The Hardest Devotional Day I've Read So Far

It Was Day 9 of the Legacy Series. I Didn't Expect It to Land Like That.

I read the Legacy 14-Day series a few months after I built it. I'd written every word of it, I knew the arc, I knew where it was going. I thought I was above being surprised by my own content. I wasn't.

Day 9 is titled "The Man They Remember." It's built around a single question for the Dad's Companion: When your sons are grown and they describe what kind of man their father was, what word do you think they'll use — and is that the word you want?

I read it at 4:30 in the morning, same as every day. Coffee, quiet, the house still. I sat with that question for probably twenty minutes. I was supposed to be getting ready for work. I didn't move.

The Word I Was Afraid They'd Use

I'm going to be honest here because that's the point of this article. The word that came to mind first wasn't a bad word. It wasn't cruel or absent or cold. The word that came to me was busy.

Busy. That's what I was afraid my boys would say if someone asked them to describe their dad in one word. Not because I'm not there — I'm there. I'm at bedtime. I coach the little league thing. I do the devotionals. I show up. But when I sat with that question in the quiet at 4:30, I knew that the texture of our life together has a lot of rushing in it. A lot of let's go, we're late, I'll be there in a second, hold on.

I didn't want busy to be their word. I didn't want them to be thirty-five and tell someone their dad worked hard and was always kind of moving. I wanted a word that meant something different. Something about who I was in the room, not just whether I showed up to the room.

And sitting with that — really sitting with it, not the version where you acknowledge it and move on — was uncomfortable in a way I hadn't felt from something I'd written.

The Question Did What Questions Are Supposed to Do

Here's what I've learned about writing questions for men: they have to be specific enough to land. Vague questions don't cost anything. "Am you being the dad you want to be?" That's easy to pass over. You answer yes or no in half a second and move on.

But "what word do you think they'll use" forces you into your kids' perspective. You have to put yourself in their shoes and make an honest guess. Not the hope. Not the aspiration. The honest guess based on available evidence — based on what they actually see, day to day, in the way you move through your house.

That's the kind of question that's annoying because you know the answer and you've been not-knowing it on purpose.

I built the Legacy series to go here. I knew, writing it, that Day 9 was going to be the hardest one. The whole arc of the series builds toward it — you spend eight days with your kids talking about what matters, what you're building, what you want to pass down. And then Day 9 asks you to hold all of that against the honest reality of what you're actually handing over right now.

I knew it was going to hit. I didn't know it was going to hit me.

What I Did About It

The Dad's Companion mission for Day 9 is this: Today, do one thing with your child that has no agenda other than being there. No phone. No task. No half-presence. Just there.

That evening, when I got home, I told my older son I needed his help with something in the backyard. We have a fence that had a loose post I'd been meaning to look at for two months. I'd been meaning to, and meaning to, and not doing it because it wasn't urgent and something else always was.

We spent an hour out there. He handed me things. I explained what I was doing. He told me about something that happened at school that he'd apparently been sitting on for a while — the way kids do, they hold things and wait for a quiet enough moment to let them out. He let it out while we were fixing the fence in the backyard, because there was nothing competing for my attention and he could feel it.

I don't think about the fence. I think about that hour. I think about the thing he told me that he'd been carrying.

That's what a question in a devotional is supposed to do. Not make you feel bad about yourself — make you do the next right thing before the feeling fades.

The Honest Thing About Building Something You Need

There's a strange experience in building something for other people and then being challenged by it yourself. I wrote every word of the Legacy series. I sat at my desk and I built Day 9 and I knew why it mattered and I still got gotten by it.

I think about that sometimes when dads write to me and say the app changed something for them. I want to say: same. Not as a founder trying to build credibility. Just as a dad who reads his own devotionals in the early morning and gets surprised more often than he'd admit.

My faith consistency has been a real thing I've wrestled with. Not in the way you'd expect from someone who built a devotional app — I'm not up here with all the answers and a consistent prayer life that never wavers. I built this because I needed it. The Dad's Companion is the most personal piece because it's the piece I wrote for myself first.

Day 9 of Legacy got me because I built it to get dads like me. And then I forgot I was a dad like me.

The Word I Want

I've thought about this since that morning. If I'm honest, I want the word to be present. Not perfect. Not wise. Not even necessarily fun, though fun would be fine. Just present — the version where they knew that when I was in the room, I was actually there.

That's not a legacy you build by doing one big thing. It's built in thousands of small moments that either had your full attention or didn't. The fence in the backyard. The question at bedtime you stayed with instead of answered quickly. The phone call before school that's four seconds long and means everything.

I'm still working on this. I'm not writing it from the other side. I'm writing it from the middle, still carrying Day 9's question with me, still measuring my days against it, still sometimes coming up short.

But at least now I know what word I'm working toward.

If you want to go back and understand what the Dad's Companion is built to do, that piece is the foundation. And if you want to see what a full day's reading looks like when it's working the way it's supposed to, the previous article in this series gets into the moments from our actual bedtimes that shaped how I think about all of it.