There was a season in my life when I had everything I thought I wanted: a career that was advancing, a family I loved, a faith I claimed, and yet I walked around with a hollow feeling I couldn’t quite name. I was busy, not purposeful. Productive, not fruitful. Sound familiar?
As a parent, the stakes are even higher. Every distracted moment we spend scrolling, every frantic morning we rush out the door without a word of prayer, every evening we collapse onto the couch instead of engaging our kids, those moments add up. They shape the kind of people our children become. I learned that the hard way.
The question “What is my purpose?” is one of the most honest questions a human being can ask. And the good news, the Gospel, literally the good news, is that God has already answered it.
The Gospel Is the Foundation
Before we talk about habits, schedules, or productivity frameworks, we have to start here. Everything else is noise without this foundation. Here is what I have staked my life on, and what I am unashamed to tell you plainly:
- The Kingdom of God is here. Jesus is not a historical figure to admire from a distance. He is the reigning King of an eternal Kingdom that has already broken into our world.
- Jesus is the Christ. The Messiah. The one the entire sweep of Scripture pointed toward.
- He died for our sins. Not as a symbol. Not as a moral example. He bore the weight of everything you and I have ever done wrong, on a Roman cross, so that we wouldn’t have to.
- He rose again on the third day. Death could not hold Him. That resurrection is the hinge of all history, and it changes everything about how you and I live today.
So what do we do with that? Three things, and they are not optional add-ons for the spiritually ambitious. They are the entire point:
- Repent. Turn. Change direction. Stop living as if you are the center of your own story.
- Believe the Gospel. Not just intellectually. Trust it with your whole life.
- Follow Him. Daily. Practically. In how you parent, how you work, how you treat people who make your life harder than it needs to be.
When I finally stopped treating my faith like a weekend activity and started treating it like the center of my identity, everything shifted. Not all at once: slowly, stubbornly, beautifully. Purpose began to replace the hollow feeling.
The One Habit That Changed My Life
I am not going to ask you to wake up at 4:30 AM and spend two hours in prayer. I tried that. I failed consistently. What actually worked, and what I believe with everything in me can work for any parent, no matter how full your calendar is, is fifteen minutes in God’s Word every single day.
That’s it. Fifteen minutes. Not a seminary class. Not a Bible in a year reading plan that you’ll abandon by February. Just you, your Bible, and a quiet corner before your phone, before the news, before the noise of the day crashes over you.
I started doing this during one of the hardest stretches of my career. Deadlines, difficult decisions, and the pressure of leading a team while also trying to be present for my family. I was running on fumes. A mentor suggested I try starting the day in Scripture before anything else. I was skeptical. I tried it anyway.
The first week felt mechanical. The second week felt slightly less so. By the third week, something I can only describe as hunger began to develop. I started looking forward to those fifteen minutes. They became the anchor of my day.
The key is consistency, not quantity. A thin daily habit will produce more transformation than an occasional spiritual marathon. The goal is not to consume information. It is to cultivate a relationship with God. One of the best tools I have found for building that habit is The Family Wins (TFW) Devotional. It is a Christ-centered New Testament devotional designed to help families deepen their connections with one another and with God’s Word. I believe in it enough that I have purchased copies as gifts. It is one of the most tangible ways I practice the Golden Rule in my own life. Think of it as your playbook for purposeful living. Read it slowly. Let the questions it raises linger. Ask yourself, “What is God saying to me today, and what does obedience look like right now?” Then sit with it for a moment before you move on.
What Starts to Grow
Jesus said it plainly in the Sermon on the Plain: “A healthy tree produces healthy fruit. A diseased tree cannot fake it for long” (Luke 6:43). Your habits are fruit. They reveal the root.
When you begin feeding your soul with the Word of God daily, something remarkable starts to happen, not overnight, but over time. The Apostle Paul calls it the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). These are not character traits you manufacture through willpower. They are the natural output of a life rooted in Christ.
In practical terms, this is what it looked like for me: I became less reactive with my kids. More patience in traffic. More generous with people who frustrated me at work. Slower to judge. Quicker to forgive. I began treating others the way I wanted to be treated, not because I gritted my teeth and tried harder, but because something was being grown in me that I could not produce on my own.
That is the Golden Rule, not as a slogan, but as a living reality: “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31). It becomes possible, genuinely possible, not just aspirationally possible, when it flows from a heart that is being daily renewed.
A Word to Parents Specifically
Your children are watching you more closely than you know. They notice whether Sunday’s convictions survive Monday’s commute. They notice how you treat the person who got your order wrong, the neighbor who is difficult, and the coworker who takes credit for your work. Your life is the first sermon they will ever hear.
When you build the habit of daily time in Scripture, you are not just feeding yourself. You are building a home on bedrock. Jesus described it this way: the person who hears His words and acts on them is like a builder who dug all the way down to solid rock before laying a single stone. When the storms came, and they came, that house held (Luke 6:47-48).
You want that foundation under your family. Not wealth, not achievement, not a perfect reputation. A life built on the unchanging truth of who Jesus is and what He has done.
Start Today. Fifteen Minutes.
Here’s my challenge to you, and it is as practical as I can make it:
1. Set your alarm fifteen minutes earlier tomorrow morning.
2. Put your phone in another room.
3. Pick up The Family Wins Devotional and read one entry slowly. If you don’t have a copy yet, buy one or contact me because I keep extras on hand for exactly this reason. Simply provide your mailing address in the secure form, and I will mail it to you free of charge.
4. When you finish, ask God for one thing: “Show me how to live what I just read today.”
5. Do it again tomorrow.
Repent, believe the Gospel, and follow Him. Not in some grand dramatic gesture, but in the quiet, faithful, fifteen-minute choices that slowly transform the root and eventually, inevitably, the fruit.
The Kingdom of God is here. Jesus is alive. And He is more than able to make something purposeful out of your ordinary Tuesday morning if you’ll give Him fifteen minutes of it.
A Prayer to Close:
“Father, quiet the noise long enough for us to hear You. Give us the hunger to open Your Word before we open anything else. Let what grows in us overflow into the people we love: our children, our spouses, our neighbors. Make us parents who build on rock. In the name of Jesus, who is the Rock. Amen.”
MindWolves 