Life & Living with Godly Habits | The One Habit That Changes Everything

What if the life you’re living right now is simply the result of the habits you’ve been practicing?

In this episode, we zoom out and talk about life itself—why we’re here, how quickly it passes, and what it actually means to live with intention in light of eternity. Because the truth is… we are not just filling time. We are stewarding it.

Your habits aren’t small.

They are shaping who you are becoming.

And while there are many habits that can improve your life, there is one that will transform everything—your thoughts, your peace, your purpose, and your direction:

Prayer.

We break down why prayer is the anchor habit that aligns your life with God, renews your mind, and shifts your perspective from temporary to eternal.

You’ll also learn the two things required to retrain your brain—so you can stop living in negativity, stop wasting your time, and start walking in clarity, purpose, and joy.

Because this life?

It’s a blink of an eye.

And eternity is real.

We talk about developing a healthy reverence for God—not out of fear that paralyzes, but a fear that awakens you to truth: death, heaven, hell, and the weight of how you choose to live today.

And to close, we anchor everything in two powerful virtues that will draw you closer to God and carry you through any season:

Discipline and perseverance.

This episode will challenge you, ground you, and call you higher.

You don’t need a perfect life.

You need Godly habits.

I got a lot of this content actually from an awesome book I’m reading, 33 Days Til Eucharistic Glory, and the Bible in A year Podcast by father Mike! Hope y’all enjoy and hope this helps get you closer to God!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Are you a faith-driven woman ready to transform your health and fitness, level up your habits, and steward everything that God has blessed you with? If so, welcome to the Refinery Movement Podcast, the place for Christian women in fitness or women ready to step into it who want to build strong, faith-based habits that honor God and inspire their families and communities. I'm your host, AJ Amrine, lifelong athlete, former WWE superstar and founder of the Refinery Movement. My passion is to help women integrate faith and fitness and to make the church healthy again. Here we'll dive into powerful strategies, biblical principles, and practical tips to help you crush your goals. We'll also talk about balancing training, nutrition, and family life because you can steward the temple and still enjoy freedom, fun, and connection. So grab your protein shake, get comfy, and let's step into today's episode with boldness, clarity, and intention. Let's get refined.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

