Reimagining the Good Life with Amy Julia Becker

Why Ignoring the Body Never Works with Justin Whitmel Earley

• Amy Julia Becker, Justin Whitmel Earley • Season 9 • Episode 7

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S9 E7 — Your body is trying to tell you something. Are you listening? In this episode, corporate lawyer Justin Whitmel Earley joins Amy Julia Becker to explore how spiritual life is also embodied life. As you reflect on the year ahead, this conversation invites you to think not in terms of resolutions, but in terms of habits that nurture health and wholeness. Justin and Amy Julia reflect on:

  • How breathing can reconnect body and soul
  • How fasting, feasting, and everyday meals contribute to the spiritual life
  • How to understand pain and sickness in a world that is both beautiful and broken
  • Why sleep matters spiritually

00:00 Intro: Anxiety Journey
05:20 The Body and Soul Connection
09:25 Cultural Disconnect
14:46 Breath: A Practice to Reconnect Body and Soul
23:35 Food: Fasting, Feasting, and Ordinary Fare
32:08 Understanding Pain and Sickness in a Broken World
38:18 The Spiritual Significance of Sleep

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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

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WATCH this conversation on YouTube: Amy Julia Becker on YouTube

SUBSCRIBE to Amy Julia's Substack: amyjuliabecker.substack.com

JOIN the conversation on Instagram: @amyjuliabecker

LISTEN to more episodes: amyjuliabecker.com/shows/

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ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Justin Whitmel Earley is a writer, speaker, and lawyer. He is the author of The Common Rule, Habits of the Household, and Made for People, 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. He continually explores both how physical habits are more spiritual than we think and how spiritual habits are more physical than we think. He lives with his wife and four boys in Richmond, Virginia, spends a lot of time around fires and porches with friends, and is a part-owner of a local gym. You can follow him online at justinwhitmelearley.com.

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Note: This transcript is autogenerated and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Amy Julia Becker (00:04)
Hi friends, I'm Amy Julia Becker, and this is Reimagining the Good Life, a podcast about challenging the assumptions about what makes life good, proclaiming the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envisioning a world of belonging where everyone matters. If you're listening to this in real time, it is almost 2026. If you're a few days late on your podcast feed, we have just turned a corner into a new year. Either way,

I bring this up because my conversation today with Justin Earley is a great one for thinking about the year ahead. And I'm not really talking about New Year's resolutions. I'm just talking about habits that can lead towards health and wholeness. Justin Earley is a writer, speaker, and lawyer, and he's also the author of a new book called The Body Teaches the Soul.

I'm excited for you to hear this conversation. talk about sleep. We talk about other just very basic habits like breathing that can bring us to a greater awareness of ourselves, of those around us and of how to live in a healthy way. But I also want to add one more thing before we get into this interview. Justin and I talk more directly about some Christian concepts than I often do on this podcast.

So I think it's possible that there are some spiritual ideas that are not familiar to all of my listeners. And I did not do what I wish I had done, which is just to ask Justin to unpack what it was that we were talking about. So my goal with this space is to make sure that it is welcoming and comfortable for people from many faith traditions or from no faith tradition, people who are.

generously and curiously and seriously seeking after truth and after answers. And I want that to be the spirit of this space. I don't try to hide my own Christian commitments in these conversations, as you well know, but I do want it to be a welcoming space. I just wanted to give you a heads up that there may be some concepts that could have deserved more explanation. So I invite you to take from this interview whatever will help you move towards health and wholeness in the year ahead. Thank you for being here.

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I am here with Justin Early. Justin, thank you so much for joining me. ⁓ So your most recent book, The Body Teaches the Soul, starts with a story about your own anxiety. And I wanted to ask you just to share that story and explain how it in some ways led to the writing of this book.

Justin Earley (02:20)
You're welcome.

So in my 20s, I was an English literature major at University of Virginia. I ⁓ then moved to China and was a missionary there for a while. And my friends, if you asked them to describe me then, it was like the, maybe I don't know, the creative writing music guy who didn't wear shoes, high EQ, really like very relational. And then I decided to go to law school, which was kind of a wild turn.

But I actually, and I'm one of the only people I've heard that says this, actually felt called by the Lord to go from the mission field to corporate law, which I see as, and I'm in it now, by the way, I'm sitting at my desk where I own and run a law firm that does business law. And I can tell you more about that if you want to know, but I really felt then and now I called to do this. But that meant in my late 20s, I run at law school with all the fervor of a missionary on a call.

