Body word spacing inconsistent

1. With the justify setting InDesign is forced to make the space between the words larger. Specially if the last word is not allowed to hyphenate.
2. You can change the justify settings in the paragraph settings (fine tuning) to allow a spacing between glyphs (what I recommend for those short paragraphs).
3. Another influence is the language. Did you set up your paragraph correcly with German 2006?

For which publisher do you set up? I do a lot for Logos Editions, E21, and many other Christian Evangelical Publishers in Germany and Austria.

> Is it acceptable to leave it like this?

That's up to your customer. I would hyphenate eingehen but there are people who object to breaking such a paragraph. Another option would be to play with word and letter spacing (in the Justification window), maybe that will take eingeben back a line, but that probably means that the paragraph will be too tight.

Are you referring to the horizontal space between words, or the vertical space between lines, indicated by the red lines in your screen shot?

The former are controlled by the justification settings (and your choicwe of alignement is a factor), the latter could be caused by several different things.

Look for empty paragraphs, a space before or space after setting applied to the the paragraphs on either side of the gap (coul;d be part of the paragraph style or a local override), or an Align to Grid setting on the paragraph after the gap (my suspicion for waht is causing this). Again, this could be part of the style or a local override.

Bawseline grid alignement is a useful methos for keeping lines of text aligned across columns or pages, but it only works when the base line grid is set to the correct spacing, generally the same as the leading of the body text.