All right, today's episode is one that I did in the Holy Habits Project curriculum, but I felt very called to also make this a podcast. So I really hope this helps somebody and I hope you guys get something out of this that leads you closer to God. To start, let me ask you something. When was the last time you actually allowed yourself to dream? Not scroll, survive, just getting through the week, but dream. Because dreaming is a God-given ability. And I think it's one of the most underutilized gifts that we have. And it is uniquely human, that gift to dream. Henry David Thoreau said, most men live lives of quiet desperation. And that's still true today. Not because people don't have opportunity, but because they've lost vision, they've lost their why. They've lost connection and depth and they've lost God. Not everybody, but I do notice this as a theme. And this used to be me as well. And here's what I've learned: joy is the fruit of appreciation. If you want joy, you got to do these two things. You gotta thank God and serve others. And the two things that have been proven to rewire your brain is to journal about gratefulness and to serve others. Our mind is made to be renewed, constant renewal of the mind, constant pursuit of God and his word and to serve and to live a Christian lifestyle. Like that is the root of joy is Jesus and living the way that he has called us to live. Mother Teresa didn't just talk about faith. Like she lived it and she breathed it. Her faith was not just like a speech, it was a response. It was living. And I think that one of the biggest things that we're missing today is this carefree timelessness. And you're probably asking, like, oh, what is that? Well, carefree timelessness, an easy way to describe it is like whenever someone falls in love, whenever two people fall in love, they just spend time together and the whole day passes. Like time just passes so fast. It's time spent together without an agenda, without a plan, really. You just want to be together and you're just present in the moment, and time disappears. There's no agenda, just presence. That's how people fall in love. And the lack of carefree timelessness is also the way that people fall out of love. That carefree timelessness is meant to happen with the people that we love and also with God. But instead, we are rushing through life. We distract, we chase, we compare, we strive, and then we wonder why we feel empty. There's another way to live. And I'm not saying that we need to be perfect and we need to have all these perfect habits every single day. This is super important. If you miss a day or two or five days of working out or of prayer or whatever, do not give in to discouragement because discouragement does not come from God. If you're restarting every time, like if you're restarting a project every time, whether that's a work project or whatever, every time that you got distracted, you would never finish anything in your life. So stop starting over and just continue to turn back to what you are trying to do. If it's prayer, keep turning back to prayer. If it's the gym, keep turning back, keep going back, and just keep going, keep showing up. Because here's the truth: this life is not permanent. If we're Christians, we truly believe, like in the context of eternity, we are here on this earth for just a blink of an eye. We are just passing through. This life is a pilgrimage. And what is a pilgrimage? A pilgrimage is a journey towards something sacred. So ask yourself this: are you living like a pilgrim or a tourist in your life? Because there's a difference. They're focused on themselves. They try to cram everything into their trips and they get upset when the flight gets delayed. They complain and just they are so consumed with thinking about themselves and um they lose sight of everything else really happening. And they have a hard time being present in the moment. They're just kind of doing things for an Instagram picture sometimes. But pilgrims, pilgrims understand that they're in a mission. And let's say their flight gets delayed, they realize, like, oh, that's for a reason. And they are so present in the moment and they have this joy no matter what their circumstances are. And they definitely aren't missing the people around them. And okay, we're gonna get a little bit deeper here for a second. These are four things that modern Christians don't think enough, think about enough. All right. We got death, judgment, heaven, and hell. And I know that sounds intense, but it's supposed to because when you remember this life is short, eternity is real, and your life has purpose, it changes your priorities and how you operate through your life and in your daily life. If you want to guess real quick, how many weeks is in a human life on average? How many weeks do you think that a person lives? The average human life is about 4,000 weeks. Let that sink in. 4,000 weeks. If you're 20, you've already used about a thousand. If you're 60, you've used about 3,000. So how many Sundays do you have left? And even if you were born yesterday, the answer's not that many. So let's not waste them. Because if you don't waste your Sundays, you're a lot less likely to waste your Mondays and your Tuesdays and your Wednesdays. And sometimes I wish that I wasn't so intense. And I'd rather though, I'd rather be on this end of the spectrum than the other. A little seriousness is deeply agreeable to the human spirit. Deep thought is good for us. Reality is good for us. The modern obsession with comfort is an aversion to depth and seriousness. And it exiles too many people from God and religion, spirituality, the church, dynamic relationships, healthy parenting, rigorous careers, and so much more. Jesus comforted people in their afflictions and afflicted people in their comfort. But I'd rather live with purpose than drift through life distracted. I don't want to be a wondering generality. I want to be a meaningful specific. But here's what happens a lot of times in our world: we're obsessed with comfort. And comfort has made us shallow. It made us avoid depth and seriousness and truth. And that's dangerous because it pulls us away from God and purpose and real relationships and growth. And today we're stuck in distraction and FOMO is huge. The fear of missing out, FOMO, comparison and endless noise. And it leads to a lack of focus, which leads to a lack of commitment and ultimately a life of quiet desperation. Going back to that Henry David Thoreau quote, lack of focus, like I said, leads to that lack of commitment. And together, these all lead us to that quiet and not so quiet desperation. But God changes all of that because God names what matters most. It gives us the clarity and wisdom to focus on the vital few rather than the trivial many. Like I said, I don't want to be a wondering generality. I want to be a meaningful specific. One of the biggest traps that one can fall into is the trap of FOMO. Driven by the psychological nonsense of FOMO, many people make the worst decisions of their lives. Some people at our age are buying houses and we're like, oh dang, like, you know, how'd they do that? And then I learn like their situation, and I'm like, oh my gosh, they just bought a house because their friends did, and that put them in