And while that does really well for me in terms of getting good grades and like a great job, ⁓ I unconsciously assimilated to all the typical habits and practices of modern lawyering, which I wasn't aware of at the time because usually you're not aware of your habits. You're not aware of the water you're swimming in. Yeah. And I came out right about the age of 30 with ⁓ a first year in lawyering that just fell apart. So I'm a young attorney. I've got two kids.

married to my wife Lauren, and suddenly I just evolve into anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, like out of nowhere. I mean, had no idea what was going on. And it took a long, long time to figure out what was going on. So I recount this, you know, in the introduction that body teaches the soul as a compressed story, but it was a long journey. And I would know just two main things that I learned. The first thing that I learned was that

when your head and your habits diverge, your heart tends to follow the habits. Because I look at my life then and I was, as I am now, like a very sincere believer who would quote unquote, like put my identity in Christ, not work. I never thought I had put my hope in how my job is going. But suddenly I became full of anxiety and panic. And I look back now and I see that my head was going one way.

but my habits were running the other way. My technology habits, my lack of good sleeping and eating habits, lack of exercise, lack of care for my body became, and I did not really understand this at the time, became lack of care for my mind. And I did not think it worked in that direction. So this is the second thing that I learned, that your body can change how you think. Bad habits of the body can change how you believe. And we don't just work.

top down, though we do, and that's also really important. We also work body, bottom up, body up. And that is what the body teaches the soul is really all about. I think the lesser known way of how we work spiritually, which is our physical habits impact our spiritual life of the mind and vice versa. the body teaches the soul is all about that direction, that the body does indeed teach the soul. And what does it have to teach and how? That's the rest of the book.

Amy Julia Becker (05:58)
Yeah, and I think you are not alone. Certainly I've similarly found myself at multiple points during my life having bodily experiences that I now look back and recognize were signs of spiritual and emotional distress. Yes. And I didn't actually know how to pay attention to them as such. Especially when I had thoughts in my mind that seemed to be like, well, I don't need to be anxious. This doesn't make sense.

Justin Earley (06:18)
Exactly.

Amy Julia Becker (06:27)
I've learned over time to pay a lot more attention to my body. last night, I woke up in the middle of the night and I was feeling anxious and I truly, I'm like, I don't know why. Like that did not, it was not something where it was obvious because this bad thing had happened yesterday. But I really did this morning say, okay, I need to pay attention to that. What was it about yesterday that woke me up in the middle of the night? Because my body is like a trusted source of information. Even That's a great way to put it.

I think that there's nothing wrong. I'm doing just fine.

Justin Earley (07:00)
Yes. For me, a lot of the book is about this, particularly chapter two on mental health. But for me, the honoring the command, do not be anxious. ⁓ Jesus says it, Paul says it, it's all over the Bible. Honoring the command, do not be anxious is a lot more than just saying it to yourself over and over. There's a way I see now of saying, actually that is a command. We need to cultivate joy and peace in our bodies. But I see a lot more like that.

where cultivate is carefully chosen. You need to think about your body like a garden and cultivate it towards the shalom of integration. And that, I think I used to think that was just a process of quote unquote, believe the truth harder, even though, you know, no one really knows how to do that. You don't know how to believe more than you believe. And thank goodness, like, you know.

Jesus isn't asking us to do that sort of works-based form of belief, which is, I know you said it and you believe it, but believe harder. It's like, wait, what? It's more, he's inviting us to a way of.

that reinforces the belief that he's already given us. like upfront in a conversation like this, and at the end, I like to remind everybody that habits don't change God's love for you. It's just that God's love for you should change your habits. So all of this conversation is not in the realm of like, how do you be a better Christian? Or how do you get God to love you and approve of you more? How do you seal the deal in salvation? That's grace through faith, not by work so that no one can boast. But I'm quoting Ephesians two there, Paul goes on to write,

He's prepared good works for you to do in advance. And so when we talk about the body teaching the soul and cultivating peace and shalom and displacing anxiety, we're talking about cooperating with the redemptive work that God wants to do in your life, not earning your salvation. We're talking about participating.

Amy Julia Becker (08:50)
Yeah, and I do love that throughout the book there's this image of the garden and that metaphor, which again is very biblical, is so helpful in the sense of, ⁓ you know, plants don't decide to grow, you know, there is a cultivation that is happening on the part of the gardener. And I guess in this analogy, the gardener is both God and also us, right? And that happens again throughout scripture where it's like,

What soil are you planting yourself in? Are you near water? What are the conditions that you're kind of giving to yourself in order to grow? It is going to determine the way that you grow. And one thing I'm wondering about, I'm wondering about the contemporary nature of this disconnect, because on one level, think that ⁓ when this has always been true, right? There's always been some measure of human disconnect between body and soul. And the body has always been

perhaps a guide to pay attention to that we haven't necessarily wanted to. there's something true about that. But I'm wondering if there's also our particular ⁓ forces in contemporary culture that you think make that disconnect wider or harder to overcome. Can you speak to that?

Justin Earley (10:00)
Absolutely. I think on the one hand, we're very much like everyone else in human history in that we struggle with the body and what does it mean, but that's because it's so important, not because humans are so dumb. So just what I mean there is that I think all the most holy, sacred and important things that God made, let's say like sex, for example, or money, power.

