on this is in the the book that's sitting behind me. Um it just came out, the The Body Teaches the Soul. And one of my fundamental metaphors in that book, which has been such an important realization for me, is that my body is more like a garden than not. Um, it's definitely more like a garden than a machine. And machines have on-off switches, right? Like you just change this, change that. Gardens, nothing happens fast, but things happen. You know, you're either growing towards being a jungle or a desert or being a flourishing, like integrated, beautiful, nourishing garden. And your body is like that. You really can cultivate it mind, body, soul, spirit, everything towards the beauty of flourishing, but it takes time and effort. And as we know with gardens, anything that purports to be like a quick chemical fix usually does more harm than good. Yeah. Um, but the fundamental metaphor, and which is why I brought it up when you just said that, Katie, was that um it's not just that you bring order to chaos. That's one thing we're looking for. Like we're looking for our problems to go away. But a flourishing garden is full of fruit and nourishment and beauty, and there's actually so much more goodness than you ever expected. Like in my life, I will tell you, I thought that God could never use a problem that bad. I mean, this is really a dark time in my life. So, like suicidal thoughts were included. Um, it was very dark. But now, 10 years later, I'm like, oh, the fruit of these struggles, like what has come out of it, is better than I like life is better than I ever thought. I'm stronger than I ever thought. I'm more peaceful than I ever thought, I'm more resilient than I ever thought. And that's the fruit of cultivating the garden of your body and paying attention to the spiritual and physical side side and cultivating it all together. Um, which is why I call it the body teaching the soul. Because you got to go through the body to learn about the whole of your spiritual life. And if you ignore it, you're just gonna become a desert, an anxious, depressed desert.
SPEAKER_01:So amazing. I we could sit on this like for a whole weekend of conversation. I'm sure there's so much to pull from this. I know, right? I mean, me too. I think just the other day, my husband and I went on a very long overdue date night. And um we got in the car, and for some reason it hit me then. I was like, man, Cole, it's been like probably a solid six months, if not a year, since I've had a panic attack. And that was, I mean, you know, when you're in those like dark seasons, you feel like they're gonna be a part of you forever and ever. Yes, right. And I was like, oh my goodness. But looking back, it almost was like there was the season of intense darkness, kind of like you said. And then it just kind of like slowly improved as habits changed, and you know, and so but I'm I'm so thankful for the journey. I'm thankful for those years because um it's opened my eyes wider, made my heart bigger, you know, more aware of people. And yes. Um, all of that to say, I'm excited for this conversation, but I want you to um answer a question for me first.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Um, who is this conversation in this book for?
SPEAKER_00:I often say this is the book that I wish I could give my younger self. Um I wish I wish that I had the body teaches the soul 10 years ago because I I just didn't know um how important in spiritual exercise was. I didn't know how important in spiritual eating was. I didn't know how important in spiritual rest was. I I would have thought those were something like life hacks, you know, that like a serious person, you know, and and especially a seriously spiritual person um didn't need, or you know, it was surface level at best. And I just see um honestly how much I ignored how God made me. Like I reduced myself to half of how he made me, the spiritual side, like and just sort of ignored my body. And I think a lot of people are like me. So this is this book is for people like that who font who really think their head is in the right place, and maybe in sense that they should, you know, pay attention to their health. I mean, obviously, like health conversations are surging in America right now, and I'm I'm all for it. Um, not particularly the controversy, but I'm for the idea of trying to figure out what is health? Like, what what does a whole integrated, mentally healthy body, a physically healthy body look like? Um, so we might intuit that that's important, but we don't realize how spiritual that is, like how spiritual health is, how spiritual integration is, like why we're meant to live with bodies in the first place. So this book is for that person who wants to start to recover an awareness of their body for spiritual reasons and recover the physicality of spiritual disciplines, because anything that you want to do in meditation or prayer are actually they're quite physical tasks. So that, you know, it's for me 10 years ago, but it's hopefully for a lot of people who are like me 10 years ago.
SPEAKER_01:It's taken me a long time. I think of when I was like a nanny and I nannied for certain families and I saw them kind of like making certain health choices. And I'm the first one to say, like, I would judge their more natural approaches to things. And like, it's not how I was raised. It was not the lens that I was like given. And it take took me a long time to learn. Um, and now I'm totally our lifestyle has totally drastically changed for the better. But I'm I'm the first one to tell people now if I sense judgment from people or kind of like questioning, I'm like, give it a solid try. Like, right? If you're questioning at all, try it and see experience a transformation and you know, give give a platform, you know, give room for ground for your opinion first. So um, if anyone is questioning any of this, give it a try. Give it a try first, right?
