Devotional Entry
A short, spiritually-oriented piece designed for daily reading - typically anchored to a scripture passage and closing with reflection or prayer.
Devotional Entry
Section titled “Devotional Entry”A devotional entry is a short-form spiritual piece designed for personal or small-group use, typically consumed in 5-10 minutes. It is anchored to a text (usually scriptural) and moves from that text toward personal application. The best devotional entries feel like a letter from a trusted friend who has read the same passage and thought carefully about what it means for both of them.
Canonical template
Section titled “Canonical template”[Opening image or observation - 2-3 sentences]
[Scripture or anchor text - quoted directly]
[Reflection on the text - 2-4 paragraphs]
[Personal application - 1-2 paragraphs]
[Closing: a question, an image, or a simple invitation]
[Optional: closing prayer, 3-5 sentences]When to use
Section titled “When to use”Daily devotional series, church newsletter content, personal reflection prompts, retreat materials, small group warmups.
When not to use
Section titled “When not to use”Technical writing, business communication, secular audiences.
Pairs well with
Section titled “Pairs well with”pastoral, reverent, warm, encouraging, devotional-reflection
Often confused with
Section titled “Often confused with”sermon: A sermon is a public spoken address to a gathered congregation, moving from exposition to exhortation and calling many listeners toward a shared response together. A devotional entry is a short private reading an individual works through alone, anchored to a scripture passage and moving toward personal application in 5 to 10 minutes - intimate and singular where the sermon is communal and oral.
- Anchored to a text, usually a directly quoted scripture passage
- Opens with a specific image or observation, not a generalization
- Moves from the anchor text toward personal application
- Closes with something that lingers - a question, an image, or a simple invitation
- Short enough for 5-10 minutes of reading (roughly 400-700 words)
- Optionally ends with a brief prayer of 3-5 sentences
Anti-patterns
Section titled “Anti-patterns”- Building toward a thesis and defending it rather than moving toward application - That is the aim of an essay; a devotional values application over argument and reads like a letter from a trusted friend, not a case being made.
- Expanding into sermon scope with multiple points and an audience address - A devotional is shorter and more personal than a sermon; the sermon teaches a gathered congregation, the devotional sits beside a single reader.
- Closing with a summary that restates the reflection - The closing is the last thing the reader carries; a summary wastes it, and the format asks the ending to leave an image, a question, or an invitation.
Failure modes
Section titled “Failure modes”- Tips into sentimentality - the personal, warm register is pushed until the piece is all soft feeling and the anchor text and substance dissolve - Keep the reflection rooted in the quoted text; if the warmth no longer connects to the passage, the devotional has become a mood rather than a reading.
- Over-applies - the move toward personal application becomes a list of instructions and to-dos that crowds out contemplation - Application is an invitation to sit with the text, not a task list; if the closing tells the reader what to do rather than what to consider, soften it.
Instruction
Section titled “Instruction”Write as a devotional entry. Anchor the piece to a scripture passage or spiritual observation.Move from the text toward personal application. Open with a specific image or moment - not ageneralization. Close with something that lingers: a question, an image, or a simple invitationlike "Sit with that today." Keep the length appropriate for 5-10 minutes of reading. The closingis as important as the opening - do not waste it on a summary. Optionally close with a briefprayer (3-5 sentences). This is personal, not academic - write like a letter from a trustedfriend.Template
Section titled “Template”See the Devotional Entry template.
Related
Section titled “Related”Pairs well with
Section titled “Pairs well with”Pastoral, Reverent, Warm, Encouraging, Devotional Reflection
Avoid with
Section titled “Avoid with”Operator, Matter of Fact, Pragmatic Architect, Problem-Solution, Architecture Decision Record
Often confused with
Section titled “Often confused with”Examples
Section titled “Examples”- Should we adopt async-first standups?
- How to start a morning routine
- How to choose between Postgres and DynamoDB for a new service
- Telling stakeholders a committed feature is being cut this quarter
- Getting a new engineer productive in their first two weeks
- Writing to thank a mentor who shaped your career
- Reflecting on keeping a discipline of rest
- Marking a long-serving colleague's departure
- Marking the team shipping a hard, long project
- Arguing a public position on return-to-office
- Announcing a new product to an outside audience
- A personal year-end reckoning with a difficult year
There is a man in Luke 15 who, having come to himself in a far country, decides to rise and go to his father. The text says simply: “I will arise and go.” And then, before the speech he prepared - before he could deliver his rehearsed confession - his father saw him from a distance and ran.