Those are the things that the enemy comes and tries to distort the most, right? So those are the real spiritual warfare battlegrounds about how to think rightly about sex, to think rightly about money, power. And I think the body is right there in the middle of that because it is so very sacred and good. I mean, this is Genesis one and two stuff where bodies are not an accident. mean, part of the magic for me of researching this book was just realizing

It was kind of like an aha, maybe in the second year of working on it, where I was like, my gosh, it suddenly just popped into clarity in my mind that God made bodies on purpose. And then he saved us by the body of his son. And then he's going to resurrect us to new bodies. And even in writing this, think I sort of thought of the body as a side tangent to what God was doing. And I was like, this is really the main character. He meant for us to be spiritual, physical beings. This wasn't an accident. So we are very much like the rest of human history in that.

we struggled to get the body right because that's just a lot of spiritual warfare there. There's a lot of attack there. There's a lot of lies and confusion there. But the Bible is really clear on it. The Bible is really clear on it. And that clarity can really help the particular ways that our cultural moment struggled with it. And I would just name two in our cultural moment, which are historically rooted. mean, most people have at some point in time struggled with this idea of ignoring the body. This is a long standing heresy that the church has called Gnosticism, where

It's some kind of overdeveloped worldview of the spiritual as the real important stuff of life. And the New Testament was written actually to people who thought a lot like this. So, know, Paul's commands and Jesus's teachings are often sounding in that realm, which is really important. So you don't, we know that we don't want to ignore the body. The church has always called that a heresy. The Bible doesn't talk like that. So.

We don't want to ignore it. And typically, Christians are the ones to err on this side, honestly. Like religious people are the ones to err on this side. You do see some level of secular culture, quote unquote, who also plays in this area of thinking, you know, the truly Zen thing to do is sort of like zone out and ignore the world. Or you see it in some gender issues where it's like, you you are this in your body, but in your mind, you're this.

truly sort of disconnecting physical reality from a more spiritual or identity reality. But by and large, I think you mostly see actually religious people make the mistake of ignoring the body. ⁓ You see another side of our culture though, and I'd say this is just everywhere, of idolizing the body. And often this is just vanity. This is body image struggles. This is self-consciousness. This is the...

entirely too heavy of a weight that we've put on how we look and how we're sexualized and all this stuff. And this is, you know, out there and everybody, this is a struggle in the church. This is a struggle outside of the church. And typically it's that stuff. There is sort of a capital materialism philosophy that really sort of says like, this is all there is. Like we're just atoms or we're just, you know, the product of our ancestors. We're just, C.S. Lewis called it nothing buttery. Like we're nothing but da da da. And ⁓

I think Amy, some of my most fascinating points of research that were so encouraging to me is how wildly new and untenable that is as a worldview, even though it is the pervasive worldview of our moment, but it is brand new in world history. Like nobody really thought this was a tenable way to think that we're nothing but atoms and the removal of everything spiritual from the world and leaving just the body and what we see in the world.

is causing a lot of the problems that we have around the body. It's causing a lot of mental unhealth, it's causing a lot of confusion that we have. So Christians get to lovingly, but wholeheartedly just reject both of these and say, no, God is much better than that. He made our bodies good and we're not meant to ignore them, we're not meant to idolize them, we're meant to image him through them. That is what the book is all about, trying to say, what would it look like to actually image God and breathing, thinking and exercising? as you know, each chapter kind of dives into that.

Amy Julia Becker (14:47)
Yeah, and well, so let's go there. I'm going to repeat what you just said, that like each chapter talks about what it looks like when we ignore our bodies or idolize them or kind of begin to reflect the image of God in our bodies. And you've just given us a broad overview, but then there are these 10 particular habits or practices that you're ⁓ walking us through in terms of a reconnection, the invitation to reconnect body and soul.

I thought we might try to talk about two or three of those, which would both be good and useful in terms of time and also encouraging people to buy the book because ⁓ each chapter really is kind of can stand alone if there are particular areas of bodily participation that people want to pay attention to. And it obviously also all works together. But you start with the breath. And that's a bodily experience that we each have all day, every day. Don't even know that we're doing it most of the time.

Why start there and why does breathing matter? Yeah.

Justin Earley (15:45)
I was totally going to start with the mind. I laid this out to my editor. I was sort of guilty of what I'm now writing against, which is that we're really just brains and thinking. And my editor, Paul Pastore, he's a wonderful guy, great thinker. was, he convinced me that breath was actually the central place to start. He was totally right. He sent me to Genesis 2, 7, where God forms Adam out of

dust and then breeze the spirit of life into him. And Genesis says a living soul was created. So there's this idea right there in the beginning of the Bible in Genesis 2, 7, that what a human being is, what a living soul is, is this combination of the physical dust and the spiritual. that's the metaphor there is breath. And it's sort of, it's what I like to call a lived metaphor, as in the closer you look at breath, the more you see how

amazingly scientific and amazingly spiritual this thing is. we take like vast amounts of breath a day. It's actually the way we interact with the world. really, we think of it as air, but we're actually consuming particles and doing things to them and like using the oxygen and giving back the carbon dioxide. When you smell something, it's literally because you're touching it. Like it's giving off particles and you're interacting with them. And there's this wild stat that the amount of molecules and evolved in each breath.

