When You Want to Do Devotions With Your Kids But You Have Nothing Left to Give
Can I just say something that I think a lot of us feel but don’t say?
Sometimes I want to do devotions with my kids and I sit down to start and my mind is just… blank. Completely empty. I’ve been up since 6am. I’ve homeschooled, refereed arguments, answered the same question fourteen times, made three meals, and somewhere in there tried to keep the house from descending into complete chaos. And now it’s evening and everyone is finally in the same room at the same time and I know this is the moment, this is when we could open the Bible together and actually talk about something that matters.
And I have nothing.
Not because I don’t care. I care deeply. Not because I don’t know the Bible, I’ve been reading and studying it my whole life. But there is a very specific kind of tired that comes from motherhood that makes even the things you love feel like one more thing to produce. And when that tiredness meets a room full of kids at different ages who need different things from the same conversation, it can feel almost impossible to know where to start.
So sometimes you don’t start. You tell yourself you’ll do it tomorrow when you’re more prepared. And tomorrow comes and the same thing happens. And the guilt of it, the gap between the mum you want to be and the mum who just couldn’t get it together again tonight…sits heavy.
I’ve been there. More times than I’d like to admit.
The Part That Makes It Harder Than It Needs to Be
Here’s what I’ve realised after years of trying to build consistent devotion time into our home with six kids across wildly different ages and stages.
The hardest part isn’t the doing. It’s the deciding.
What are we reading? What topic is actually relevant right now, to the teenager who is struggling with friendship drama AND the five year old who just wants to know if angels are real? How do I explain this passage in a way that lands for both of them without talking over one or boring the other? How long should it be? What question do I ask to get them actually thinking, talking and absorbing, instead of just staring at the table?
That mental load — the prep work, the planning, the trying to hold six different children’s needs in your head at once before you’ve even opened your Bible… is exhausting. And it is the reason a lot of genuinely committed Christian parents end up doing devotions inconsistently. Not because they don’t love God. Not because they don’t want this for their family. But because the barrier to starting is just high enough that on a tired Tuesday night, it wins.
And I really, really wanted to do something about that.
What I Built and Why
I want to tell you about something I’ve been working on because I genuinely think it’s going to help a lot of families… including yours.
It’s called The Digital Devotional. And it’s a simple little app I built specifically for this problem, the one where you want to have a meaningful faith moment with your kids but you don’t have the time or the bandwidth to plan one from scratch.
Here’s how it works. You open it, you put in a few quick things… your kids’ age range, a topic or theme you want to cover, and how much time you have. That’s it. Within seconds it gives you a complete, ready-to-go family devotion. A Bible verse. A simple explanation your kids can actually understand. Discussion questions that work for the ages you chose. And a short closing prayer.
The whole thing can be done in five to ten minutes. You don’t need to prepare anything. You don’t need to search anything. You just open it and go.
What I love most about it, and why I think it’s genuinely different from just Googling a devotion, is that it adapts to your family. If you’ve got a seven year old and a thirteen year old in the same room, it accounts for both. The explanation is accessible enough for the younger one and the discussion question has enough depth to actually engage the older one. It meets your family where it actually is, not where it would be if everyone were the same age.
What This Is and What It Isn’t
I want to be honest with you about this because I think it matters.
The Digital Devotional is not a replacement for deep Bible study. It’s not meant to be your family’s entire spiritual diet. It’s not going to replace sitting with your teenager and really digging into a passage together, or the longer conversations about faith that happen when you give them real space.
What it is, is the thing that makes the small, consistent moments actually happen. The Tuesday night devotion that would have been skipped. The quick faith moment at breakfast before the school run. The ten minutes before bed that turned into a real conversation about God because you had something ready in your hands and didn’t have to think.
Those moments matter more than we realise. A five minute devotion that happens every day is building something in your children that a perfectly planned hour once a month simply cannot. Consistency does something that intensity alone never will. And The Digital Devotional exists to make consistency possible on even your most depleted days.
For the Mum Who Wants This For Her Family
If you’ve ever sat down to do devotions and felt that blank, empty, I-have-nothing-left feeling… this was built for you.
If you’ve got kids at different ages and you’ve ever struggled to find something that works for all of them at once.. this was built for you.
If you keep meaning to build a devotion habit in your home and life keeps getting in the way… this was built for you.
You don’t need more pressure. You don’t need another thing to plan. You just need something that makes it easy to show up… and then you show up.
That’s the whole idea.
Because your kids don’t need a perfect devotion. They need you, present, pointing them toward God. And now you’ve got something that makes that a little easier.
Written by Tabitha | Digital She Wrote — honest conversations for the Christian woman doing it all.