He was seen before he could explain himself.
I think about that moment when I think about what it means to give an honest account of yourself to the people who depend on you. Not the polished version. Not the update that makes the quarter look on track. The real one: where you actually are, what is actually stuck, what you are genuinely uncertain about.
Most of us have become very good at accounts that sound like the ones our fathers and managers wanted to hear. We have learned to frame uncertainty as “exploring options.” We have learned to call a stopped project “paused for prioritization.” The account we give is technically true and practically misleading. And we wonder why our teams cannot help us.
The discipline of honest daily accounting - the real standup, whether it happens on a Zoom call or in a Slack thread at 8am - is the discipline of being findable. Not impressive. Findable. Present in a way that lets the people who love your work and depend on your work actually locate you and meet you there.
Psalm 139 says there is nowhere you can go that God is not already waiting. That is not surveillance. That is the deep relief of being known without having to perform.
Today’s invitation is simple: post the real update. Name the actual blocker. Say where you are, not where you hoped to be. Let yourself be found.
Lord, give me the courage to give an honest account. To be findable today - to my team, to the people who need to know where I am. And let that small act of honesty be an act of trust.
The First Light
Section titled “The First Light”“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” - Lamentations 3:22-23
Reflection
Section titled “Reflection”Each morning is a small inheritance. We did not earn the sun on the windowsill. We did not arrange for our lungs to begin again on their own. Before we form a single thought, before the phone glows or the kettle hisses, mercy has already arrived and laid itself across the bed.
It is striking that Jeremiah wrote those lines from the ruins of Jerusalem. He was not describing a pleasant suburban morning. He was describing the daily miracle that mercy comes to people whose lives are not yet repaired. The morning does not wait until we are ready. It comes anyway, new, regardless of what we left undone yesterday.
I have been thinking about what it means to meet the morning honestly. For years, my first act of the day was to reach for a small lit screen and pour the world’s anxieties into a brain that had not yet drawn its first deliberate breath. I was answering messages from people I had not yet greeted God for, in a body I had not yet thanked Him for inhabiting.
A morning routine is, at its most modest, a way of receiving the gift before spending it. Water before words. Light before noise. A moment of stillness before the day’s many small demands take their seats around the table. None of this earns mercy. Mercy was already here when we opened our eyes. The routine simply slows us down enough to notice that it was.
There is no virtue in the routine itself. There is only the chance, each morning, to begin again, and to begin awake.
A small invitation
Section titled “A small invitation”Tomorrow, before the phone, before the inbox, before the calendar opens its mouth, try this. Drink a glass of water. Stand at the window for one minute. Say, quietly or in your head, “Thank you for this day, which I have not yet spent.” Then begin.
Prayer
Section titled “Prayer”Lord, you have given me this morning, fresh, before I asked. Teach me to receive it with both hands. Slow me down at the threshold of the day. Let my first thoughts be of you, not of the work I owe or the worries I have inherited from yesterday. Make me grateful before I am useful. And when I forget, which I will, meet me again tomorrow with the same patient mercy you brought today. Amen.
The Tool You Already Know
Section titled “The Tool You Already Know”It is Thursday evening at Lattice Notify. Ana is at her desk with two browser tabs open: a Postgres scaling guide and a DynamoDB pricing calculator. Priya needs a decision by tomorrow. There is a small ache behind Ana’s eyes that is not really about databases.
“Better is a little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure and trouble with it.” - Proverbs 15:16
Reflection
Section titled “Reflection”There is a particular temptation in our work that the writer of Proverbs would have recognized, even if he would not have recognized the words “managed NoSQL service.” It is the temptation to reach for the better thing when the sufficient thing is already in our hand. The new tool, the bigger system, the more elegant architecture. There is nothing wrong with any of these. The question is what we are willing to trade for them, and whether the trade is honest about what we already have.
The Postgres database that Ana’s team runs is not glamorous. It is not what she would put on a conference slide. It is the thing that has been quietly absorbing whatever Lattice Notify has thrown at it for three years, with a 4-person on-call rotation that knows its quirks by name. The DynamoDB option is more elegant for the access pattern. It is also a stranger to this team, a stranger they would have to spend a year getting to know while the product waits.
