Scripture As A Habit | Jen Pollock Michel Enneagram One

Today we are starting our Wholehearted EnneaSummer with a new friend, and Enneagram One, Jen Pollock Michel. I invited her on the podcast to share about her newest book, A Habit Called Faith. I’m a big fan of habits or at least making good ones, so a book to encourage building my faith habit is something I wanted to know more about. I was not disappointed in our conversation and in fact as I listened through a second time, I was taking notes on her wisdom about motherhood and launching adults, how the Enneagram has served her motherhood as she parents young adults, and even in how she cultivates her faith habits. I’m fairly confident you are going to enjoy Jen as much as I did!

Interested in specific episodes about the Enneagram Type One? Check out episode #168 in my Motherhood and Enneagram series and episode #102 the Summer in the Enneagram Series 2019.
Come say "Hi" to Jen and me on Instagram!

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The Enneagram can name your patterns. It can't set you free from them. That's the difference between insight and transformation, and it's the whole focus of this summit.

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https://www.simplywholehearted.com/wholehearted-2026

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 1:38

But I think really we can cultivate the habit of listening to God's voice too, simply by expecting him to speak. And I love that we learn that in Deuteronomy, and again, also in John, is that he's leaning toward us and he's speaking. And this is his first act of love. Hi, my name is Amy Wiggs, and I help you navigate the overwhelm and frustration of motherhood through faith, Enneagram, and simple plans. As a faith-based Enneagram coach, I champion you to love your mothering style because you are the mom your kids need, even when you don't feel like it. I'm a mountain mama who somehow ended up on a cul-de-sac in the Midwest, overwhelmed and frustrated by motherhood. But the Lord didn't let me stay there. He helped me turn the challenges of motherhood into a wholehearted decision to get intentional with my faith, my self-awareness, and my family. Each episode of this podcast provides perspective through story, wholehearted purpose, and simple plan so you can discover how to love your mothering style and be confident that you are the mom your kids need. Think of this podcast as your on-the-go mom pal and friend who can't help but talk about Jesus and the Enneagram. So get to that pile of laundry, or hit the treadmill, or load up the kids in the car for that grocery run. Get ready to be encouraged and empowered while you listen. This is the Simply Wholehearted Podcast. Hey friend, I'm kicking off our summer in the Enneagram with the next four episodes making our way through Enneagram types one through four. These are amazing interviews, even if we weren't talking about the Enneagram, because they love Jesus as much as I do. Today we are starting our Ennea Summer with our new friend and Enneagram 1, Jen Pollock Michelle. I invited her on the podcast to share about her newest book, A Habit Called Faith. I'm a big fan of habits, or at least making efforts to make good ones. So a book to encourage building a faith habit, well, it's something I thought was worth learning more about. I wasn't disappointed in our conversation. And in fact, as I listened through a second time, I was taking notes on her wisdom about motherhood, launching adults, and how the Enneagram has served her motherhood, especially as she parents young adults. It's fantastic. And she shares about how she cultivates faith habits and of course how this book came to be. I'm really confident that you're gonna enjoy Jen as much as I did. I can tell you more about her, but I'm going to let her tell you as we jump right into the conversation. And by the way, if you're interested in specific episodes about the Enneagram type one, check out episode 168 in my motherhood in Enneagram series and episode 102 in back way back in 2019 in my summer in the Enneagram series. Tell me a little about your world and your life and what you're up to. I'm an American living in Toronto. We moved here in 2011 for a work opportunity for my husband. We have five kids. We came, it's funny, when our oldest was 10 and our youngest twin boys were three. And so I don't think we imagined that they were going to be growing up in Canada, but you know, it's been 10 years. Yeah, so here you are. Here we are. Yeah. Our oldest two are at Canadian universities, as they call them here in Canada, not colleges. So yeah. And uh, do they have some of those A things and uh, you know, little Canadian big and oh my goodness, yeah. So my daughter, she goes to school in Montreal, so she's also she's interacting in French a lot, right? She's got like the