A Rule for the Rest of Us: An Ancient Practice for Making the Daily Decisions that Shape Faithful Lives - Hardcover

Michel, Jen Pollock

Hardcover

ISBN 13: 9798217152285

Publisher: WaterBrook, 2026

Synopsis

Discover an accessible, five-step framework for writing a rule of life with award-winning author Jen Pollock Michel, who transforms this ancient practice into a grounded way of living faithfully in a distracted world.

A rule of life isn't a rigid list of spiritual disciplines that makes you feel guilty when you fail. It's a grounded way of living faithfully in the chaotic world we inhabit.

Drawing from years of leading spiritual formation workshops, Jen Pollock Michel helps you:

• Keep company with God—Establish practices that cultivate ongoing conversation with the One who sustains your life.
• Name your givens—Honestly assess your current season, roles, and limitations instead of fighting against them.
• Attend to your desires—Examine what your heart truly longs for as an important step toward faithful response.
• Articulate faithful habits—Develop specific, sustainable practices for your relationships, work, and daily rhythms.
• Review and revise—Create systems for ongoing reflection and adaptation as life changes.

Your finished rule might include a weekly date with your spouse, morning prayer before checking your phone, or boundaries around evening work emails. The specifics will be as unique as the life God has given you.

Combining the enduring wisdom of Saint Benedict with the realities of modern life, this book proves that ancient practices can help you live with clarity, courage, commitment, and care—right where you are.

About this title

About the Author

Jen Pollock Michel is the award-winning author of five books: Teach Us to Want (Christianity Today's Book of the Year), Keeping Place, Surprised by Paradox (Christianity Today's Book of the Year Award of Merit—Beautiful Orthodoxy), A Habit Called Faith, and In Good Time (Canada's Word Guild Book of the Year Award). Jen is a sought-after contributor to publications like Christianity Today, The Christian Century, The Gospel Coalition, Mockingbird, and The Dispatch, among others. She is also a first-year mentor in Whitworth University's MFA in Creative Writing program, and she travels to speak at churches, conferences, and retreats. Over the past several years, she has been teaching rule-of-life workshops to hundreds of people across various life stages. The mother of five children, she is married to Ryan, and they live in Cincinatti, Ohio.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

A Practice of Love

Midmorning on a Saturday, my husband Ryan and I are caught red-handed in an argument at our neighborhood bodega. The small coffeeshop-meets-deli-meets-corner-store is crowded, and we have overstayed our welcome at the small round table in the back, near the garbage can.

"Well, hi!" Sarah says brightly. Sarah, an acquaintance from church, bends to confirm it is us as she waits for her latte. Her two young children, each of them with hair the color of flax, peer shyly from behind her legs.

"Hi," we say, working hard to mirror Sarah's smile. We have been "discussing" our household budget—because where your treasure is, your heart will be also. As believers in Jesus, we can't avoid talking about money.

In previous years of intensive parenting, a weekend breakfast without any of our five children would have required logistical planning and cash for a babysitter. But seasons change, and habits change too. Now that we are middle-aged and nearly empty-nested we can make a weekly breakfast date a regular practice, or rule.

A weekend breakfast with Ryan is just one example of an intention written in my rule that has become a durable commitment. Unless we're sick or out of town, we choose breakfast—and in choosing breakfast, we choose marriage. When it comes to our weekly breakfast meeting, Ryan and I never overthink the details, because it's a track on repeat. Same time, same place, same table if it's available. I get the breakfast burrito; Ryan gets the egg on a roll with goetta.

The breakfast is less romance, more business. We talk money and calendars, vacations and weekly obligations. Ryan brings his laptop and his "monk manual," a plastic, white three-ring binder that is a self-made knockoff version of the leather one I bought him years ago. I bring my three-ring binder, which is divided into monthly sections, each crammed with nearly illegible journal pages.

At the very front of this notebook is a printed document. It's the rule of life I have written, revised, and been working to practice, in various forms, for the last six years. My rule strengthens a prayerful resolve, even to remain here at the back of our neighborhood bodega, fighting about money. I want to stay committed to Jesus and his lordship over all things.

"Let me not be deaf to your voice, nor suffer the pain of a rebellious soul."

Here, then, is where we all must begin in a rule of life practice. Not at a table in the local bodega exactly—but with the intention to hear and heed the voice of God in every area of our lives, including finances and fights with our spouses. In the Scriptures, hearing is a word associated with obeying. If we do not attend to the loving voice of God, we cannot live a life of consistent faithfulness.

Listen is the very first word of The Rule of Saint Benedict. "Speaking and teaching are the master's task," Benedict writes. "The disciple is to be silent and listen."

✦✦✦

Before a rule of life ever becomes a responsibility, it is first a response. As a reminder, I've defined a rule as the practice of regular habits that sustain creative, faithful response to God's loving voice. A rule should not be confused with a long to-do list—but rather received as an invitation to be still and know that God is God.