The verse does not say great treasure is bad. It says it is worse when accompanied by trouble. The Hebrew word for trouble here, mehumah, carries the sense of tumult, confusion, things stirred up that cannot be set down. Ana has felt that word, even without knowing it, every time she has tried to imagine a 3am page about a system her on-call engineers have never debugged.
The wisdom Proverbs offers is not anti-ambition. It is a counsel of proportion: notice what you have, notice its quiet value, before you measure it against the brighter thing. The little, held with fear of the Lord, with reverence for the gift of the steady, becomes more than the great treasure that arrives with trouble.
Application
Section titled “Application”If you have a decision like this in front of you this week - a tool, a team, a path - it is worth a moment of quiet before the spreadsheet. What do you already hold? What does it cost you? What would you have to put down to pick up the new thing? Sometimes the new thing is right. Sometimes the boring path is the faithful one.
A small invitation
Section titled “A small invitation”Tomorrow, before the meeting, list three things your current tools have given you that you no longer notice. Then ask whether the trade you are considering is honest about losing them.
Prayer
Section titled “Prayer”Lord, give us the wisdom to see what we already have before we reach for what we do not. Slow us down at the threshold of the decision. Teach us the difference between ambition and restlessness. And when we must choose the boring path because it is the faithful one, give us the steadiness to walk it without resentment. Amen.
When the Plan Changes Before the Promise Does
Section titled “When the Plan Changes Before the Promise Does”There is a moment most builders know: the one where the calendar and the codebase finally tell the truth at the same time. You have made a promise. The ground under it has shifted. And what you need to do next is harder than any sprint.
“Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails.”
- Proverbs 19:21 (NIV)
We plan in good faith. The team sat in a planning session last spring and named a date. The capacity was there, on paper. The sales team was told. Key customers were told. The commitment was real because the intention was real - and that distinction matters, even when it does not change the outcome.
But plans live inside systems that do not hold still. A billing migration, required and overdue, ran longer and deeper than anyone had modeled. The engineers who were supposed to begin the Insights dashboard in July were still untangling billing logic in August. And the honest assessment came back: the team could ship the dashboard on the committed date, or they could ship it well. Not both.
Proverbs does not say our plans are careless or our intentions empty. It does not prescribe less commitment or looser promises. It says the final word on the schedule is not ours. There is a humility in that - not the passive humility of giving up, but the active humility of acknowledging that our best planning is still partial, still dependent on conditions we cannot fully control. We are not sovereign over the systems we build inside.
The question is not whether plans will sometimes break. They will. The question is what fidelity looks like in the space between what was promised and what is now possible.
The answer Scripture keeps returning to is not silence, not revision without acknowledgment, not delay without explanation. It is honesty, and then faithfulness to what remains possible. If the full Insights dashboard cannot ship in September, something can still ship - a way for customers to reach their data now, to work with it in the tools they already have, a bridge rather than the destination. The destination still comes, in January, built right.
That is not consolation. That is integrity. The impulse when a commitment breaks down is to go quiet, to minimize, to let the item slip off the roadmap and hope it is not noticed. The alternative - naming what happened, explaining the constraint, offering what is genuinely possible now, and recommitting to what remains - is a form of faithfulness to the relationship that lived inside the broken plan.
You made the promise honestly. The conditions changed under it. What you carry into this conversation is not only an explanation; it is the relationship with the people who were waiting, and you get to choose what you bring to it.
Sit with that before you send the message.
Lord, give us the courage to name what has changed when we would rather stay silent. When the gap opens between what we promised and what we can deliver, let us carry that gap honestly to the people who trusted us. Help us to offer what is still possible with full hands, not a half-hearted apology. And remind us that the people we have promised are more important than the particular shape of what we promised them. Amen.
She arrived Monday morning with her laptop under one arm and a careful look on her face - the look of someone who knows how to learn but doesn’t yet know where anything is. This is Priya. She is good at this, and she doesn’t know you know that yet.
“Then Boaz said to Ruth, ‘My daughter, listen to me. Don’t go and glean in another field and don’t go away from here. Stay here with the women who work for me. Watch the field where the men are harvesting, and follow along after the women. I have told the men not to lay a hand on you. And whenever you are thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled.’”
Ruth 2:8-9
Boaz sees Ruth working at the edges. She has arrived in a foreign field, in a land she did not grow up in, under circumstances she did not choose. She is working hard, and she is working alone. She does not yet know the shape of this place.