SPEAKER_00:I'll tell you, um, Katie, breath prayers and box breathing um was this for me. So I had heard in my anxiety struggles that you know, breathing exercises were really important. And I honestly was like, okay, that's Eastern, that's woo-woo, that's psycho babble. Like maybe, maybe that helps some people a little bit, but that's like, I think I was like, that misses the huge problem of like, what are we actually believing in our anxiety? Like, why are our thoughts going crazy? It's because we don't actually know the truth. Um, now that is true, right? Okay, that is true. Like, if you don't know the truth about reality, for example, if you think you're unsafe in an environment that is safe, you're gonna feel anxious. And you're gonna be like, why do I feel like this? Like, what, for example, my alcoholic father is no longer here. Why does walking into this living room make my body anxious? I mean, that is like a physically un or a theoretically untrue thing, but you're what you're missing is that there's this whole realm of your life called the lower brain that intuits things, that remembers things that you can't you can't talk yourself out of alone because you didn't talk yourself there. You practiced your way there. So you have to practice your way out. And I I started to do two things. One, I started to learn more about how God made us, which is we are a combination of um dust and breath, is how Genesis puts this. Uh that's to say we're a combination of body and spirit. Like Genesis 2.7 says, God formed human being from the dust and then breathed the spirit of life, and a living soul was born. And that kind of stunned me because I was like, huh, here is a Bible verse on the spirituality of breath. And then I start reading um some books, but uh breath by James Nestor was one of the most interesting and like pop-level ones that I read about all the health effects that come from breathing well and breathing on purpose. And and I was just like humbled. I was like, oh, I thought this was psycho babble. Turns out this is uh great science and great spirituality. And when you combine them, unsurprisingly, you get incredible results. So now one of the things that I do all the time is uh breath prayer. I I pray in rhythmic like box breathing breathing patterns, which for anybody who doesn't know is you inhale for a number of seconds, you hold for a number of seconds, you exhale for a number of seconds, you hold for a number of seconds, and you continue in that box. And I like to pray on the inhale and the exhale, like maybe recite a a verse or a truth. And this is one of the amazing things that unites your upper brain spiritual truth with your lower brain physical embodied practices to become that whole person that you were meant to be. But I was so judgmental of the idea at first. I really thought it was silly, it didn't matter. And so I'm very much with you. Um, I've been humbled by giving things a try and realizing, oh, I wasn't so smart. Um, I just knew too little. And now I know more, and now I have some practices that help, and it's really has changed my life.
SPEAKER_01:You can kind of apply that to all of life, right? A lot of different contexts. Um, you actually just said a phrase that I wanted to bring up, and I'd love for you to talk to it just for another second. This is this is good, Justin. It says you cannot think your way out of a problem you didn't think your way into. You practice your way there, you need to practice your way out. Can you just elaborate elaborate on that? Just I don't know, like yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, um just a little bit. So this is on the same train that we've been riding, right? Like how important understanding your brain and embodiment is to uh certainly ordinary life, but spiritual life. And even I'll give an example in parenting here. Um when I snap at my children, it is not because I'm like, this is the kind of dad that I want to be. Like I want to be the kind of dad who who barks at them and snaps at them and yells at them for minor offenses, right? Like said no whenever. Okay. None of us think our way into that problem. Um snapping at our kids in ways that we regret and don't like are instincts of stress. They're instincts of what we learned from others, they're instincts that have been trained over time. So, and we call them bad habits, right? And the thing about habits is that they work in the lower part of our brain, not the upper. So that means you can be doing complicated things like tying a shoe or taking, you know, a left turn on the way home while thinking about something else. Maybe you're talking to your kid while you tie their shoe, or maybe you're listening to a podcast while you drive. And that feature that is so beautiful for human beings is you have a divided brain that allows you to do amazing complicated tasks in your mind while doing really neat patterns by rote called habit in your lower brain. And that leads to an incredible life when they're good habits, right? But when they're bad habits, snapping at our kids, for example, or maybe scrolling your phone first thing in the morning, or you know, while at the playground with your child and you're like, I don't want to be doing this, why am I doing this? Um, the part of your brain that knows better is not the part that's churning along in habit. And this is how you become the kind of person that I was, right? That I described at the beginning, where your head's going one way and your habits going the other. Um and most of us, um, for some reason, lots of reasons, think that we can think our way out of that problem. Like it's a mindset shift. I just need to tell myself this and I need to remind myself this. And that is good. That's a necessary, but not sufficient solution to the problem because you you can't think your way out of a thing that you practiced your way into. That's you're only using half of your brain if you try to do that. And the lower half of your brain is still just like in the wagon wheel rut of habit. And if you think about that image literally, it's like it's going where it's going, unless you literally lift it out and put it in a new rut. Like you have to, one of the fundamental um psychological insights of habit is that you can't just stop one. You have to create a new one, you have to displace it with a new one. And so for snapping and my kids, for example, one of the ways that I have been working on that, not mastered that. I'm just like everybody else, I still really struggle. But one of the ways that I work on that is by fighting habit with habit. So um, I write about this in Habits of the Household because it's been a very dear practice to me. I call it pause prayers. This can be a pause moment if you pray, pray. If you just need space, then use it as a pause moment. Like I try to make a commitment to myself that I won't discipline my children until I have paused before speaking to them. And usually I'm saying a quick prayer like, help me be gentle, help me be kind, help me be um humble, help, help me be helpful. It's just it's it's it's short. One of my favorite spiritual writers, Anne Lamotte, said the most powerful three prayers are help, thanks, and wow. So, like this is short. This is a help prayer. But what it's doing is it's fighting habit with habit. It's like practicing a routine of saying, I'm not gonna respond yet. I'm gonna briefly say help. And what happens is that my old habit of snapping is actually interrupted and displaced with a new one, where my upper brain is coming back online, and I'm like, how do I actually want to respond here? And um, that's gone such a long way to help me become a little more of the parent that I actually want to be. It's not, I'll tell you two things. It's not um instant, nothing is. Remember, pace of a garden. Your body's like a garden, it takes time. Um, and it's not the only thing. Like you do a lot more in a garden than just water one thing, you know, you're you're doing a lot more than that. But these one, like these, these small things do have extraordinary impact when you practice them over time, and particularly when you practice them in other sets of habits where you're attentive to your habits of technology, sleep, eating, and disciplining your children. That is where I I see a little bit more of that masterpiece painting of life coming into view, even though all of these things by themselves are just little strokes, but they create a life of beautiful habits and the a lower brain life of where you can actually have just the upward spiral into virtue. And lots of us are familiar with the downward spiral, right? And the into bad habits. But they they work the other way too. They really do. This is called habit stacking in psychological literature, but you they they work the other way where you can start to experience the upward cycle. And we call that wisdom, maturity, um, a life of discipline. But really, it's the life of beauty too. It's just the life you're longing for, and you didn't know that you couldn't think your way there, you had to practice your way there as well.