Canadianism, she's got like the Quebec sort of I don't know, okay, vibe inflections, a vibe exactly. That's awesome. I love it. So obviously, you're a mom with some older kids here who are starting to leave the nest and all that. How is that? Tell me, you know, it's like right around the corner, but also so far away. I think the transition was the hardest part of it, sending our first um out of the house. And then it's kind of all those questions of how often can I call before you find me annoying? Um what does it look like to give you the support that you need without it feeling overbearing? And so it's just one more transition where you sort of fumble your way into it and you don't feel like you know what you're doing, but you figure it out as you go. And one of the things I was just actually telling my other friend, who just her son is getting ready to graduate from high school, she's like, I don't know how to do this thing. And I said, That's what you say to him. You say, I don't know this, you're the first that I've sent from the nest. I don't know how to do this. So you're gonna have to help me figure out the best ways that I can support you, that I can love you, that I can listen to you, and I'm gonna get some things wrong. Yeah, that's good. I think that if we confession and honesty along the way is a lot better of going, hey, listen, you're helping raising us too, because I've never done this before. I've never parented a 14-year-old and it's all new territory. Totally. Oh man, it's fun though. It's all good. And I I honestly, we are at that point with a couple of our kids that I'm like, oh no, we're counting down the years and it's just way too soon. And but I know it'll be good, and what we've sown all these years, right, will be a wonderful, wonderful harvest. So I look forward to that too. Absolutely. Well, I'm curious to know with older kids, have you guys talked about Enneagram at all and figured out, you know, each other's Enneagram type and things like that? We have. We several years ago, I want to say this was probably three to four years ago. So that would have put our kids at about 16 down to nine. Okay. So we read The Road Back to You by Ian Cron and Susan Stabil, Suzanne Stabile, is it right? And what we did is we didn't take any official tests or anything like that. We just read the chapters aloud and just talked about them. Does this sound like anybody from the family? Does this sound like you? Just we just sort of interacted with it really casually. Uh, the younger two, so they're twins. Okay. They would have been about nine-ish at the time. They were not super interested, but our older three were pretty interested. And since then, they've actually asked for the book back. And then I have the road between us, which is Ian Cron Susan. Yeah, exactly. And so they've asked for that, they've sort of talked about it with their friends. They've so it's yeah, they're they're pretty interested in it. Uh-huh. That's awesome. I love how you approached it because that is definitely, I'm an advocate of doing the narrative, reading through it, figuring out the test. Sure, it's fine. But it more often confuses than it does illuminate. And so it's the quick fix to the journey when it's supposed to be a journey. I'm all about giving shortcuts, yes, but I think you should take time to kind of figure that out because how often can we be that honest about our motivations? I mean, right? Absolutely. No, you kind of know when you hit on your Enneagram number when you feel that sense of, oh my goodness, I don't that I think that's true of me, and I don't want anybody else to think it's true of me. Yes. Okay. So given that, what type do you lead as? I'm an Enneagram one. Fun. Okay. So what was the revelation moment? What was the thing that kind of like stepped on your toes or hit you by the two by four that you're like, oh dang? A really long-standing pattern of resentment with somebody in my extended family. And then an inability to forgive that person and a constant sort of resorting to a narrative of, well, if they could just get their stuff together, if they could just be a better person, if they could live up to these ideals that I think they are failing at. And I think it was at that point. I know I've been introduced to the Enneagram before that, but it was at that point, I don't even remember what sort of drew me back to it. I'm pretty sure I picked up the Richard War book, but just started to see, I think this is actually my problem, not this other person's problem. And it was just an amazing revelation and a and a breakthrough moment with this person that I could finally release from all of these impossible expectations that I had put on them. Dang, that is powerful. What an amazing testimony. To be honest with you, I am just at that stage where for some reason, and I I think it's more