Atomic Habits

Son, why are these clothes on the floor?

The other night I stumbled over my ten-year-old son's shorts and shirt at the top of the stairs. "Son, pick up your clothes; they don't belong here!" He ran over. "But Dad, I'm just putting them there so I'm ready for my workout class tomorrow."

I answered shyly, and then proudly: "Oh, good call, son. Have a great night."

After reading Atomic Habits, I learned about staging your environment ahead of time to make a habit easier to keep. So every night I lay out my workout clothes on the stairs, so in the early morning I don't have to think about what to wear before I head out the door. My son had watched me do this so many mornings that he started doing it himself, before his own workout class, without me ever teaching him to.

He was doing what he'd seen his father do his whole life.

I didn't teach him that. I never sat him down and said, here's how you stage your clothes the night before. He just watched me do it, enough mornings, enough times, until it became his without him deciding to take it. That's what formation actually looks like most of the time. Not a lesson, just proximity.

You become like whoever you stand closest to, long enough.

Which is the part that stops me, because I am somebody's son too.

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are (1 John 3:1).

Not "children" as a metaphor I have to work to believe. Actual children. Which means the same quiet mechanism is at work in me. Not my strain to imitate God, but my nearness to Him, doing its slow, unnoticed work on me.

The clothes on the stairs weren't a technique I invented. They were an inheritance I didn't know I was passing on. So it is, I think, with the Father's love. It doesn't wait for me to notice it before it starts shaping me.

Pause and ponder.

Take a moment to notice your heartbeat, breath, and where you are. Shut the door. Light a candle. Close your eyes. Just sit with the Father. Contemplate His love for you.

Sit with the small son before you move to the capital Son, Jesus. Picture something ordinary your own father did, or something ordinary you now do, that you never chose so much as absorbed.

Let that be the doorway, not a detour, into 1 John 3:1. The love that made you a child of God is not a doctrine to master. It's a nearness to rest until it does its own quiet work, the way a boy learns to stage his clothes on the stairs without ever being told to.

What is being formed in you today simply because of who you've been standing close to?

Praise God the Father for those graces.

What might it look like to stand a little closer to the Father, trusting that the forming is His to do, not yours to force?

Oh, by the way, don’t forget to put out your workout clothes before you go to bed this evening.