If we want to make it a regular practice to love God, love our neighbor, and properly love ourselves, we must stay rooted and grounded in the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. God's love is not simply a one-time rescue at the moment of our conversion. God's love is also our inexhaustible resource for living every day that follows: in wholehearted trust and confident surrender. We love because he first loved us.

In the Gospels, Jesus modeled the spiritually responsive life that became the spiritually responsible life: "I can do nothing on my own," he said. Jesus lived in and from the love of his Father to the very end. In the Garden of Gethsemane, God's love was a rock and a refuge as Jesus knelt and prayed, wrestling with the call to lay down his life. God's love—and God's loving will–was the reason for ultimately submitting to the Father in the most painful moments before his betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion.

Patterning our lives after the life of Jesus, we make it, first and foremost, a rule to live in and from the love of the Father, which makes it possible for us to choose the obedience of a rule. When we find it hard to love difficult people, forgive a friend, honor our parents, stay sexually chaste, tell the truth, and give generously, our first inclination must not be to try harder but to seek the face of God. God's love for us and God's love in us can free us from our bitterness, our self-hatred, our lust, our pride, our indifference, our fear.

A rule is not spiritual trapeze art, hoping God takes a liking to the show. In a rule, there is nothing to earn and nothing to secure. The work is finished, Jesus said from the cross. Because we cannot earn the love of God, neither can we increase its measure by our obedience or lose its reward by our disobedience.

We are not responsible for securing our identities as God's beloved children. As Benedict wrote in his prologue, we begin the good work of a rule, trusting his grace will perfect it. "In his goodness, he has already counted us as his sons." Though we have spurned the love of God in ways deliberate and unconscious, the gospel tells us that God has loved each of us as his prodigal child.

This very good news makes very little sense in a world of measures and metrics. We are accustomed to transactional relationships. We applaud performance and give merit-based awards. In a rule of life, our formation—in this world of achievement—tempts us to try impressing God, or at least try to get him to forget some of our awfulness. But this kind of spiritual tap-dancing would make our rule a rejection of God's love. God is love, and God loves because he loves. God doesn't need to be cajoled into his own generosity. Your rule can gain you nothing more than the full and free inheritance Jesus has already secured on your behalf.

A rule, then, can be freely undertaken because we have been freely loved.

When we live in and from the love of God, we find a more secure footing in this anxious world. Our decisions matter—and don't, at the very same time. We want to live well, but even when we fail in our well-meaning intentions, we're held in the love of God. This security becomes the taproot of our spiritual health. We can make commitments and fail commitments, learning to trust that our compassionate Father "knows our frame" and "remembers that we are dust." Love isn't a cause for laxity—because if I love God, I will do what he commands. But it is also not an occasion for fear. Perfect love drives out anxious spiritual striving.

As Jesus said to his disciples in the gospel of John, it's here, in the love of God, that you must abide, remain, persevere, endure, and rest if you are to faithfully carry out his mission of love.

✦✦✦

Pick up any book on the spiritual disciplines, and you will see all kinds of ways we can live in and from the love of God. Though the love of God is a constant, we can "practice" our awareness of it and enlarge our vision for who God calls us to be through these spiritual habits. Because we are a forgetful people, we need constant reminders of the reality of God's self-giving love in Christ.

For the purpose of simplicity, I want to challenge you, as you undertake this first step of a rule, to commit to three regular habits: prayer, Scripture, and participation in the life of the local church. It is hard to imagine growing as a Christian without these habits that return us, over and over again, to the reality of God's love. In Scripture, we learn of God's loving character. In prayer, we seek the reality of God's loving presence. In the church, we amplify the truth of God's love as we worship side by side and shoulder to shoulder in loud unison.

Maybe this appetite—to be with God, to be with God's people, to talk to God, to hear him talk to you—is your deep hunger and regular habit. That means you can incorporate the disciplines you're already practicing into the working document of your rule. Or maybe you don't yet know this yearning for friendship with God and God's people. That's okay—because you can ask God for this desire. As my pastor said many years ago, you can pray to want to want to. This might be the place you begin.

On the one hand, there has never been a day in my life, at least that I can remember, that I haven't believed in the love of God. One of my greatest inheritances was being born into a Christian family and raised by parents who took me faithfully to church, Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night. We sang songs about the deep, deep love of Jesus and the great faithfulness of God. My story should encourage parents who make the weekly effort to get their kids to church, even when the kids are whiny and tired and more than a little belligerent.

By the time I was a teenager, though, I presumed on the love of God. I thought I could abide in God's love without obeying his commandments. I counted on the love of God like a golden ticket in my pocket that would take me to heaven when I died. This is a danger in the Christian life, that we can imagine the love of God as something cheap and undemanding.

Edition details

• Publisher: WaterBrook
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798217152285
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304