are so vast that statistically it's likely that you're touching a particle that every single other human being in history before you has touched, which to some people is like, my gosh. And to some people they're like, gross. And both are right. But the more you look at breath, the more you realize it's very spiritual. And you realize it's actually right at the center of that connection of the physical and the spiritual because it's at the center of our upper and lower thinking systems. And what I mean by that is breathing is the one thing that's a vital life function.

that you can take out of the unconscious and bring into the conscious. So it's typically happening in your lower brain. You you're just respirating as you sleep. don't think about it. And everybody was breathing normally until I started talking about it. Now they're all, wait, what am I doing with my breath? Because your upper brain can take control of it. And some experts call this the brain's fire escape hatch. Because the idea there is that when you need to do something incredible, like run away from a bad person, as I would tell my son, like run away from a robber.

You're gonna start breathing in a certain way to enable your body to do that. The lesser known side is that it's also super helpful in calming us down when something has scared us that is actually not scary. Let's take anxiety for that matter. I heard so many people during my anxiety struggles tell me I should think about breath work. And I thought they were so silly. I was like, I've got something much more serious than that. I don't know what I need, but I thought I was like.

I was a real patient. didn't just need to like huff and puff a little bit because I had no idea actually at how much God has given us the capacity to garden peace and put off anxiety simply through breathing. And I would just say two ways I write at the end of the chapter to do this. One is box breathing, which is a wonderful, scientifically affirmed way of calming your central nervous system of getting

out of flight mode and into relax mode. Box breathing is where you breathe in, you can trace the box as you do it for about four seconds. You hold for four seconds, you breathe out for four seconds, you hold for four seconds. And you try to work up longer if you can, kind of like an exercise, like can I do it for eight seconds on each side? Can I do it for 15 seconds? I like doing that because then you get to a point if you're doing it for 15 seconds on each side. And I often do this, like, maybe sitting down in the morning, often in the car.

I do it when I'm just driving, like won't listen to anything. And I'll just box breathe for a while. If you do it for 15 seconds, you're taking one breath a minute, which is really interesting. And it's incredibly calming. And I like to pair that sort of upper brain control of the lower body to garden peace in your body with scripture as breath prayers to sort of bring spiritual truth into this sort of physical exercise. And that's where I see the sort of.

I would almost call it sublime combination of you're really working on how God made you, because he made you physical, he made you spiritual. He made you habit based in your lower brain and he gave you an incredible rational faculty in your upper brain. And when you work at the intersection of all those things, you're really working in a really holistic way. And I say working, you could call this just responding to God in a holistic way. Like when you, and I know I'm talking a lot about breath, so I'm gonna end my comments here. Just think about this. When you are,

standing at the kitchen counter doing dishes and repeating in your head, no one helps me, no one cares about me. And by the way, this is from my own life. Like this is my narrative when I'm doing dishes at night and I'm like, you why is this place a mess? And where are the kids and why have they done, you know. You are literally increasing your heart rate and you're respirating lies. Like you're actually saying through your breath.

That's your faculty for speech, right? You're respirating lies. Like nobody loves me, nobody cares for me. When you honor the command, don't be anxious about anything, in prayer and petition, present your requests to God. When you take back control of that breath and you say, I'm gonna actually breathe here at the sink, and I'm gonna do a breath prayer while I do dishes. You're not only calming your body, which is super important to making your mind available to truth. You're respirating truth into it. You were speaking a lie.

And now you're speaking a truth. And as it turns out, both of those create neural patterns, like neural pathways, that the more you go down them, the more well-worn paths those go. It's not just that the brain can't hold anxiety and gratitude at the same time, though that's true. So we should work on putting gratitude there as a practice. It's that those neural pathways get deeper. And that's why words are so powerful. Words form who you are, physically and spiritually. And so breath prayers have been a wonderful way to me to say,

I wanna be formed in gratitude. I wanna be formed in peace. Let me garden that plant instead of guarding the anxiety plant because both of them will grow if you tend to them.

Amy Julia Becker (22:10)
Hmm. Well, I thank you for kind of landing, you know, staying with that ⁓ initial image, not just image experience, very, very daily human experience of breathing. And thank you to your editor for also getting you to start there, because I agree. ⁓ I was not someone who paid any attention to breathing and was somewhat dismissive of that idea until I was, you know, well into my adult life. And now

It is the first place I go in both anxiety and when I notice resentment. I don't always notice it. That's the place I

Justin Earley (22:48)
right

It's also a wonderful tool to give to your kids. You talk a lot and kids are slow to pick up. That's just parenting. But I often mention this, hey, you just scraped your knee, breathe with me. Because you're in pain and you're freaking out. Let me help you. ⁓ So hopefully they'll carry that. I'm trying to teach them early that breathing can help them in lots lots of places.

Amy Julia Becker (23:12)
Yeah, and I think even just ⁓ one thing I was not really taught as a child was that idea of like paying attention to your body, not in an idolatrous way, but in a way that says what is my body telling me ⁓ is really, really helpful and what can I bring to my body that might also help to reorient my mind and spirit. Yeah.

