03/17/2026
I watched my daughter bow her head at dinner and noticed she folds her hands exactly the way her youth pastor does, not the way I do.
It was such a small thing. The way she interlaced her fingers and tucked them under her chin. A gesture she had learned from someone else. Someone who had apparently spent more time praying with her than I had.
I did not say anything. I just noticed. And then I spent the rest of the meal trying to remember the last time I had actually prayed with my daughter myself.
I could not come up with an answer.
The truth is, I had been running on empty for longer than I wanted to admit. Not just physically tired, though that was part of it. Something deeper. A kind of spiritual fatigue that had settled into my bones so gradually I stopped recognizing it as anything other than normal life.
I still went to church. Still said grace when it was expected. Still checked the boxes that made me look like a man of faith from the outside. But somewhere along the way, the inside had gone hollow. I was too exhausted to engage with any of it on a real level. Too depleted to do anything more than show up and go through the motions.
So I outsourced.
I let the youth pastor handle my daughter's spiritual questions. I let my wife lead the bedtime prayers. I let the church do the heavy lifting while I stood on the sidelines telling myself I was just too tired, too busy, too stretched thin to do it myself.
And now my daughter folded her hands like a stranger because that stranger had been more present than I had.
That realization sat heavy in my chest for weeks. I wanted to change something, but I did not know where to start. Every time I thought about establishing some kind of spiritual routine, I felt overwhelmed. I pictured early mornings and long readings and the inevitable failure that had followed every previous attempt.
I was too tired to try again. And too tired to keep feeling guilty about it.
A few weeks later I was at a store and saw a book on one of those display tables near the front. Brown cover, simple title. One Minute with God for Men. I almost walked past it, but something about those words made me stop.
One minute.
I picked it up and flipped through it. Each page was short. A question, a thought, a verse, and a simple challenge. The whole thing could be done in sixty seconds.
I bought it mostly because it seemed impossible to fail at something that small.
The next morning I read one page at the kitchen counter while waiting for my coffee. It took maybe ninety seconds. And that was it. No elaborate routine. No pressure to feel something profound. Just one minute of pausing before the day started pulling me in every direction.
I did the same thing the next day. And the next.
What surprised me was how that small moment started to shift something. Not dramatically. Not overnight. But slowly, like a door cracking open that had been sealed shut for years. I started feeling less hollow. Less like I was just surviving until the next weekend.
A few weeks in, I asked my daughter if she wanted to read one of the pages with me before school. She seemed surprised but said okay. We stood at the counter together for about two minutes. I read the verse out loud. She asked a question. I gave her an honest answer.
It was not much. But it was mine. It was ours.
I do not know if I am doing this right. I still feel tired most days. I still struggle with consistency. But I am no longer just a spectator in my own family's faith. My daughter is starting to see her father pause and reflect, even if only for a minute.
And maybe the next time she folds her hands, she will fold them like me.
