The Family Devotional We Don't Do Perfectly (And Why It Works Anyway)

Let me describe the family devotional I imagined, when I first became a Christian mother, that we were going to do together.

It happened after dinner. Everyone stayed at the table. Candles, possibly. Certainly cloth napkins. The father read a passage aloud, calmly. The children listened, attentively. Someone asked a thoughtful question. Someone else offered a spontaneous but well-worded prayer. It lasted twenty-five minutes and produced photographs suitable for a Christian parenting magazine.

I do not think I need to tell you that I have never had this evening. I have never come close. I have never met anyone who has.

The version we actually run — the one that has, against my expectations, actually worked for the last two years — is much smaller, considerably less photogenic, and has a name inside our family: the porch minute.

Why the "beautiful" version failed us

The first year I was a Christian mother, I tried three separate times to run the imagined-evening version I described above. All three times, it collapsed within two weeks. Not because my family was uncooperative — they wanted it to work. It collapsed because it was designed by someone who had not yet met her own children.

My daughter, at three, could not sit for twenty-five minutes at a table for anything short of dessert. My son had not yet been born, but I already knew, from watching him from the inside, that he was going to be worse than she was.

My husband was patient with me but eventually asked, gently, "Are we doing this for God or are we doing this because you saw it on Instagram?" I did not appreciate the question. He was right.

The devotional I had imagined was not actually a family devotional. It was a performance of family devotional. Which is a real spiritual danger, and one I now watch for in my own inbox — mothers writing to me apologetic about the "quality" of their family time with God, when what they need to hear is that quality was never the metric.

What the porch minute is

I want to describe it plainly because it is embarrassingly small and I want you to see how small it is.

Every night, after both kids are in pajamas and teeth are done, my husband Rafael or I (whoever is closer) walks whichever kid is closest onto the small back porch off our kitchen. It takes about six seconds to get there. We stand outside for one minute. That is where the name comes from — the porch minute.

In that minute, one of us says, aloud: "God, thank you for this day." Then one of the kids names one thing they are thankful for. Sometimes it is real. Sometimes it is "my sock." (Tomás thanked God for his sock for approximately eleven consecutive evenings last winter and I stopped correcting him around night four.) Then the other one names something. Then whichever adult is out there closes with: "Amen. Bedtime."

Total elapsed time: sixty to ninety seconds. No candles. No cloth napkins. Sometimes it is raining. Once, memorably, we did it during a small snowstorm and my daughter was so delighted that she now asks about doing it in snow every winter, and this is now the thing she thinks God most likes.

Why it works when the big version didn't

I have thought about this a lot, because I was surprised that something this small did anything at all. Here are the four reasons I think it works, offered in case you are trying to build your own version of a family devotional and keep failing at the "beautiful" one.

One: it is short enough to survive bad days. The porch minute has been done on the day I got the phone call about my grandmother. It has been done on the day my daughter had a fever of 103. It has been done on the day Rafael and I had a fight in the kitchen twenty minutes earlier and neither of us wanted to speak. If a family devotional cannot be done on your worst days, it will not survive your average ones.

Two: it is anchored to a physical place. The porch is not the kitchen and it is not the bedroom. It is a specific place, and going out there is a small ritual movement that signals to the kids' bodies: this is what happens now. Physical anchors work on small children the way meetings on the calendar work on adults. Do not underestimate this.

Three: it does not require anyone to be in a good mood. The imagined-evening devotional required my daughter to sit still, my husband to be present, and me to be patient. When any of those three failed — and one of them failed on approximately eighty percent of nights — the whole thing collapsed. The porch minute requires nothing but breath and one sentence.

Four: it is small enough that the kids run it. After about three months, my daughter began leading the porch minute. She would announce it. She would say "Papai, it is time." She would sometimes start the "God, thank you for this day" line herself. The intervention, which I had designed for them, was taken over by them. This is the sign of a spiritual practice that has actually rooted. It stops needing you to enforce it.

What we don't do

I want to be honest about what we are not doing, because Christian mom internet is full of curated highlight reels and I don't want to add to them.

We do not read a Bible passage every night. We read one during the porch minute maybe twice a week — a short verse from a devotional book, said aloud by whichever of us feels like it. On most nights it is just the thank-you.

We do not always pray at meals. We aim for dinner. We hit dinner maybe five nights out of seven. I have made peace with the two other nights.

We do not have a family altar, a family reading plan, a family curriculum, or a family memory verse chart. I have tried all four in various forms. All four broke. The porch minute is what remained after everything more ambitious than it fell apart.

We do not do this on vacation. That was Rafael's rule and I was resistant to it at first, but he was right: forcing a ritual into a hotel room in a different city killed the specificity of place, and the kids sensed it was fake. We resume when we get home. The break has never damaged the practice.

What it has given us

I want to be careful here, because the temptation in essays like this one is to overclaim.

The porch minute has not made my children into small saints. It has not turned my marriage into a Christian marriage-book cover. It has not produced photograph-worthy family moments — nobody is taking pictures on the porch at 7:52 p.m. in pajamas.

What it has given us is smaller and, I think, more durable. My children go to sleep having said, aloud, that they are thankful for something. My husband and I stand outside briefly, together, before the noise of the evening's cleanup swallows us. God is invited into a moment we would have had anyway, rather than into an extra hour we were pretending we had.

Two years of this. It is starting to shape them. I can see it. And it took no photography, no curriculum, no candles.

What I want you to try

If you have been trying to build a family devotional and it keeps failing, please consider that the problem is not you. The problem is the size of the thing you have been trying to build.

Pick the smallest possible ritual you can imagine. Anchor it to a place. Anchor it to a time. Give it a name — a real, family-only name that outsiders would find silly. Run it for ninety days without missing more than three nights. Do not add anything to it in that time.

You will be surprised what a ninety-second ritual, done consistently, does to a small family.

A quiet invitation

I write more about this — the small, sustainable, honest version of Christian family life with little kids — at godslittlesprout.com. There's a free weekly note called The Sprout Letter. And a book of 100 devotionals for kids ages 3–8 that was, in a real sense, built out of nights like the porch minute.

But mostly, please: try the smaller thing. That is the whole essay.