What Boaz does next is specific enough to become instructive. He does not offer a general welcome. He says: here is the field, stay in it. Here are the workers, follow them. Here is who to ask when you are thirsty. He answers questions she has not yet learned to ask. He provides access, orientation, a pairing, and a clear map of who belongs to what. And underneath all of it, he says something she will feel more than hear: I have already spoken for you here. You are not unprotected.
The ancient rabbinic tradition reads this moment as hesed - a word usually translated as “kindness” but meaning something closer to loyal love, the love that stays and shows up, the love that acts before it is asked. Boaz had no obligation to do any of this. Ruth was gleaning legally, but she was gleaning at the margin. Boaz moved her toward the center - not by granting her a rank, but by narrating the field until she could navigate it herself.
The first two weeks of a new role are a kind of gleaning at the margin. Priya is capable. She will find her footing even without your help, eventually. But “eventually” is not the same as belonging, and she will carry the memory of how it felt to arrive. You can set up her access, walk her through the codebase, pair with her on the on-call rotation, hand her a real change small enough to be safe and real enough to count. And then, when she opens the pull request at the end of week two, you can say: we were expecting that from you.
That last sentence is the water from the jars. It tells her she was not watched from a distance while she proved herself. She was expected in, from the beginning.
Who is standing at the edge of your field today, doing careful work at the margin, not yet knowing you have already spoken for them?
Lord, give us eyes to see the ones who are arriving. Let us be the kind of people who answer questions before they are asked, who make room before it is requested, who name the ones who belong before they have to earn it. And when we forget - because we are busy and the field is large - call us back. There is always a Ruth in the field. Amen.
The expression on Marcos’s face when I told him he would lead the platform migration stopped me for a moment. It was not quite surprise. It was more like a person searching for a handhold they were not sure would hold.
I had seen that expression before.
“For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” (2 Timothy 1:6-7)
Paul writes this to Timothy from prison. He does not soften his circumstances or pretend the road ahead is easy. And still, what he reaches for is not instruction or a plan. He reaches for remembrance. Fan it into flame. The gift is already there. I put my hands on it. I saw it before you did.
What this passage does not say is just as important as what it says. It does not say “here is how you do this.” It does not say “here is what to do when you get it wrong.” It says: remember what was placed in you. Remember who named it first. That is the work of a particular kind of mentor - not to transfer a skill set but to witness what is already present and call it by its right name, before the person can name it themselves.
Ten years ago, Dana told me I would lead the Meridian account transition. It was a project that sat three years above my apparent experience level, and I told her as much. She said, “I know. Do it anyway.” Then she did something that turned out to be harder than the assignment itself: she stayed close without hovering. When I stumbled on the first vendor call, she let me finish. She did not correct me in the room. Afterward, she asked only, “What would you do differently?” She asked some version of that question every week for six months.
When I gave Marcos that same kind of assignment last month, I heard Dana in my own voice. More than that - I felt what it must have cost her to hold back. Patience like that is not passive. It is an act of deliberate restraint, repeated week after week, trusting that what she had placed her hands on would hold.
Paul tells Timothy to fan what is already there. That is not the metaphor of a person starting a fire from nothing. It is the metaphor of someone who kneels close and tends a flame that already burns.
You may have someone in your life who tended yours before you could see the heat. Today might be the day to tell them.
Lord, make me quick to name what I see in others, and slow to rescue them from the work of becoming it. Give me patience to stay close. Give me wisdom to stay out of the way. And remind me to thank the ones who did that for me.
What the Day Costs
Section titled “What the Day Costs”It was a Saturday in November when I first tried to leave my phone in the kitchen. I made it forty minutes before I walked back in, just to check. I told myself it was about the weather.
“And he said to them, ‘Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.” - Mark 6:31
The disciples hadn’t been idle. They had just returned from being sent out, healing, preaching, doing the exact work they were called to do. And Jesus called them away anyway. Not as a reward for finishing, not as a break before the next assignment, but as the thing itself. Rest. Come away.
I used to read that word “away” and feel only the warmth of the invitation. It took years before I felt its edge. Away from the inbox. Away from the half-finished draft sitting open on my desk like a sentence I hadn’t completed. Away from the low, ambient hum of production that I had learned to mistake for purpose.
The first few times I tried to keep a real day of rest, an actual deliberate stopping rather than just a slow afternoon, I felt something close to guilt. Not the loud, accusatory kind. The background kind. The kind that whispers you are falling behind, that others are not stopping, that this will cost you. I thought I was failing at rest because I found it so uncomfortable. I didn’t understand yet that the discomfort is part of what the practice is asking. You cannot be called away and feel nothing about what you are leaving.