SPEAKER_01:What I love about conversations like this is they're empowering, they're not like hopeless and crushing. It's not like I hope so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's empowering. It's like the ball is really in your court and there is hope. There is hope.
SPEAKER_00:I I think that's such an important thing to remember. I think some of our cultural moments, you can learn about the brain in a way that is incredibly disempowering. Like you think, oh, maybe I'm just stuck with the chemicals that I have. Like maybe I'm just trapped in this brain and I didn't win the dopamine lottery like that person. So I'm like, I'm depressive, or I am my trauma, or I am just anxious now. And I think one of the wonderful things about learning about who you actually are, and I think of this spiritually, right? Like if if you haven't, if you haven't guessed yet from the conversation, I think like everything spiritual becomes physical and everything physical is is spiritual. So I I think of them as an integrated whole, which means, for example, um neuroplasticity is a feature of the brain that means grace is always present. Like grace is always available to you because you're not stuck with the brain patterns that you have. They're true, right? And if you don't address them, if you don't address your anxiety, address your depression, or address your trauma, um, you will keep reliving it. Like you will keep deepening that wagon wheel rut. But you do not have to. Like recovery is possible. You're not stuck with the addictions you have, you're not stuck with the mental loops you have. And I can tell you from my life, like a lot of them have changed and they were bad. You know, they were they were unhealthy rhythms, they were dark rhythms, they were dangerous rhythms. But I just want to tell everybody so clearly, you're not stuck. Like you have this grace built into your brain called neuroplasticity. And when you garden your mind through habits that unite the spiritual and physical sides of you, incredible change happens. And that is the best news that I ever heard.
SPEAKER_01:Me too. Me too. Well, let's dive into some of these rhythms um to give people some like a framework. Um, so we talked about breathing, which I'm super grateful for. And um are you involved with Think Media at all, Gabe and Rebecca Lyons?
SPEAKER_00:Um, I know them quite well.
SPEAKER_01:I um I've been a part of Think for a few years, and then I've gone on their retreats and to their conferences, and the first one I ever went to. Um, it was a totally new concept and community for me. And it actually was in this in the middle of the dark season that I got invited and I bumped into someone and he said, he said, I think I think God's saying you really need to work on your breathing. And it was the first time I'd ever heard it.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I was so glad that happened so neat.
SPEAKER_01:My life in that season. Um, so I'm really glad that we talked about that because I had someone that said it to my life. So hopefully this is the first time someone else is hearing it too. Um, but let's talk about eating and drinking. I'm very interested to dive into this one. So, what do you want to? I'm gonna kind of pass you the mic. Take it where you want.
SPEAKER_00:Sure. I mean, so here's a story that I I tell in the chapter in this book that has really been formative for me. Um, there was a time in early high school where I found myself. Alone at home, and I'm one of six kids, so like it's rare to be alone. And um, the story could sound darker than it is. I was alone at home and I found myself with a box of vanilla wafers, and I remember like having an after school snack and then being like, just one more, just one more. Um, and I I remember this very like shameful moment of like finishing a whole box and burying it in the trash can. And it wasn't because I had weight problems or eating disorders. Um, I for better or for worse have a body whose metabolism hides my bad habits. So like um it wasn't that, it was this weird feeling of the loss of agency that like for a moment I wasn't driving the bus. And that feeling around food or drink has really been with me my whole life. Um, it's been with me in a lot of areas. I I think I'm more normal than not, like I think a lot of people are like me, particularly around food and drink, where we sort of live haunted by ourselves, that we're not really in control here and we could easily lose control. And like, what's happening? Um, I learned so much that was so helpful to me in researching this book. And I'll give you just the two sides of it. One, spiritually, I learned that um, at least from the perspective of the Bible, uh, food is seen as a gift. Um like in Genesis describes a garden where the trees are good for the fruit of the trees are good for food and pleasing to the eye. And I like to summarize this as in dependence and delight are built into the world. So you were made to need food. That's a feature, not a flaw, that you're actually dependent for your life on the world around you. This is actually a beautiful concept to explore the interdependence of like things must die so that we can live. It's a it's actually kind of weird. It's like a sacramental way of looking at the world. The the the world gives itself to us that we might live, but we're dependent on it. But we also delight in it. Like there's a reason that we take pictures of our food, like there's a reason that we Instagram our food or that we want to arrange the charcuterie board so beautifully, or that we want to like set the table and the place and dress our food up because it really does delight the soul as much as our stomach depends on it. And those are two beautiful things, right? To depend and to delight. But what happens in our like ultra-processed, um, super available world of sugar and sweets and refined carbs and chemically driven foods is that we are, because of all these weird ingredients, are tempted to just indulge. Okay, so we trade like dependence for indulgence, and that's me with the vanilla wafers. And then instead of delighting in the goodness of the provision of