Justin Earley (23:35)
That's right.

Amy Julia Becker (23:36)
Another chapter I found really helpful and challenging and unexpectedly so was about food. I was like, okay, food, whatever. And then, so what I really loved is you write about three different ways we can approach food and you're basically saying all of them are important. All of them are good, ⁓ but they can get distorted when they're kind of in the improper place. So you write about fasting, feasting.

Justin Earley (23:42)
I was interested, okay.

Amy Julia Becker (24:02)
and then food as ordinary fare. I love that to me, think was especially helpful, the idea of ordinary fare. But could you just speak for a minute about all three of those ⁓ possibilities and what they teach us?

Justin Earley (24:14)
This is one of the ones that's been so practical for me. I've never had outsized struggles with eating, but I have the normal human feature, which is it comes with a lot of frustration, shame, regret, guilt. You know, like I've never had anything like an eating disorder, but I've always had this sense that I can't trust myself around food and drink. And I think a lot of people carry that. know, you don't have to be an alcoholic or have some eating disorder to know that like you lose your

capacity to choose well very quickly. And most of us live our life with this low grade sense of we're actually not in charge around food, which is such a distortion, I think, of the way God made us to interact with food. Because in Genesis, I love to look at Genesis 2.9, God made the trees in the garden pleasing to the eye and good for food. There's this sort of dual nature to creation in that it's given to us for our dependence.

like we need to eat, but also our delight. Like we're supposed to take wonder and gratitude and astonishment in it. And in the American diet, mean, or really, you know, after the fall, the human diet, we tend, but it's really bad in America right now with our sort of processed food everywhere, eat as much sugar, everything as you want. We tend to turn that dependence into indulgence. just eat a ton. And that turns the delight into shame. And so we were meant to experience,

dependence and delight as these twin poles of food. And now we're just bouncing back and forth between indulgence and shame. And that's where so much of my life has been spent. When I started to realize that the Bible is good news for everything, it's also good news for your eating. It has ideas for you here. ⁓ There's like a history of the way that people of God have eaten that lives between these two poles of fasting and feasting. Fasting is the place where you recover that dependence. You, like Jesus said, you know, and he was quoting Deuteronomy,

We don't live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. We would actually, as the people of God, restrain from eating food, which is odd. We skip meals or skip whole days or sometimes long seasons of eating or eating regularly to recover our dependence. And by the way, Jesus said, as a famous passage on this, he says, when you fast, and the most overlooked

part of this passage I think is the word when, because he assumes that you will. That's really interesting. Most of us have heard of fasting and don't actually do it. But Jesus assumes that we'll do it. ⁓ And yet, he's also actually more upfront in his teachings about feasting than fasting. He's actually criticized more for eating too much and, you know, people still are criticizing him for turning water to lime.

I mean, the church is generally uncomfortable with the idea that this was his first miracle. It still makes at least half of the church blush. Because we don't really understand the capital G goodness with which God made the world, that it really is good that we are embodied. It's really good that the world is made for us to consume, like wine included, and that the end of time is best symbolized as a feast with God and the people of God. And so that's what Jesus was all about.

you know, always going to feast with people. And he also says, when you feast, like when you throw a banquet, also an interesting assumption, right? So I just love taking those two poles and saying, okay, part of the Christian life is going to be a real restraint. Like sometimes like just not eating at all. And we can talk about healthy patterns for that if you want, but also a real delight in the gifts of God at the community of God and feasting. But none of that makes too much sense.

if you don't take it with the whole of scripture and realize that on your regular days in between, usually you're not fasting and usually you're not feasting. And that's where you live with the ordinary ethic of a believer, which is about simplicity, about resisting addiction, about ⁓ not idolizing food to a place that's unhealthy. And a lot of people call this like dieting or healthy eating. And I just want to take it less, move it.

out of the realm of like body image and even health and just into the realm of the spirituality of saying what and how do you need to eat in order to love the people that you're called to love? I think that answers way more questions than what do you need to eat to get to this weight or what you need to eat for this health outcome. I think just as a dad and a lawyer, like how do I need to eat so that I can do great legal work? Cause that's my main call to service.

How do I need to eat to be a good dad who's alert enough, strong enough, healthy enough, to live long enough, to love my family well enough? And there's a lot of good ideas there that I could share with people, but I would rather them think about what is the call in their life to love? That's right, we're gonna image God through food. We're gonna image him in loving God, loving neighbor, and then pick your diet accordingly. But just don't think that your diet has nothing to do with your call to love God and neighbor. It has a lot to do with

Because when you're deadening yourself with food and drink, it turns out it's hard to glorify God and be a good parent when you're hungover. It happens to be that way. It's also hard when you're constantly wrapped up in bad body image diets. It's hard when you're constantly indulging in anything and not practicing any sense of self-control. So the ordinary fair idea in the book is to be like all the normal days when you're not fasting and feasting.