spiritual tech than not, but I've gotten a lot of haters and just a lot of critical spirits about the Enneagram. And I get it is not the gospel. It is not, you know, where saving grace comes from. And it's not where we need to hang our hat and live all day. But it is testimonies like this, and of course, coaching dozens and dozens of women in this process. I just see moments like this that I'm like, we can't argue with that. I mean, that is life-changing, and that is the that is helping people illuminate the gospel message in in just such a unique way to reach their hearts. I mean, powerful. I love it. It it's a disclosing of your heart. That's how I've appreciated the Enneagram. And like you said, it's not the gospel, and you know, it's not written in the Bible, and um, but it is a tool to be able to understand, as you sort of talked about, your inner motivations and desires and and where those can go really deeply wrong. And I think the interesting thing for an Enneagram one is that your desires actually seem like they're so good because all you want to do is be good. You want to be good and you want to do good. You want other people to live up to the good that you think um is possible in the world. So, what could be wrong with that until you realize it is this just it is a burden that you actually can't carry and nobody else around you can carry, and that your relationships are really suffering because you have asked people to do things to live up to impossible expectations. And the other thing I think I realized with the Enneagram is that I didn't realize honestly how exacting people found me. I thought that I was a compassionate, gentle person. And then I realized at through the Enneagram, and it again, it was just a tool to begin sort of diagnosing where some things were going wrong and to realize oh my goodness, people are afraid sometimes to be with me because I'm so exacting, because I'm so perfectionistic. People are afraid they're not gonna live up to my standards. And that's really, really challenging, especially challenging in a family is a challenging as a mother, challenging as somebody who leads a team. It can be challenging in so many different ways. Certainly challenging for my husband. Well, and it's that broken-hearted moment, though. I mean, I think sometimes we need that eye-opening awareness that just renders our heart in submission and humility to the Lord and go, Oh, yeah, I need your grace, I need your fruit of the spirit in my own idea of rightness and goodness and perfection. I'm not gonna pull off a way that reflects Christ's love. And it's so hard to swallow though. Man, I just so appreciate though how you articulate it really beautifully in a powerful way. Cause I got a lot of Enneagram one friends and they will appreciate how you have shared that. Well, I do hear that we're among the most tortured. Oh, oh, the inner critic is relentless and ruthless, and I ache for y'all. I go to one in my stress, and so I'm familiar with it in there, but I don't live there. I live there for maybe a few days a month, and definitely when I was pregnant and postpartum. But I'm just grateful because for me, I can easily like, okay, I need to do some things to get back to my line of growth and not hang out here. I'll live with it all the time. It's tough. Uh, I love my one friends though. You put a one in my life and we can go places and realize my dreams a little bit, my big ideas are like, yeah, let's pull in reality here. It's so great. Oh, I love it. I love getting to talk about the Enneagram. Thanks for indulging me. You're welcome. All right. So, what I did invite you here for is to help us just to share your book, a habit called faith. Tell us a little bit, maybe the decision to write the book, what we can expect as we read it. Just give us the scoop. Well, as a one, of course, in some ways, I live with very impossible ideals and, you know, a sense of like there's always a right way to do things, right? And I think I've pursued that in my spiritual habits and my spiritual practices. And I back to 16 when I came to faith in Jesus, I had somebody who said, you know, make it a habit to read your Bible every day. That'll be really good for you and anchoring for you. And that person was absolutely right. And then, of course, you know, I've sometimes followed that habit very legalistically and you know, made it made it an exacting burden in my own life. But for the most part, I could say that although I haven't kept the habit always well, the habit has kept me. And just to be regularly in scripture is to just be rooted and grounded deeply in the revelation of God's love through Jesus. And again, you know, you think about an Enneagram one, like I do find such a deep consolation in the idea that God is, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. So scripture is a habit that just