food, we are filled with shame. And again, that's me hiding the box in the trash can. And and like so we invert these twin poles of creation to depend into delight into indulgence and shame. And that's where like I think most of us live. Like we're we we we long for delight, but we find ourselves in a world of shame. And and we long for like a healthy like interdependence with food, but we find ourselves in a world of like greed or indulgence, or the opposite, right? Like we so that we like diet really hard or like back off really hard, um, and then get into unhealthy patterns of like seeing food as almost an enemy to our body that we should avoid. And it's probably enough said. I mean, probably most people listening can find themselves somewhere on that spectrum. And what I want to offer that was so helpful to me in researching and writing this book, and it has become like a normal pattern of my life in the um the past couple of years, is cultivating dependence by practicing fasting, cultivating delight by practicing feasting, and then just holding those two extremes together with a normal pattern of what I call ordinary fare. So that's what in and put this together. I call this spiritual rhythms for eating. So fasting, feasting, and ordinary fare. Um, and you probably know you know what these things are fasting is the idea of um restraining yourself from some or all food at specific points to cultivate a um a dependence, like to remember that you are dependent on it. Interestingly, like as many people know, like we've been through an era where we're realizing that some forms of fasting are actually quite healthy for you. Um everybody's gonna be different on that. One thing that fasting does, even if it's just skipping one meal, or even if it's just saying, I'm gonna go today without sugar, like it, you know, for some people fasting is gonna be unhealthy because it's gonna bring up past eating disorders, like that that kind of person should not do it. For some people, fasting is gonna be impossible because you're you're pregnant or you're injured or you have some illness, that person should not do it. But anybody can fast from sugar for a day. Anybody can fast from refined carbs for a week or something like that. And um, what we know this does is actually resets your dopamine cycles, which is a gift because you you stop bouncing from indulgence to shame, like in your brain, um, and you start just leveling out, which is healthy. Now, feasting, on the other hand, is this idea that we can, we ought, we should run to the beauty of creation and celebrate it. Like, and this is not indulgence, this is not cheat day stuff. This is actually saying the world is good and it's worth celebrating. Um, my body was meant to be delighted by food. And in healthy occasional rhythms, and I do this, I feast more than I fast. I try to fast one meal a week and one day a month, but I'm like feasting like, you know, at least one day a week where like on um Friday night, we're doing like family pizza night or something, or on Sunday, we're doing like a Sunday dinner with my family, or maybe a date night with Lauren that we usually do every Wednesday. Like there's moments in my week where I'm saying, my my my regimen or my my healthy diet is not the most important thing right now. What's important is to dive into community with the goodness of food and and and know that if I ate like this all the time, I would be whack out of balance and my body and soul would suffer. But to indulge in these rhythms as a way of like holiness means I'm actually not indulging, I'm just sort of delighting. And that is good. That is good. And if if you those two um pillars, fasting and feasting, don't work unless you're living an ordinary fair rhythm of saying on a regular day, a regular meal, while I'm not fasting and I'm not feasting, which is like an overwhelming amount of time. Like this is like 95% of the time. I I'm just cultivating a rhythm of like ordinariness, like being content with the ordinary simple beauty of whole and simple foods, the the all the ways that that makes your body feel better, work better, parent better, pray better, sleep better. Um, this is eating how you want to feel rather than eating whatever you feel like. And this is not eating, this is not like diet and body image stuff. This is not saying, I want to eat so I look a certain way. This is saying I want to eat so I love a certain way. Like what I'm saying is like so that you live into a life of good service and love. And as it turns out, you need to care for your body in order to parent well. You need to care for your body in order to work well, you need to care for your body in order to be able to meditate or go through a day without spiraling into anxious and depressive and panicky thoughts. And food is so much more related to all that than we think. So I realize that's a super long answer. Um, but I think that this is a part of life that takes a lot of time to recover all the damage that food is enemy, body image concerns, like unhealth is done to us. And I would submit that these spiritual rhythms for eating are kind of um a way home. Like a road, it's gonna be a long road to travel, but it's a way home.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I heard you say this before when you were talking about the ruts. And, you know, I've said it in kind of like a different way, like you've learned something once, you can learn it again. And I just love this. Like, yeah, like it's it is something that we can relearn. And there is, it's not all about restriction. It's life. Like that's what we're that's what we're getting from it. And um, I've said this through the last, so in Thailand, I got super, super sick, autoimmune stuff kind of got triggered, and then I had to change the way that I looked at food. I was kind of forced to. And I have just like kind of continuously lived gluten and dairy free since then, just because I feel better. Yes. And people are always like, oh, I'm so sorry. I'm like, no, no, no. I eat super well. Like, yes, yes. I've I've learned how to really uh my relationship with food has changed and it and um I still enjoy food.
