When Lisa's husband left, he took the structure with him. Not just the second income or the shared parenting duties — he took the other half of the spiritual foundation she had been building for their children. They had prayed together as a family. They had read Bible stories at bedtime. They had talked about God at the dinner table. And now Lisa was sitting alone at that dinner table, looking at her two children — seven and four — wondering how she was supposed to do this alone.
"I barely had enough energy to feed them and get them to school," Lisa says. "Adding 'spiritual formation' to the list of things I was failing at felt impossible."
Lisa had grown up in the church and knew what Christian parenting was supposed to look like. Family devotionals. Dad leading prayer. Mom and Dad modeling a faithful marriage. None of that was available to her now. She felt like she was starting from scratch with a deficit — no partner, no energy, and a four-year-old who asked every night, "When is Daddy coming home?"
She stopped reading the Bible herself. She stopped praying, except for desperate, wordless prayers at 2 a.m. She was surviving, not living. And the thought of passing on a faith she could barely hold onto herself felt like a cruel joke.
A woman in her single moms' group mentioned FaithMentor. "I use it for me," she said, "but I also started sharing the verse with my kids at dinner. It is become our thing."
Lisa was skeptical. But that night, after the dishes and the baths and the arguments about bedtime, she opened FaithMentor and typed: "I am a single mom and I do not know how to teach my children about God without their father."
The verse that came back was Deuteronomy 6:6-7.
“These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”
Deuteronomy 6:6-7 (NIV)
Lisa read the verse and noticed something she had missed in all the years she had heard it in sermons: it does not mention a partner. It says "your hearts" and "your children." It says "when you sit at home" and "when you lie down." It describes the exact moments Lisa already had — bedtime, morning, sitting at home. The verse was not asking her to create a family devotional program. It was asking her to weave God into the moments she was already living.
That night, she sat on the edge of her seven-year-old's bed and said, "Can I read you something?" She read the FaithMentor verse for the day — Psalm 23:1, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want" — and said, "That means God takes care of us. Even when things are hard."
Her son said, "Like a shepherd takes care of sheep?"
"Exactly like that."
She was not asked to create a family devotional program. She was asked to weave God into the moments she was already living.
That became their ritual. One verse at bedtime. Lisa would read it, explain it in simple words, and ask her kids what they thought it meant. Some nights the conversations lasted thirty seconds. Other nights, her son asked questions that forced Lisa to think deeply about her own faith. Her four-year-old mostly wanted to know if God liked dinosaurs. (Lisa said yes.)
FaithMentor gave her Proverbs 22:6: "Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it." She taped it to the bathroom mirror where she would see it every morning while brushing her teeth.
“Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.”
Proverbs 22:6 (NIV)
Then came the story of Hannah and Samuel — a mother who entrusted her son to God's care when she could not provide everything he needed on her own. FaithMentor connected it to Lisa's situation: "Hannah did not have all the resources. She had all the faith. And God filled in the gaps."
That story gave Lisa permission to stop striving for a picture of family faith that no longer existed and to trust that what she could give — one verse, one conversation, one bedtime prayer — was enough when offered in faith.
A year later, something remarkable happened. Lisa's son came home from school upset about a friend who had been mean to him. Before Lisa could offer parental wisdom, he said, "Mom, what does the Bible say about when people are mean to you?"
She pulled out FaithMentor and they looked together. Ephesians 4:32: "Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you."
Her son read it, thought about it, and said, "Okay. I think I can do that."
Lisa cried in the kitchen after he went to bed. Not from sadness. From the realization that the faith she thought she was failing to pass on had taken root.
The faith she thought she was failing to pass on had taken root. One verse at a time. One bedtime at a time.
"I am not doing it perfectly," Lisa says. "There are nights I am too exhausted for the verse. There are weeks when bedtime is a war zone and scripture is the last thing on anyone's mind. But the rhythm is there. My kids know that God is part of our home — not because their father is here leading devotionals, but because their mother opens an app every night and says, 'Let me read you something.'
And that, it turns out, is enough."