The Automatic Saint

The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach talks about how easy it is to become a millionaire using a variety of automatic methods such as setting up direct deposits into retirement accounts and making extra mortgage payments. For example, starting at age 22, if you direct deposit $300 from every paycheck into a mutual fund that returns 8%, then by the age of 62, you have $1M.

A similar approach can be applied towards personal growth, but the automatic methods are a little bit harder to setup.  The automatic methods that I'm talking about are daily habits.  Most of us live our lives through an intricate framework of daily habits, from what we do when we wake up to the inner dialogue going on when stressful situations arise.  We aren't even aware of many of our habits, and a lot of them are detrimental to personal growth. In Linchpin, Seth Godin writes about what he calls the "lizard brain" that thinks about survival, and how the lizard brain, when left unguarded an undisciplined, leads us to lust, gluttony and paralyzing anxiety. The lizard brain can be much stronger than our higher level brains, so we have to be purposeful in tricking it to not want to take over and sabotage our lives.

To take this a step further and apply similar concepts to spiritual growth, we should carefully consider the words of Mother Theresa, "God doesn’t ask that we succeed in everything, but that we are faithful." St. Francis of Assisi also had something to say about spiritual growth and daily habits, and he articulated it in the rule for the orders that he founded. His solution was daily conversion, a purposeful act of going from gospel to life, and life to gospel.  There are many methods of doing this, but they all hinge on our ability to put into practice one or more spiritual disciplines on a daily basis.  Dallas Willard gives us a wonderful explanation of the rationale behind many of the spiritual disciplines in his book, The Spirit of the Disciplines. 

The automatic part of daily spiritual disciplines is that once they are formed, it takes relatively little to maintain them, and you don't have to muster a bunch of will-power in order to carry them out every day. The difficult part is establishing these disciplines, and getting into the habit of continually increasing or improving on those disciplines.  This is a big part of the imperative to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. It may take a couple of months of fighting a daily battle with an existing bad habit in order to establish each new spiritual discipline in your life. This is sort of like setting up a permaculture garden in our hearts (see Hosea 10:12); it takes a lot of up-front design and labor, but then it is fairly self-sustaining and yields good fruit in season.  This is, in my experience, the light yoke.