SPEAKER_00:And that's a great example of like eating how you want to feel. When you you can relearn patterns and reteach your body what's what's healthy, and that and this is like ordinary fare um is delicious, like it's good, even if you are on a restrictive diet of like I don't eat this or that, when you realize that the world was made for you to consume and and like what I call like quote unquote god-made foods, as opposed to quote unquote man-made foods. And I realize this is like a a simplification of categories, but like the more natural you get, the more whole you get, the less processed you get, the more sort of like ordinary stuff you find in the world, it is so good and it is so good for you, right? And nobody is suffering from having an ordinary fair diet. It is a actually wonderful thing to run to. It's like the opposite of um, you know, how we think of like restrictive diets is like, you know, you know, boring. And I'm always telling myself, no. This is really just saying yes to good things first. And of course, you are saying no to some because there are sides of you that um wants to eat dangerous things because you know, Oreos are made to be like fairly addictive, but and they're delightful once in a while, but it's not what you're made for in an ordinary rhythm.
SPEAKER_01:Um, are you the cook in your house or is your wife?
SPEAKER_00:Goodness no. Um, I um no, I love to eat. So I I like like to think that I keep Lauren inspired through my appreciation of her work. I heard I heard somebody say once a husband's hung hunger might be like can be the greatest gift to his wife. Um because I I'm just so thankful for how good of a cook she is. But she is I'm I'm a pretty good breakfast line cook. Like I do breakfast every morning, and I'm a pretty good griller. But Lauren is the one who does the amazing work of thinking about our health, sourcing groceries, meal planning, and actually getting it together. And she's, you know, when I met her in college, she um she was not much of a cook and really had no interest in it. And it's so neat, you know. We've been married for um going on 19 years, and she is incredible like now. She likes she's an incredible cook. She can feed an army and it'll be like pretty gourmet, super healthy, very natural. And so I'm so thankful that I have her.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome. She's my girl after my own heart.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think so.
SPEAKER_01:Um, but I was gonna ask like if you have any go-tos that you recommend to people, like recipe developer or website-wise or cookbook-wise. Do you know any that she gravitates towards?
SPEAKER_00:Um she I don't know that I can I can see her cookbooks, but I don't necessarily know the names. I do know that um salt, fat, acid heat has been a really helpful like paradigm book for her of thinking like how do the components of food come together to make the kinds of flavors that we find delicious. And I think that book has really helped her because it it she takes like the natural whole ingredients that she wants and and rebalances them so that she doesn't have to, she's not like a recipe cook, she's an intuitive cook, but I think she's intuitive because she knows her category. She's like, this needs more acid, like, where's the vinegar? And so like four boys, right? I kid you not, our boys fight over her salads because she makes her and very quickly, like she like throws together a vinaigrette for it. Um, and they love her salad. Like, I'm truly like baffled. It defies all stereotypes. You got a table of four boys being like, give me more mom's salad. Like, wow, she said something right. So it's more that um that she's more intuitive than that. But I know those categories have helped. I know, as for me, I this is not on the recipe side, but on the helping people think through their what I call the ordinary fair rhythms. Um, I include a couple charts in the book for people to think about this. Some people need to avoid restrictive patterns and they want, you know, positive like ordinary fair rhythms, like keep single ingredient snacks on hand, or start your um meal with some protein or some maybe fermented food, something that's going to be good for your glucose rep levels. Um, try to get at least X grams of this vegetable or that fruit or this protein a day, like sort of positive things that you can run to that are less restrictive. Um, because some people don't respond well to restrictions, and that's great. So I have like a whole list of that kind of stuff. But I, Katie, I need restrictions. Like that I I do much better with like clear limits. And so I include a long list of like if you're like me, you're gonna be well served by like, for example, I um generally live on a diet that avoids sugar most days, that avoids refined carbs most days, and really just eats like clean meats, vegetables, fruits, and maybe like whole um like whole grain uh carbohydrates or something that's like you know, that made carefully or fresh, something like that. And those help me so much because I just say no to most things until it's a feast, you know, until it's like a date night or a Friday night or a Sunday. And though those, so I include like lists for people of like, here's some examples. And I I change all the time. Like these rhythms move, they're not rules, right? Rhythms and habits are really different than rules. They're not something you do all the time and you feel bad about when you break. They're things that you do most of the time because you're learning to live into them and they're giving you life.
SPEAKER_01:So good. I could sit there for a while because food's my language, but yeah, move on to some of the other habits. And if anyone's like, oh, I didn't know you were doing construction, Katie. Can you hear the sound in the background? It's my son playing.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, oh, I was I didn't hear that, but I saw I saw you a mute button go up, and I was like, Oh, she must be doing something.
SPEAKER_01:I know I'm like, what is happening upstairs?
SPEAKER_00:Looks I'm in I'm in my office, and my boys were in my, if my boys were here in the office, you would hear a lot more than that.
SPEAKER_01:So if I go mute every once in a while, and that's why that's what's going on. Um, so some of the other habits we had talked about, let's maybe highlight one other one from the book that you're like, I really wish people could hear more about this one.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, that's hard because I probably would say sleep or exercise. Which do you think your listeners would appreciate hearing about more?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, goodness. Well, sleep's kind of ironic because I have a toddler in sleep regression right now. Um you pick either one.