orients me to that truth that I wouldn't normally come to. And it's been a grounding kind of keystone habit in my life. I started to think of a book that could sort of propose that to other people. Hi, you know, here's 40 days. Develop the habit of regular Bible reading, but not as something informational, something as very transformational, something where you actually encounter God, you can cultivate the habit of listening to Him. And I thought of the kind of person who may just need a restart where their life with God has gotten dry or it just feels really hollow. But I also had the in mind the person who might be on the periphery of faith, who doesn't maybe sort of like peers through the window, if you will, and what they have a Christian friend, or maybe they have a Christian family member, and maybe honestly they're even at a church, but they just don't have a vital experience of faith. And it was a way to invite them into a habit, a practice that could even produce faith, not just sustain faith that was already there, but seed faith anew. And so that was sort of where the idea came from. Yeah. I love it. That's a lofty idea too, because they talk about that. This is something that for you know Christians of all ages and for centuries, getting in the word, I think the enemy is hot on anyone's heels who is looking to make faith a habit and getting the word a habit. How did you structure the book in a way that you felt like, okay, the one who's looking in, trying to figure out what does this look like? And for those who are looking to revitalize their faith and those who just need some guidance because maybe they never saw this demonstrated. They didn't see it modeled in their home. And they're just kind of like you said, like, okay, what do I do? What does this look like? Mm-hmm. I tried to make it as straightforward as possible. It's like DoorDash showing up at your door with dinner, and all you have to do is like take it out of the bag and you know, open the style map in the cardboard box. So it's 40 days of reading. I tried to make them reasonably short. You could do the Bible reading. There's also I have a chapter that accompanies each reading, but I even sort of broke that down and said, if you are not going to read the whole chapter, here's our five to six verses that you could read that would make sense of my reflection on that text. So it's something that's very reasonable. You could probably do it in 20 minutes. You know, you could certainly do spend, you could linger and it you could take more time if you wanted to. So there's that sense of okay, it's good trying to make it reasonable and moderate. And also I started in the Old Testament, which is a little bit funny. Deuteronomy, it's 20 days in Deuteronomy, 20 days in John. I find that there's so much of God's character that's revealed in Deuteronomy. And I also think that it creates all of the expectation and anticipation for the revelation of Jesus in the New Testament. And so we have these amazing connections that we can make, that if you just started at the Gospel of John, which is beautiful, and certainly if that's what people want to do, they should do that too. You won't be disappointed. But connecting it with an old testament book like Deuteronomy allows us to make some really rich connections. And I also think Deuteronomy really draws out the theme of obedience. And John does as well, actually, because Jesus says, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments. That's right. And that felt like a really important thing, not just to say to Christians, but actually to people who might be curious about Christianity. Because if you want sort of Christianity on your own terms, like here's my little hors d'oeuvre of Christianity, but my got the rest of my life, I've got the meal, and I don't need no, God actually wants to be the entire thing. And obedience is a really big part of faith. And I was trying to communicate that as well. Yeah, I love that you tied in both the old and new testament because I know there's some more recent in the last few years, people who would have us throughout the old testament. And no, we can't understand the whole God's story without those texts, without those ancient texts, leading the way, pointing the way for our need to a savior. Otherwise, the need just isn't there, it isn't expressed as well. And it's just this nicety or this just other, like really good person, and go, no, we are in desperate need. And I think it's vital to pair our practices with the old and the new testament because we often, you know, if we are willing to study invest a little bit, we see it reflected in each other in such a beautiful way that it's we're reminded of like, oh, the word of God isn't a mistake, it was ordained to be packaged, if you will, in the way that it is, in the way that we have available to us.

