Acquiring good habits

Back when I was riding in the kids’ seat of my mother’s shopping cart, I swore that when I got to be a mommy I would buy lots of Twinkies and skip the lettuce and broccoli. When I grew up, I found myself going for the veggie aisle and treading lightly in the cookie section, to the consternation of my own children.

Today I was driving down the road and passed the U-Swirl, an establishment where you can work your way through a dizzying selection of frozen yogurt flavors and toppings. I was alone in the car, and nobody would have been the wiser if I had pulled in and gorged myself, but I did not. And it was not even hard to pass by, though my love for sweets is undiminished.

What dawned on me as I kept unswerving on my homeward course is that good habits, once established, are actually easy to maintain. The “once established” is the key condition, of course. The beginning of a new good habit is always the hard part, the part that calls for dying to self, to slaying unwanted desire. But a few weeks or months of fighting the good fight shrinks monstrous temptation to the size of a puny gnat, just as little Harry found in Dick Gackenbach’s children’s book Harry and the Terrible Whatzit.

Last Sunday I heard a pastor preach on godly habits. He said that if people can establish bad habits they can establish good ones. He promised that if each of us were to make it our business to read a few chapters of Scripture every day, the practice would pass from hard, to not hard, to an indispensable craving for the Word of God to start our day.

Godly habits, once mastered, feel automatic. But it is no belittling of a virtue that it has become second nature. All virtue—whether kindness, patience, or self-control, or however many virtues there are—was once hard and became easier by the practice of it. This power is by the grace of God, vouchsafed to us in Christ’s atonement.