I have a beautiful devotional set on the shelf in our kitchen. Hardcover, linen-bound, the kind with a bookmark ribbon and a “blessed” on the title page. For two years, it has gathered a thin coat of flour dust because that’s where we keep the rolling pin, and honestly, that has become the most accurate description of our devotional life.
We weren’t doing it. Not really. And I don’t mean we stopped because of a death or a diagnosis or any of the reasons people give when they need to explain why their faith got quiet. I mean we stopped doing it because it had become homework with a Christian skin.
The Devotional That Became Homework
The structure had been good, at first. 8 p.m., after dinner, after the dishes (which my husband did, because he still remembers which one of us he promised this to). I would open the book, we would read the verse, I would say three to four sentences about it, and then we would pray.
My 7-year-old would ask, “Are we done?” by minute three. By minute five, she had a drawing going. My 10-year-old was “listening” with the intensity of a cat watching a bird through glass — all attention, no movement, going nowhere.
I kept trying to fix it the way most of us do: with more structure. I bought a planner. I made a color-coded chart on the fridge: red day = read together, green day = journaling, blue day = serving someone. The chart went up. The chart went down. The verse set on the shelf never got a second look.
Here’s the thing I couldn’t say out loud for a long time: I had started teaching my kids a lesson instead of sitting with them in one. And they could tell. Kids can always tell. You can put a storybook Bible on the table and your kids will look at you sideways the way a dog looks at a treat that’s been sitting on the counter too long.
There’s a verse I keep coming back to because I think it describes exactly where I had drifted: Ephesians 6:4 — “And bring up your children with the discipline and instruction of the Lord, but do not make them angry.” My kids weren’t angry. They were bored. Which was worse, because it was my fault and I’d built the system that produced it.
The Day the 7-Year-Old Took Over
It happened on a Thursday in the middle of a really ordinary week, which is the kind of week where God usually slips in when you’re not performing for anyone.
I was opening the devotional book for what I was already sure would be a lost cause, and she looked up and said, “Why is this boring?”
Not in a mean way. Just flat. Accurate. The way a 7-year-old reports weather: “It’s cold,” “It’s boring,” “Your story is long.” No malice. Just the truth, unsolicited and inconvenient.
And I think — I hope — what stopped me wasn’t that it hurt. What stopped me was that it was right.
So I tried something I shouldn’t have hesitated to try two years ago. I closed the book. I said, “Okay. You tell me what God is like today.” And then, before I could catch myself, I added: “Just one thing. One verse or one memory.”
She thought for a second. Then she said, “The one where Jesus tells the disciples to stop and rest, because there’s so much to do.” That’s Mark 6:31 — “Come, you yourselves, come apart to a quiet place and rest a while.” She had picked it up from a verse card I’d made her months ago, when devotional was still fun, before it calcified into a routine.
Then she said, “I pick that because Mama is always doing things.” And my 10-year-old, who hadn’t spoken all night, said very quietly, “I think that’s true.” And I sat in the kitchen with the flour still on the counter and realized I had no response, because they were right.
Five Minutes, One Question
We didn’t fix it that night. That would be the kind of story where everything resolves and the kids start drawing Bible verses on their notebooks. It wasn’t that clean.
What changed was smaller. That night we read one verse and asked one question. Total time: five minutes. The next night, she picked a verse from the week, and we talked for about eight. My 10-year-old asked me a question I couldn’t answer, which was, as far as I’m concerned, the first real thing he’d asked me in two years.
We stopped using the planner. We stopped color-coding. The red-green-blue chart went down in January; I’m not sure anyone noticed.
What stayed was a rhythm, not a system. One verse. One question. Sometimes the question is mine to answer, sometimes theirs, sometimes it’s “Why does that matter to me, or to this week?” We kept it to the kitchen table because that’s where we actually sit, not some special “devotional space” I had never managed to create.
What Actually Changed (and What I Stopped Doing)
I want to be honest about what worked, because I think it’s the boring part that people skip when they retell these stories.
First, I stopped being the one talking. For two years, my job had been to explain the verse so it came out right — so it sounded like what I thought God would say. But Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” And I kept misreading that as “deliver the right words” when it was really “point at the right direction and let him walk.” The walking is theirs. The pointing is mine. I had been doing both and it had made the path crowded.
Second, I stopped making it about attendance and started making it about honesty. We don’t do it every night. Some nights the verse is about three sentences long because we’re tired, and that’s fine. Hebrews 10:24–25 talks about not giving up meeting together, about encouraging one another — and I think that applies to a kitchen table as much as it applies to a sanctuary. What it doesn’t require is a performance. What it requires is that we show up, even badly.
If you want a more structured resource for the kids’ side of this — a devotional planner, a workbook with the questions already written so you’re not standing there blank — we put together a few of those at christianfaithweb.org/shop. I’ll be honest: we made most of them before we had our own five-minute kitchen-table version, so we built them from the “what would we have needed” side of this problem. They’re not magic. They’re just the scaffolding so you don’t have to stand there designing the lesson every night.
The Part No One Tells You
Here’s what I’ll say at the end, the thing I needed to hear from someone else and am probably going to need to hear again: the verse book on the shelf wasn’t the problem.
We didn’t fail because we had a broken devotional. We failed because we had made a performance of something that was supposed to be a conversation, and our kids were the audience we kept disappointing with our own set. The fix wasn’t a better plan or a nicer book. The fix was closing the book and letting my 7-year-old talk to me the way she’d been trying to for two years.
God doesn’t need us to do it right. He needs us to do it open. And if open is messy and the verse is short and your kid asks “why is this boring?” one more time — well. That’s probably the most honest thing that’s happened to your table in a long time. Start there.
And if you’d like a small set of cards to keep it going — ones with the verse on one side and the question on the other, so the night goes faster and better — we have a few in the shop. No pressure. You can start with the verse card you already have in your pocket and a question you can say in one breath. That’s enough. That’s where it started for us.