a really bad situation. Like, I don't want that. It leads people, that's just one example, you know. I'm sure you guys have others, but FOMO leads people to oftentimes making the worst decisions of their lives. The only thing that matters are those that God has chosen for you. And it's actually preferable to miss out on everything else. And FOMO will ruin your life if you let it, because you'll chase everything and become nothing. Instead, quiet the noise, choose what God has for you, live with intention, and prefer missing everything else. So now we get into the foundation, the foundational habit, which is prayer and reading your Bible. Prayer is not just something that you do. It's not just something that I have on your program if you're coached by me. It's not just something that I have on the checklist for you to do that day. It is a way of life. It starts simple and a lot of times people overcomplicate it. It's like, okay, how do I pray? But it's just a conversation. So just start the conversation. Communicate. You don't need perfect words, you don't need the right formula. Just start and then ask God what he wants. And this is super powerful because what this does when we listen in our prayer, not just talk, talk, talk, which is what I did. I have to get better at that. What that does is it opens ourselves up to his wisdom. And this is where that carefree timelessness comes back. Give yourself to prayer without an agenda. Just be with your father. Just be with God. And you can turn anything into prayer. You can turn your entire entire day into prayer. Like pick the task that you're dreading the most that day and offer it to God as a prayer of intention for the person in your life who is suffering the most that day. And think of them while you're doing it. And do that task with love. Do it intentionally and do it to the best that you've ever done that task ever. And just start adding and stacking tasks like that and offering it to God. And that is just so, so powerful. And that's just a great way to make prayer a way of life and not just something you do in the morning, but something that you're living. And people can feel that. Like you are a light when you do that and you operate in the world. You are showing people who Jesus is and wearing him on your sleeve. And you never know what kind of seeds that you're planting. And prayer is just so powerful. So also make yourselves available to God because the amount of joy that you have in your life is proportional to how available you make yourself to God. The amount of joy you have is proportional to how available you make yourself to God. And if you feel overwhelmed spiritually by all of this, then there's a good chance that you're trying to do God's job. You're getting your role confused with God's role. Your role is to just keep showing up. God's role is to transform and move. Really, all you have to do is just keep showing up. Not perfectly when it's convenient, but show up every day because discipline creates freedom and joy is a byproduct of becoming who God created you to be. Now, finally, after we talked about life and the main habit, let's talk about habits in general, because habits form your life. They make up your entire life, those little habits. And if you build one habit right, like the power of prayer, the habit of prayer and reading your Bible, it will change everything in your life. I'm talking even just 15 minutes a day, guys. And self-discipline is great and all those things, and that willpower is great, but it runs out. Like motivation runs out. But the root of motivation means motive. So, like, what is your motive? What is your why is another way of saying that. And so when your why is rooted in something that is supernatural and powerful and so, so strong that we can't even fathom, then things become possible that you never thought possible. And my why for reading the Bible every day and daily prayer is I want to see the way that God sees, and I want to love the way that God loves. And that's it. Because the world is loud, culture is chaotic, and if you're not rooted in truth, you will get pulled in every direction. But when you come back to the word, there's peace and there's clarity, there's truth that cuts through everything else. So, how do you actually build the habit of prayer? Pick a time. Pick a time during the day that you're gonna do it. Not your perfect daytime, but your average daytime. And then pick a place or a rhythm. So morning routine or on your drive to work, obviously, if you're doing like the podcast version, I don't want you reading while you're driving, but sitting with your Bible at your table or walking and listening, it doesn't matter how, just make it consistent. I know that I'm a perfectionist and I like to take a bunch of notes. Sometimes I have to tell myself to not take any notes, but just let God's word wash over me. Drop perfection. This is huge. Perfection is not expected from you. So just forget about it. You're gonna miss days. You might miss a week, you might fall off for a month. So what do you do? You don't start over, you just hit play again. You just open your Bible again, pick up right where you left off. Because one of the enemy's biggest lies is if you can't do it perfectly, don't do it at all. Screw that. That's a lie. Consistency beats intensity every single time. Even 15 to 20 minutes a day, just do it. It will change your entire life. So here's what I want you to take away. Your life is short, and think about death, but don't obsess over it. Think about it in a healthy way. Think about eternity, guys. As a Christian, your calling is real. God is real, and your habits are shaping your life and how you serve God. So let's focus on our habits and let's renew our minds and let's come at those with intention. So don't overcomplicate it. Just keep showing up. Don't wait for perfect. Don't restart every time you mess up. Just show up, open your Bible, start the conversation, and let God do the transformation. If you do that, your life will change. Thank you guys so much for listening to this podcast today. I got this kind of content from a book that I'm currently reading and also the Bible in a year by Father Mike Schmitz. So if you're looking for a great Bible study, definitely look on Spotify or Apple or any podcast streaming thing, uh, YouTube, anything, just type in Bible in a year by Father Mike Schmitz. It has absolutely been just amazing for me and has really helped me digest the word. And if you need any help with knowing where to start with the Bible, just DM me, message me, and I'll help you get started with a Bible study that that works for you. But just show up and start the conversation. God is moving in your life. You are beautifully and wonderfully made. You are a daughter of Christ. Speak that life into your life. Be open and have good soil for Him to change your entire life. God is the answer to joy. God is the answer to everything. And I really hope that this helped someone and someone needed to hear this. Because again, um, I just yeah, felt really called to share some of the things that I've been learning in this book and this podcast. But, anyways, you guys have a great rest of your day, morning, evening, whenever you're listening. And until next time, stay refined.