SPEAKER_00 20:42

So I love it.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

I think it's really, really good and it's invaluable. So way to be clever. Well, I I laugh because I tell people it's not a book project I ever would have just thought out of my own head. I just happened to be studying John for a speaking engagement. And as I was studying the farewell discourse in John, this is Jesus giving his final words to his disciples. And I was I was reading some commentaries about that. They said, This is has a lot of parallels with Deuteronomy and Moses giving his final words to the nation of Israel before they inherit the promised land. And I thought, that's so interesting. I've never even thought of that connection. And then the deeper than I dug, I realized, oh, there are a lot of really interesting connections. So that kind of came to me. I did not invent it out of my head, that's for sure. Oh, I love it. I think that for those of us who and I have a lot of writer friends in just who listen to the podcast and in my life, and I as well, I do have the sense that there's these books, call it heaven, whatever, that God, you know, like picks out and then he puts in our heart and in our laughs, and then we get to participate and filling out the pages with him. So I think that's really cool. I love it. I always love hearing the story and the journey because it's just always so unique and really special. And it gives it gives such meaning and depth to the word. So well, I would love it if you would leave us with a little practical advice, and it's not a little topic. We're gonna like go pig. What does it look like to cultivate the habit of listening to God? Because what does God's voice look like? What does it look like to listen and wait? And what does it look like for you? And how would you encourage us today to begin cultivating that habit? We do learn the sound of God's voice through scripture. I just will go back there that it is a coherent story, and you hear of God's just generous, prodigal love for people who keep turning away from him, who keep making promises to him that they can't keep. And so I think, and I think just to kind of go back to the Enneagram one, I've often thought that voice of the inner critic was the voice of God, and that God was always there to sort of remind me of the ways that I was falling short. I've been recently listening to um Dane Ortland's book, Gentle and Lowly, and he's making this wonderful, just it's a whole meditation on the gentleness of the heart of Christ, and that he's so for us. And that's what you read in scripture is you read that God is so for us, that he longs to bless people, to bring them into communion with him, to give them fullness of life. And that's had been a relearning a little bit in my own life, because I thought that, yeah, God was always. Reminding me of my shortcomings. And not that that doesn't happen, too. I mean, there is, I love that John Stott says the Holy Spirit is a disruptor before he's a comforter. And so there is a this idea that to hear God's voice doesn't just mean, you know, God always pats us on the back and says, you're amazing. It's not just from fuzzies. No, you're fearfully and wonderfully made. I made you, I knitted you together in your mother's womb. And I have life for you that doesn't involve some of the patterns and familiar kind of ways of living that you've grown so used to. I'm calling you out of that. But it's always an invitation into life. And that's what you see honestly, on even in Deuteronomy and John, you hear Moses constantly telling people, this is life. These words are life. Have the blessing. And Jesus says that too. I've come to give you life. And so that is one way of recognizing God's voice, is the invitation into life, life on his terms, not life on our terms, important necessarily. And so we read scripture, but I think really we can cultivate the habit of listening to God's voice too, simply by expecting him to speak. And I love that we learn that in Deuteronomy, and again, also in John, is that he's leaning toward us and he's speaking. And this is his first act of love. When you think about when somebody's mad at you, what do they not do? They don't speak to you. They don't speak. Nope. And it and it's awful. It's so punishing when people won't speak to you. They won't acknowledge you. And here is the God of the Bible, the God of Jesus Christ, who enfleshed himself as a word, a living word, so that he could bend toward us and speak and not only speak to us, but listen to us speak, which is another kind of crazy paradox of scripture. Even just to create the expectation that God is speaking, that God is speaking words of love and life, that just when you get into God's presence, it's not He's not reading off His, you know, all the reasons why you're on the naughty list. Getting into His presence really is an invitation into life. Yeah. Oh, that's beautifully said, Jen. I just couldn't say it better. I do pray that my friends listening today will receive that and they will be excited to have that expectation because I just concur of that it's the expectation, it's going in into the presence of the Lord to wait and see and taste the goodness. And it looks different. I mean, I would speak personally, it looks different every day. Sometimes it's this whisper and nudge. Sometimes it's as I'm writing scripture, he'll illuminate the answer or illuminate what I need, my heart needs to hear, or I write a question and suddenly the answer is there. Um but as it all aligns with scripture, it is his promises and his word for us, which is so beautiful. A reminder that his word is living and active and ready for change to change our hearts and our minds and their lives. So good. Thank you, Jen. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for writing this book. I do I encourage my friends to pick it up and just get that little nudge of maybe getting that rhythm going or investigate what does it look like. And even those who are like, oh yeah, I maybe need to get some more Old Testament, New Testament, see how that aligns and be taught in that way in any depth of in the Word of God. So thank you. Oh, well, thanks for having me, Amy. This was fun. Remember, sweet friend, it's always a great time to begin a habit of getting in the scriptures. Just take one day at a time. And maybe the best place to begin is with Jen's book, A Habit Called Faith. I think you'll find her simple approach a great place to land this summer. Be sure and check out her website and tell her thank you on Instagram for the wisdom that she has shared with you today. Next week, I'm sharing this summer's conversation with our Enneagram 2 guest, Andrea Fortenberry. She is sharing about motherhood, perfectionism, and friendship birth from a very far from perfect moment. Make sure you're following this podcast on your favorite app so you get the episodes as soon as they are live. Remember, you are the mom your kids need. Continue to pursue perspective, purpose, and plans for the wholehearted life you desire.