Amy Julia Becker (29:48)
Yeah, which again, I really appreciated just that language around the ordinary fair. ⁓ And it is a challenge again to me because we live in a culture where ⁓ indulgence is possible at pretty much all time. Like we can just feast all the time, which really actually is not feasting if we do it. But and I think on the flip side of what you just said, the examples you just gave about loving, which I completely agree with, like certainly the way I treat myself.

Justin Earley (30:00)
So easy.

Exactly.

Amy Julia Becker (30:15)
you know, and my body the night before work is going to affect my work. I also, though, think about when I am in a situation and I really am like, gosh, I do not need that cake right now. But to eat the cake is to honor the person who is putting it in front of me is to connect me to the other people around this table. Like it can go. I guess my point is just there's a discernment involved in both of those, because there are times where especially I find this in like church potlucks where I'm like,

Yes, I really don't want to be eating like a cheese casserole and then a vegetable and cheese casserole right now, you know, I don't but I do want to sit with Dottie and hear about what's going on in her life and that's gonna happen more if I am like Eating with her then then if I'm not so anyway, I guess I just Add that not not in any sort of contradiction because I completely agree with what you said, but as like another aspect of what it means

Justin Earley (31:11)
Yeah.

Amy Julia Becker (31:11)
for love to be the guide into the decisions we make around food.

Justin Earley (31:16)
I love that, because I think if you look at Jesus' life, depending on which angle you're looking from, he's going to look overly restrictive or overly indulgent. And I think a believer's life should kind of look the same. Like if you look at my life on a lot of days, you're like, whoa, like highly disciplined eating or he's fasting. But to me, those are because I'm trying to grow closer to God or love others better by doing it. But then you look at me on other days and be like, oh my gosh, he kind of like I didn't know believers did that. they?

party like that, you know, he's eating a lot because I'm feasting. And I think if you're doing it right, you're going to get looked at weird from both angles, which is great because we might make interesting decisions. I wouldn't usually eat that, but I'm here celebrating with this person. So I'm going to indulge.

Amy Julia Becker (32:03)
I agree. And there is more that I would love to talk to you about with that, but I'm going to move on because I two other things I want to ask you about before we're done. The first is ⁓ you make a statement, which I agree with, most every health problem we have is more spiritual than we think. And most every emotional problem we have is more physical than we think. And we've kind of been talking about that, that kind of thing there. But you also devote a chapter to pain and sickness that doesn't have

those immediate and direct connections. Sometimes they do. Like sometimes we know, ⁓ yeah, like I am, I have a stomach ache because I'm anxious. Like that is something that happens to me or I'm have insomnia because I'm anxious, right? But for people who are experiencing physical pain that doesn't seem to be teaching them anything much. ⁓ Yeah. Could you just like speak to that? Cause I think it's a really important part of the book and just kind of put in this conversation that can seem a little bit like

do x, and z and achieve this result, which is not what you want.

Justin Earley (33:02)
Really appreciate this question because I put the chapter on pain, sickness, injury right in the middle of the book. It's chapter five. And I like to do this intentionally. And my book happens to the household on parenting. I put a marriage chapter right in the middle of the book. And part of my theory there is that you this is a hinge upon which you understand everything else. Like if you leave this out, everything else collapses. And if you leave out

the way that the fall and sin have broken, and even I would say tortured our bodies, then you won't get anything else right because you won't really understand what's going on when we struggle with sickness or mental illness or death or miscarriages. ⁓ If you just read the rest of the book, you might get the incorrect sense that God made bodies capital G good and we just need to do our part to like recover that goodness.

But tell that to a cancer patient. They'll have a lot to tell you back or they'll probably just go be sad like they usually are because nobody understands. Tell that to a mom who's just miscarried. Tell that to somebody who's doing everything right. And for some reason, these autoimmune disorders will just keep coming for them and their children. And I don't think you can grapple with the body at all unless you grapple with the fall, which I would put it like this, the fall has ruined everything, bodies included.

It means that try as you might, garden as you might, you might be on really rocky soil. Like you have an injury that you didn't ask for. mean, some of our injuries are kind of our fault. Most of them are, you know, most of them. So and so got hit by a car. ⁓ ever since that head injury, they've been suffering chronic depression. That's not a, you just read the Bible more fix.

That is just something, and this is the main application of that chapter, to lament. And I want to give people the category for saying, if you have anxiety like me in my early 30s, you've got something to garden back towards. You've really self-inflicted, and a lot of the mental illness we see in America is self-inflicted through lifestyle.

And following Jesus is a wonderful way of recultivating that garden. But there's very real instances and it's not clear. Like you don't really know which part of your struggle is which and that's okay. ⁓ Part of it is that our bodies are broken and dying. And that is to be lamented, it's not to be ignored. But when I say lamented, that's also not loathing, self loathing or despair.

Lament in the Bible is this category of being able to say to God your sadness while also holding on the inherent hope that it is to say it to God, if that makes sense. like that you're crying out to God means you're, sorry for the redundancy, crying out to God. Like you're not cursing mankind. You're not cursing like, why am I stuck with this dopamine lottery? You're looking up and doing the good work of wrestling with God. So the chapter,

The thing that was most helpful for me in that chapter was the two by two diagram, which I got from an author and theologian, Kelly Kapick. He's a wonderful.