What I found, slowly and with some surprise, was that the day did not simply vanish. It did something stranger: it reordered the days around it. The Thursday before began to take on a shape. The Monday after arrived with something steadier in it. I could not have told you why at first, and I still cannot fully explain it. The clarity I had been chasing through longer hours was often waiting for me on the other side of stopping.
The pull to check one more thing has not disappeared. I still walk back to the kitchen sometimes. But I have started to notice the pull itself as a kind of question, not whether to give in, but what I am trusting when I do. If I cannot set the work down for a single day, what does that say about what I believe the work rests on?
The Sabbath is not a productivity strategy. It is a practice of trust. It makes the same claim the disciples heard on that crowded afternoon: the world does not need my watching it for twenty-four hours. That is harder to believe than it sounds.
Set this down for a moment. Not to make a better plan for resting next week. Just to sit with the question: what would it mean, this week, to stop - and to believe that stopping is enough?
Lord, teach me to rest as you rested, not from emptiness but from completion. Help me trust that what I set down is held by hands more steady than mine. Quiet the voice in me that calls busyness faithfulness. Let this day be holy not because I earned it, but because you named it so. Amen.
The conference room where Howard ran the quarterly planning sessions for most of two decades kept a particular rhythm. He would arrive before anyone else, his notes already written out by hand - not typed, written - and by the time the room filled in, the right question was already on the whiteboard, waiting. Not his answer. His question. He knew, in a way that is difficult to explain, that a room needed to work toward something before it was ready to receive anything.
“Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.” Matthew 25:21 (ESV)
We tend to hear this verse through the lens of expansion. Faithful over a little, so - promotion. So - more. And for many servants in this parable, that is exactly what happens: a small trust becomes a larger one, and the servant is invited upward.
But Howard did not go upward in the way the organization chart would measure. He stayed. He came back to the same chair, with the same care, for twenty-six years. He learned what the company had been before most of us arrived, and he carried that knowledge the way a river carries the shape of the ground it has moved through - quietly, invisibly, but as the reason everything else flows where it does.
The parable does not say “faithful over a little and he moved on to something bigger.” It says faithful over a little, and the master calls him into joy. The joy is not a larger assignment. The joy is the master’s own. Howard understood this, I think. He showed up every day to something that looked small from the outside and held it with both hands.
The team has a name for what Howard carried: institutional memory. But that phrase is bloodless compared to what it actually meant. Institutional memory is Howard knowing, in the middle of a vendor dispute three summers ago, that the same clause had tripped up a predecessor relationship a decade earlier - and knowing where the old files lived, and knowing why that history changed what the team should say next. It is not a database. It is a kind of love, shaped like attention.
There is a version of faithfulness that waits for recognition, that accumulates a ledger. Howard did not appear to keep that ledger. He mentored people without naming it mentorship. He handed over credit the way another person might hand over a coat at the door - without announcement, without wanting it back. Several people in this building have careers they would not otherwise have, shaped by a question Howard asked them early on and then quietly followed up on three months later, not because he had to but because he had paid attention.
What do we do with an inheritance like that?
We cannot replace Howard. We can try to learn what he was practicing. The instinct to ask the follow-up question. The willingness to hold the room’s question rather than rushing to hold the room’s answer. The decision, made every morning for twenty-six years, that showing up faithfully to this particular work was enough.
Somewhere in this building right now, there is a question that only Howard knows to ask. In the weeks ahead, some of us will discover which question that is when we reach for it and find the space where he used to be.
Sit with that today.
Lord, thank you for people who stay - who see that a faithful presence is its own calling, and who offer themselves to it without requiring an audience. Bless Howard in this next season. May he find in rest the same steadiness he brought to work. And may those of us who remain carry forward some portion of what he offered - not because we can fill his place, but because he showed us what it looks like to fill one well. Amen.
There is a kind of work that nobody sees. A customer clicks through the checkout page, the experience holds, and they have no idea that two systems ran in parallel for fourteen months while a team rebuilt the one they trusted, brick by brick, without ever letting the old one fall.
“Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.” Galatians 6:9
The word weary is the honest one. It is not the language of defeat. It is the language of cost. Fourteen months is long. There were two moments when the ground felt uncertain beneath the work - when late discoveries surfaced problems that threatened to reshape decisions already made and commitments already given. There was a launch date that moved, and then moved again. Anyone who has sat with a slipped timeline knows it is not merely a calendar inconvenience. It is the slow compression of confidence, the question that arrives quietly in the space between midnight and morning: Is this going to hold?
But this team did not give up. Priya and Dominic held a critical path together when the second near-miss surfaced a data integrity gap that nobody had anticipated, at eleven in the evening, without ceremony, while the rest of the organization was already somewhere else. They made the call and the work continued. Marcus spent three weeks on a migration sequence that most people on the outside will never know existed. These contributions do not appear on the launch announcement. The work they did was the kind that cannot be explained in a sentence to someone who was not there. But the passage names what they did: they did not grow weary. They kept going in the season before the reaping.
The final rollout held under peak load. That phrase carries more than it sounds like. It means the architecture was right. It means the decisions made under the highest pressure, at the moments of greatest uncertainty, turned out to be sound. The work that cost them so much was also the work that proved to be true.
There is something here for each of us who does work that is not visible from the outside. The patient, parallel labor - maintaining the old while building the new, holding the thread through a second near-miss and a second slipped date - this is a form of faithfulness. The scripture does not promise that the work will look impressive to the people passing by. It promises that the season of reaping arrives for those who do not quit.
This team did not quit. Today, let that be enough to sit with - not as a prologue to the next milestone, but as the thing itself.
What would it look like to receive this fully - not as a checkpoint on the way to something else, but as the harvest it is?
Lord, thank you for the people who stay. For the ones who hold the thread at eleven in the evening and show up the next morning to keep going. Let them feel today what they built, and let the weight of fourteen months settle not as burden but as proof. May the work that was invisible to most be seen, in this moment, for what it truly was. Amen.
The whiteboard marker dried out halfway through the diagram. A colleague walked over, uncapped a fresh one from the shelf beside her desk, and handed it across without a word. We kept drawing. The moment lasted four seconds, and without it, we would not have solved what we were trying to solve that afternoon.
“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12
This passage has nothing to do with office layouts. It was written for a world without offices. And yet it names something I have been turning over as our organization debates whether to bring people back, send them home, or land somewhere in between.
The preacher in Ecclesiastes is not arguing that people should never work alone. He is observing that isolation, over time, creates a kind of cold. Not dramatic failure - just the slow chill of working without someone to fall beside you or pull you back up. The warmth he describes is not productivity. It is the harder-to-measure thing: being known, being covered, being held to account in a way that feels like care rather than surveillance.
I have watched this dynamic play out on both sides of the hybrid debate. The colleague who chose full remote found genuine focus she had lost to open-plan noise. She also told me, quietly, that she had stopped knowing what her teammates were actually working on, and that she no longer got the off-the-cuff edits that used to sharpen her thinking. The colleague who returned five days a week said the energy had come back, and also that his commute was costing him two hours a day that used to go to reading and rest.
Neither was wrong.
What Ecclesiastes does not give us is a scheduling solution. It gives us a value: the cord of three strands holds because of what is woven into it, not simply because the strands happen to be adjacent. The question our policy debate keeps skating past is not “how often?” but “what are we trying to weave?”
If I am honest, I believe we need enough shared time to build the kind of trust that lets someone hand you a marker without making it a transaction. A few anchor days each week - chosen with intention, not mandated as theater - and then the rest of the time in whatever conditions help each person think clearly. Not a perfect answer. But closer to what this passage is describing than either extreme on its own.
Think about the last time a colleague helped you in a way so small they probably forgot it happened. Where were you?
Lord, keep us from mistaking proximity for community and flexibility for isolation. Give us the wisdom to see what we are actually building when we make these policies, and whether we are building it for the people who need covering. Help us hold this together as a cord, not as a collection of strands. Amen.
The whiteboard in their conference room had three colors of sticky notes - yellow for what was working, pink for what was broken, green for what customers said they wanted next. By Friday afternoon, nobody could agree on which pile mattered most. Three people had three different stories about what the customers had said, and the roadmap for the next quarter was a guess dressed up in confidence it had not earned.
I have seen that room. I suspect you have too.
Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.
- Habakkuk 2:2
Habakkuk received this word in a season of straining to see. The people around him could not make sense of what was happening, and the prophet himself had been asking hard questions. The instruction that came back was not “gather more data” or “hold another meeting.” It was simpler and more demanding: write it plain, not for yourself, but for the person who will have to carry it while running.