SPEAKER_00:Um I I'll I'll talk about exercise, I think, because I I I think kind of like food, most people have a feeling like I wish I was eating healthier or I wish I was exercising, but they also have like a lot of guilt baggage and frustration with, well, but I don't and I can't. Um and so I'll say this one of the things that has been the most impactful in my mental health recovery has been making exercise a normal rhythm of my week. And now remember, I'm starting this years ago with like four small boys in the house. So it's not convenient ever to exercise. And that's that's kind of the point. Like wanting to exercise and actually exercising are two different things. The first one sounds exciting, the second one takes time, you get exhausted, it kind of hurts. Um, and you're like, this is very hard. What I want to point out is that that is the point. Um, anti-fragility is one of the most important concepts for you to understand about your body that you're made to encounter struggle and push through, and that's exactly how you become healthier. This was so informative to me because I realized, oh, this is true of me spiritually too. Um, hard things make your character stronger. Suffering makes you, when done rightly, when gone through it with others and with God, makes you more holy, more soft, more warm, more open to the world. And so I see I look at exercise as a spiritual gymnasium where yes, I'm making my body stronger and more healthy, but also I'm teaching my soul, again, the body teaches the soul, that the this is the way of life to encounter the right kinds of suffering in the right ways and train yourself to turn what is difficult into health. Now, for anybody, and okay, let's just I'm just gonna do both, right? One of the key things to exercise is that you're actually just breaking your body down. You're actually just straining your cardiovascular system. What needs to happen for you to get stronger is then you have to go rest. All right. It's it's rest, not weight lifting, that builds up your muscles. It's rest, not running, that makes your heart and your cardiovascular system, your lungs stronger. And so you have to do these twin pairs of saying, I'm gonna push myself more than I wanted to push myself, and then I'm gonna rest more than I'm actually willing to rest. And if you're a young parent like yourself, Katie, you're like, that sounds great, Justin, but everything in my life is conspiring to make that not happen. So what do I do? Well, this is where I think um two things can be really important and comforting. One, over and over and over, um the most impactful form of exercise for overall health and longevity is not weight training. Um, it's not swimming, it's not marathon running, it's walking outside, like walking outside. And if you're the kind of person some of you will love, like me, like I love cross-training. I do crossfit, I love like pretty intense exercise. That's great. If you do that, do that. But if you're like, I don't have time for this, nor do I have the health or the capacity for this. I would say the beautiful thing is that one of the most best things is the lowest bar of all things, and that is just taking a walk, let's say every other day. And if you can make that with a friend, with another mom, maybe around the playground while your kids are playing. Um that is incredible actually for your health. And two, sleeping. Um one of the things that really has solved like my mental health is actually just practicing a sleep routine of going to bed at the same time every day, getting out of bed at the same time every morning, and trusting that um your body learns to sleep in those, in that sleep opportunity window, a lot more than you can make it sleep at any given moment. And there's a ton of like stuff I have for in the book on um the chapter of about sleep for like sleep routines and how to form it. But you put those things together and you're like, these are low bar things that you can do. But again, if you have a toddler, you're thinking, okay, my life is characterized by wanting to sleep and not being able to sleep. And I think one of the greatest reminders for that, uh, for me, is that it is holy and good to give up sleep for those that you love. Um it is so holy, it is so good. I think, you know, for me, I always think about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane surrendering sleep, staying up all night to pray for me, like for us, like sacrificing his sleep, his life for our good. So anybody who's like, I love this, but I can't, I would say there's two ways of formation here. One is you are being made a more loving person by surrendering your life to the good of others. So that police officer working the night shift, or that nurse staying up till 4 a.m. to care for a patient, that mother getting up all night, that grandpa walking the hallway to pray for his children, or worried about, you know, his wife, that is beautiful. Like that is holy, that is good. But if that becomes the whole of your life, we're gonna be worried about whether you um are attending to the idea that that your life is not just meant to be caring for other people, it's also meant to be caring for the body that that you have and that you were made to care for. And so, of course, in the newborn years, it's gonna be primarily for other children. But if you are like lots of us, five, 10 years later, you're still staying up all odd hours of the night, checking your phone and scrolling in bed and watching one more show and then trying to wake up early because you're behind. Well, that's not holy. Um, that's addictive patterns. And so, you know, people in different stages are going to need to hear this differently. But both of them are gonna hear the central message that sleep is spiritual and that exercise is spiritual, and that there are low bars to both that can push you forward into a new way. Again, not into transforming your body into what you always wanted, but rather transforming your life into a more loving one that cares for your body and cares for others. Um, wonderfully, these this does have actually physical impacts. Like you will tend to like the way your body looks eventually a little bit more through doing these things, but it's not the primary reason. We're not talking about body image. We're talking about life of love and how do you serve and steward your body. And sleep and exercise are just two integral parts of that. And they're very, very spiritual.