Amy Julia Becker (36:23)
Yeah, he actually was just on this podcast. Yeah, I was like, well, this is did you talk about the two by two for? we didn't. I hadn't read your book. I had talked to him. But and I've we were talking about ⁓ your only human. Is that the name of Yes. Yeah. But I think the two by two that you're referring to comes from his book embodied hope. That's right. That's right. Anyway, yes. Go ahead and describe that. ⁓

Justin Earley (36:46)
Yeah,

it's just this, you know, it's more helpful to see than talk about, but it's just this idea of like, if you have no lament and no hope, you're kind of like, I don't know, you're just not anything, you're cynical. Like, if you have high lament and no hope, then you're really in despair. But if you have ⁓ high hope and no lament, it's naive optimism. Only, only when you have a true lament with a true hope do you get to...

Amy Julia Becker (36:57)
critical.

Justin Earley (37:15)
true Christianity, which is very aware of how broken the world is and we'll be happy to sit with you and mourn with you about it. But very aware that Christ is making all things new and we can have hope even in suffering. And this is what makes Christianity entirely and startlingly unique and what makes Jesus so comforting because he's the God who wept with Lazarus' sisters before he then said, Lazarus, come forth. I this is amazing, right?

He laments it, he cries about it, even though he knows he's about to fix it. And that idea that Jesus wept in the face of death means that we can too, we ought to, but that he rose again from the dead and calls us to hope in a world made new is wow. So there's a lot there, but you don't get to it by ignoring sickness and pain and injury. You can only go through it. Just like Jesus didn't ignore death to get to resurrection, he went through it, so do we.

Amy Julia Becker (38:14)
Thank you. I wanted, I felt like that was just important to name in the midst of these conversations. I have one other chapter that I want to ask about, which is the bodily experience of sleep. was fascinated when you wrote, modern science does not have a great explanation for sleep. And I wanted to ask you what you mean there. Like also why then might there be maybe a spiritual, if not scientific explanation for sleep?

Justin Earley (38:42)
Yeah. ⁓ I don't want to be too high on my horse. I mean, there's certainly a lot more sleep scientists who know more about it than I do, but in my reading, I found some pleasant, I guess, confessions of experts that were like, you know, it doesn't really make sense from an evolutionary perspective. And you know, that I'm writing people who have bought into the evolutionary worldview and are confessing it is actually kind of hard to understand. It's really fascinating. There's not a great

natural selection reason that you would think the life form that makes it to the top of the food chain, like your apex, like creation needs to spend a third of its life completely unconscious and completely vulnerable. Like that's not helpful for survival. And it's not totally necessary for, for brains. mean, obviously the brains, the bigger your brain, the more rest you need, but there's also other life forms with brains similar to ours that don't sleep the same way we do. Right.

There's a couple of life forms that like they rest one half of their brain at a time, or they sort of like go into a semi sleep stays where they stay aware. So you've got to reckon with this weird idea that it seems like we're created for as type of dependence and vulnerability that makes us uncomfortable. And that I think is where you really get to some spiritually good stuff because you have the Bible starting on page one, you know, saying that God is a God who rests.

and he made us in his image, calls us to do the same, that, you you can talk about this in Sabbath, you can talk about this in a lot of areas, but we're actually only like God in our need for rest. We're not like him in our need for sleep because God neither slumbers nor sleeps. He watches over Israel, the Psalms say. So my conclusion in that chapter, and this was a really fun one to wrestle with, was that biologically sleep,

teaches us something that is theological. And that is that we are like God in our need for rest, we should enjoy that capacity of it. We are unlike him in our need for sleep, which means we should ⁓ embrace the dependent limited creatures that we are by taking up healthy sleep. And I really mean that conclusion. Like a lot of my unhealth came from thinking that I was more like a machine than a human being. Like if I could figure out life hacks around sleep, ways to stay up late, or just ways to be super productive before and after.

then I could minimize this thing that was sort of a handicap on my existence. And unsurprisingly, it was that that drove me to lose a life that was conducive to sleep. And then I started experiencing insomnia and I just desperately wanted the ability to sleep back. And I think we do much better when we embrace a healthy sleep rhythm as a way of embracing healthy spirituality that says, am limited. I do not run the world. I am vulnerable and I will submit.

That's just such a wild worldview in our modern moment. But I think for Christians to cultivate a healthy sleep rhythm is to cultivate a healthy theological rhythm of knowing that you were made for rest. but one asterisk on all that, and that is that if you are a new parent, if you are a ⁓ healthcare worker, if you're a police officer, many of our wonderful, wonderful people in life are staying up all night for the sake of others, just like Jesus in the garden.