That word “run” carries something. A vision written for a runner cannot hide in complexity. It cannot live only in the head of the one who received it. It has to be transferable - clear enough that someone can pick it up in motion and know exactly where they are going.
Most teams are not short of feedback. Customers have said things. They have emailed and called and filled out the form and mentioned it after the demo. The failure is rarely the listening. The failure comes at the next step, where someone has to take all of that scattered voice and write it plain enough that the team can run. That step asks for a kind of ruthlessness about what actually matters and a kind of generosity about making it visible to everyone.
This is the problem that Tidemark was built for. Tidemark is a new tool that helps small teams gather customer feedback from wherever it lives - the support queue, the chat channel, the interview notes - and turn it into a single ranked roadmap the whole team can see and share. It launches next week.
The assumption behind it is the same one Habakkuk carried: your people have already written the vision. Your customers have already told you what is working, what is missing, and what would change things for them. What most teams are short of is not input. It is the writing-plain step. The moment where the scattered voice becomes something others can run with.
If your team is sitting in front of a pile of feedback and not sure what belongs on the roadmap next, Tidemark may be worth a look. You can get early access at tidemark.io when doors open next week.
But sit with the image for a moment before you do anything else. Write the vision, and make it plain. Not as a productivity strategy. Because the people running with your work deserve to know where they are going.
Lord, give us ears to hear what the people we serve are actually telling us. Help us resist the temptation to keep the vision inside our heads, where it cannot be carried by anyone else. Teach us to write it plain - generously and clearly - so that others can run. May the work of our hands be something worth following. Amen.
The final email came in late December, timestamped 11:47 p.m. I read it twice, then put my phone face-down on the desk and sat with the dark window for a while. That was how the Millbrook project ended.
“Remember my affliction and my wandering, the wormwood and the gall. My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.”
- Lamentations 3:19-20
The writer of Lamentations is not trying to get somewhere. This is not a psalm that pivots. The famous lines three stanzas later - the ones about mercies being new every morning - do appear, and they are real. But the writer earns them by first refusing to rush past the wreckage. Wormwood is bitter root. Gall is a bile-flavored grief. The writer names both, with something close to precision.
This year I needed that permission. The Millbrook partnership had consumed most of three years. I believed in what we were building, and I brought other people in with me - people who trusted my read of the situation. When the funding fell through and the core team dispersed in March, I kept expecting a clean feeling to arrive: relief, or at least a settled sadness I could file away. It did not arrive. What arrived instead was the recurring memory of a particular Tuesday planning session - all that energy, the whiteboard covered in markers, the room loud with possibility. That image still shows up when I am trying to sleep.
And then, separately, there was the friendship. Claire and I had been close for six years. I will not narrate the whole of it here because it is not only my story to tell, and because I am still not sure what I got wrong and what I only got wrong in her accounting. What I know is that by summer we had stopped calling, and by fall the silence had the weight of a decision neither of us officially made.
I am telling you both of these things because I want to be honest: they did not teach me the same lesson. The project ending and the friendship changing are not secretly the same grief wearing two coats. I got some things wrong in the first and probably different things wrong in the second, and the year asked me to hold them separately even when I wanted to collapse them into one clean story I could understand.
What I am taking into the new year is not a lesson, exactly. It is more like a practice. When I catch myself reaching for a frame - “it was a season of growth,” “everything happens for a reason,” the usual equipment we hand each other - I am trying to set the frame down and just stay with what happened. The Millbrook project ended. The friendship changed. My soul is still bowed down in some places. That is not a stopping point; it is a starting point. Honest accounting is not the same as despair.
There is one thing I am choosing to carry: the Tuesday session, the whiteboard, the energy in the room. Not as a reminder of what I lost, but as evidence of what I was capable of believing in. The believing is mine, even when the outcome is not.
What in this past year are you still holding at arm’s length because naming it fully would make it too real? What would it mean to set down the frame and just let it be what it was?
Lord, I am not asking you to make this year make sense. I am asking for the honesty to look at it clearly - to see what I got wrong without collapsing into it, and to see what was genuinely lost without having to call it secretly good. Keep me from the stories that comfort me too easily. And stay close to the places that are still bowed down.
Appears in diff-pairs
Section titled “Appears in diff-pairs”- devotional-entry vs technical-reference (varies format)