SPEAKER_01:There was something that I felt like the Holy Spirit's convicted me of recently. And, you know, I would get Wesley down seven or eight o'clock, right? And I'd stay up until 11, midnight, whatever, and wake up, you know, be up with him all night, like whatever, up early in the morning. And I really felt like he questioned like, what's the motivation of staying up so late? Like, what am I doing? And it's always like hustle, hustle, hustle, work, work, work, clean, clean, clean. And I'm like, man, could there be a grace in that where maybe I'm saying no to some of it or letting some of it go a little bit, like cleaning the kitchen, but not perfectly, or you know, like doing the laundry, but like just enough, um, or working on projects only that are pressing, but not when so I could sleep, you know, like and so last night I went to bed at nine, which I would have seen as like I don't know, lazy or unproductive.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, a few years ago. But I'm like, man, if I if I'm if I feel called to all of this and want to show up well, I have to start evaluating. And so um, just last night, nine o'clock, that was a big shift for me.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. All right. So you're you're on to it. And it's a I am. And if you can, you know, so it's it sounds like you've had a moment of life where you're like, oh, I I actually can. And that's the important thing. I think you we get addicted to the patterns of young childhood where we're just completely strained and stretched thin. And a part of a movement of health is for the parent who is actually sort of at the point where that can start changing again, but they're still in all the old rhythms. And and remember, for good reasons, like because you were keeping a child alive. Like, praise God, thank you for you. Um, but also there's this life happens in seasons. And one of the things that really shifted my season was learning to Sabbath, like learning to take a day off to do exactly what you said, Katie, to say there's always more I could do, there's always more work, there's always another email, there's always another errand. But um, the weekly routine of Sabbath calls you to a new mentality of saying, yet I will rest. Um, I there's always more, always more I could do, but I will rhythmically rest. That kind of weekly routine, I think, trains you to be the sort of person who begins to be able to grab that in smaller moments and say, Yeah, I I could do more in the kitchen tonight, of course. But it's also really important that I attend to my body so that I can do well for my family tomorrow. And I'll catch up in the kitchen tomorrow. And that's the person who knows their limits. That is not most people in the world, particularly in the modern world. We're very uncomfortable with limits. We don't like the idea that we're limited, and we certainly don't respect them as a way of health. But the more that we do, the when you know your limits and you respect your limits, what you're actually doing is creating the guardrails in between which freedom can flourish. Because just like a plane that is finely tuned within certain guardrails to be like, you know, the screw is this tight and the wing is in this place, and it's very precise, that thing can fly because it is so finely tuned. And likewise, when we start to know and respect the limits of our bodies and souls, the ways that we're made to depend, need rest, need food, um, we start to find a place of freedom, of like where, oh, I'm made to love. I'm made to live into this healthy way, body and soul. And that is not restrictive. That is freeing, but it comes through respecting your limits.
SPEAKER_01:Well, what a powerful way to end, man. Well, if people are curious about the rest of the habits, how many are in there? I didn't count. Is it 13?
SPEAKER_00:It's 10. Um, 10 areas of the body breathing, thinking, eating, sleeping, sickness, exercise. I could go on. Um, and each one has a physical and a spiritual discipline. So there's kind of like 10 areas, 20 habits. Good luck keeping count. Don't do it all at one time. Um, I'd say in the book over and over, just pick one thing and try it, you know. So yeah, you start anywhere.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I will attach the link to the book directly to the book in the show notes. So if you're curious, want to get yourself a copy, you can get it there. But one quick note um I wanted to talk about before we close. Um, one of Wesley's favorites for a good reason, favorite phrases for a good reason is what a mess.
SPEAKER_02:I love it.
SPEAKER_01:He walks around the house and goes, what a mess, probably because he hears me say it a lot. But um your um children's book became an instant free or instant favorite because of the title. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I love it. Yeah. And so he calls it. So much of what I talk about in Haves of the Household is the mess of our house. So when when I wrote a kid's book, I was like, the big mess is an appropriate title.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It sits right next to his bed and he loves that their ice cream, there's ice cream in it. And right there's ice cream and pie. He loves the graphics, the title. We'll get the concept as he gets older. But um can you just tell us about your kids' book? Because I want people to know about that too.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the big mess is a story about two brothers. Um, one of which the older brother makes fantastic giant dessert creations. And the younger brother, as you might expect, just sort of accidentally all the time gets in the way and ends up smashing them. And there's a lot of messes. Because, you know, part in part, I'm trying to tell a parable of sibling life and parenthood where um babies come and they mess up your life. They make a big mess of everything. And the story, as you know, if you've read it, is about sort of finding the grace of relationship in the mess and realizing that in in messy places that that's actually the place of loving households. Um, when we learn the art of grace. But it's also, Katie, unabashedly just a way to delight kids. Because I'm like, what would keep a kid turning the page? How about a giant dessert that explodes every next page? Like, so so I find like little boys particularly um love this book. And I, you know, it's so fun for me because they get to look at, oh, here's a huge cake and it gets exploded. Oh, here's a huge ice cream sundae, and yep, it gets exploded. I was very inspired by kids' books that I loved with larger than life desserts or food, like Cloudy with a chance of meatballs, for example, where you just like you get to see the delight of huge food creations. So the big mess is definitely playing on those.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you have Wesley's vote. He loves it.
SPEAKER_00:That's the most important one. Like, I don't care what the the Amazon reviewer says. I don't know, does your kid say read it again? And uh I've gotten a lot of good kid reviews on that. Just read it again.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's awesome. I was actually thinking we're at that stage where we have to like hide the paper books because he ruins them. Yes, and he hasn't ruined yours. So that's also another compliment.