Amy Julia Becker (41:56)
you

Justin Earley (42:06)
All this talk needs to be balanced with the idea that Jesus demonstrates that one of those holy things you can do for people you love is surrender sleep for them. So I'm not going to make anybody in the stage of life where they're caring for an aging parent at night feel guilty about not having a healthy sleep schedule. But many of us, I think, including me, you get out of that newborn phase and you continue the unhealthy sleep schedule, not now because you have to, but because you're so used to it. Yeah.

And that typically, I think, is a sign of idolatry, not of actually loving service.

Amy Julia Becker (42:38)
Yes, it's a very important caveat and I ⁓ will agree. was actually, I mentioned that last night I woke up in the middle of the night and just was having a hard time getting back to sleep and really trying to attend to that. Where did that come from? And my mind was drawn to Psalm 23 and just that, you know, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. And then the first line is he makes me lie down. Yes. And just that idea.

Justin Earley (43:03)
Like a little baby.

Amy Julia Becker (43:04)
Yeah,

like, no, no, you got to lie down in a green pasture, you know, and it's before then God leads in all sorts of directions, right? Like after that lying down. But there is that sense of like start. Yes, with that sense of dependence, but also with that sense of like green pastures, like I am being held, I'm being cared for, provided for. And I and I don't have to prove myself. first thing I have to do is receive the rest and.

Yeah, care that God has for me. That was where my sleeplessness led me.

Justin Earley (43:37)
Well, I think that's a really good line to give to people because there's a correlation, I think, there between healthy sleep rhythms and actually grace, which is a healthy sleep schedule would suggest that one of the main things you can do to cultivate healthy sleep in life is simply lie down at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning. And experts call this a sleep opportunity or a sleep window. Sleep is weird. The more you think about it.

the less you're gonna get of it. The more you worry about it, the less you're gonna get of it. So when you're laying in bed thinking, I need to be asleep, I need to be asleep, I'm probably, why am not asleep? You're gonna increase your anxiety. But if you say, God makes me lie down, the part of my role here is simply to lay down. There's actually not just something scientifically healthy about that. I think there's a grace paradigm there, and this kind of covers the whole conversation, so conveniently it's happening at the end. ⁓

The gospel is opposed to earning, not effort, as Dallas Willow put it. And sleep is quite like that. There's nothing that you can do. No one literally ever can have made themselves fall asleep. All they've done is submit to the posture of it. And this wonderful miracle called rest comes over you, just like no one ever has made a seed sprout, but many farmers and many people have planted one and watered it and cultivated it. And that miracle of grace happens called growth.

Sleep is like that. And I think for that reason, it's one of the best metaphors for the work of God in our life. There's a lot we can do to put ourselves in the way of grace. We call those the spiritual disciplines. And I'm arguing in this book for spiritual and physical disciplines to be intertwined. But the idea that you actually become less anxious, more Christ-like, more loving, is something that is entirely a grace. We call it a fruit of the spirit. we, yes, we cooperate with

with God. Yes, we try to like lay down at the same time. Yes, we try to do a Sabbath, but we don't get high on our horse because we do all these things and now look at us. We do it because God is so gracious and so loving. Like God's love changes our habits, but we know habits don't change his love. So we can just lie down in the peace of that. As it turns out, the grace of sleep often follows. And that's where you cultivate a life of gratitude, not earning. you're like, my gosh, look, I slept again. Praise God.

Amy Julia Becker (46:03)
Right. Well, I think you just brought us to a great conclusion here. I will say there are ⁓ each chapter has a lot of richness and depth that I think we were able to hint at in this conversation. So I do hope that listeners will be able to just get more ⁓ from The Body Teaches the Soul. ⁓ And I really highly recommend it. So thank you for sharing all this wisdom here and with the world in your writing and in what you're doing. Thanks for being here.

Justin Earley (46:33)
You're

welcome, it's been a delight.

Amy Julia Becker (46:39)
Thanks as always for listening to this episode of Reimagining the Good Life. We will include a link in the show notes if you want to follow Justin online. And I'll be back in two weeks with a conversation with another Justin, Justin Gibbony. We are talking about political engagement in our polarized time. And I am excited for you to get to hear that one too. I know I say this every week, but I'm going to ask again that you take a minute, I mean literally like one minute of your time and go to your phone and click on the show.

I've learned recently that if you are to rate or review a show, ⁓ you have to go to the show and not the episode. Scroll down until you see the button that says rate or review, and then you will play a part in letting other people know that this is out there. Of course, you can also just share it directly with people who you think would benefit from the conversation. And I love to hear from you. I love to hear your suggestions, your questions. There's a link at the end of the show notes that says send us a text.

You also can email me at amyjuliabeckerwriter at gmail.com. I'll say it again, happy new year to those of you who are listening to this on the day it drops. And as we are closing out this year, I want to thank Jake Hansen for editing this podcast, Amber Berry, my assistant, for doing everything else to make sure it happens, and all of you, the listeners, for being here. I hope this conversation helps you to challenge assumptions, proclaim belovedness.

and envision a world of belonging where everyone matters. Let's reimagine the good life together.


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Amy Julia Becker

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