SPEAKER_00:It's hardback, which is good, but you know, yeah, read it enough and the pages will get rips. That type of thing. Okay, well that's it's always like an honor.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's the best sign, though, right? Yeah. Well, well read, well worn. Well, we end each of our conversations with the same three questions, and I would love to hear your answers as well. The first is something you have eaten recently and loved.
SPEAKER_00:Um, does it is this like, do I get a food and drink one or just oh sure.
SPEAKER_01:Do both if you have both, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So recently I've just been really into making like Ethiopian coffee in my like my my morning routine. Oh, and it's just been like amazing. The the eaten one is my wife, Lauren, you has recently gotten a um, I think it's called a neutra mill, but it's like a homemade, like a grain, like she buys wheat berries and grinds the flour like in the kitchen. It's just like a big glorified coffee grinder. And like the combination of something that she's made, like a whole, like a fresh whole grain bread with my Ethiopian coffee in the morning is like delighting me.
SPEAKER_01:So that's I've never, I have to say, I've never milled. Is that the word? My own.
SPEAKER_00:That is what she calls it. Yeah, it's very new to us too, but it's been super fun because even the kids. Like they the boys like to pour it in, grind it up, and then like we'll make homemade waffles, which are super healthy, even though it's still technically called a waffle.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Oh my gosh, amazing. Man, I'm like, I gotta meet her. I love all of that.
SPEAKER_00:I think you'd like her. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And then I'm a huge coffee fanatic, but I've never had Ethiopian coffee.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. I bet you've had it and you just didn't know you had it. It's so yeah, it's it's one of my favorite like varietals. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. How about a gathering you attended that made you feel a strong sense of belonging? And if you could pinpoint it, what it was that made you feel that way.
SPEAKER_00:Um this is a fun one. I at the gym that I go to, um, one of my best friends there is a chef. And I met him about a year and a half ago. We just work out together. And um, one of the neat things about exercise, even just walking around the block, like I said, is that you really bond with other people. And um, we started talking about food, and uh he knew that I was sort of writing some about this. And like he's a very good chef. His restaurants in Richmond are um like incredible, some of the best. He's got a couple, and we decided, hey, we should do that a dinner together. We read this book called Supper of the Lamb by Robert Ferrar Capon, which is about sort of the beauty of food. And um I he was like, You invite 20 of your friends, I'm gonna invite 20 of my sort of like restaurant fans, and we're all gonna get together and like read quotes from this book and have like a private dinner feast. And it was so neat. I think the sense of belonging came not because everybody knew everybody in the room, like a lot of us didn't know, but we sort of gathered in a sacramental way to say, we're gonna dive into the glories of food and good books and like both eat and toast together through the night. And it was such a neat community feel. I think it was like a bright spot of hospitality that doesn't have to be in a restaurant with 40 people, it could be at your home where you say, We're gonna have a beautiful meal and we're gonna toast this tonight. So bring a little thought. Um, moments like that, I think, are so beautiful. And that was one of my highlights this year.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. Thank God for good chef friends.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, yeah, it's it's it's honestly a pretty good gift.
SPEAKER_01:Um, last but not least, my favorite question lately something random you've discovered lately that you think everyone should know about. An Amazon purchase, Netflix show, anything random like that.
SPEAKER_00:All right, I'm gonna stay on the coffee theme. Um, I did not know that there is a travel aero press. So aeropress is a way of making like a really good either espresso or um kind of like pour-over style coffee. And I travel a lot to speak about my books or to like yeah, go to different conferences and stuff. And I didn't know I you can buy this travel airpress that fits in a travel mug. And so in the airport, you can make like great coffee, or in your hotel room, you can make great coffee. And um, I've started to post about this because I'm getting to be a bit of a coffee fanatic, and this has been my latest, like best gear edition, the travel airpress.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, I'm here for it. That's good. I'm kind of in that like mom, like I want my coffee fast phase, but this is not that.
SPEAKER_00:This this takes you know four to five minutes to make.
SPEAKER_01:Um, but I love good coffee, so it's really good, and I like the ritual of it.
SPEAKER_00:It's like it makes me like do something tactile for five minutes and then like enjoy the reward of it. But yeah, I it wouldn't be like a typical morning with a toddler for sure. It's a hotel morning when it's like just me, you know.
SPEAKER_01:There you go. There you go. Wow. Well, like I said, I feel like I could have stayed here at the toddler. He's having a dance party upstairs, but I don't know if you can hear the footprints. But um, I feel like I could have stayed on this conversation much longer. But thank you for sharing your wisdom and excited to get this book in people's hands. My goodness.
SPEAKER_00:Um, I'm so excited to hear from anybody who reads it, please DM me on Instagram or go find me on my email list on the website and tell me what you think. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
SPEAKER_01:Um, and I forgot to mention what's the website and socials just to send people out with that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, both are Justin Whitmore Early. So Justinwitmore.com or my Instagram handle is Justin Wilmore Early. And you can find both of those by like Justin Early, author lawyer. You'll find me out there. Um But I'd love I'd love to hear what you think. So give me, you know, get in touch if you liked this episode and let me know.
SPEAKER_01:Amazing. Well, thank you so much, guys. You know the drill. If you love the episode, be sure to share it with someone that you know would be encouraged by it, leave a review, and we will see you next week.