Dad, I need you.

About seven years ago, we were going through a massive life reboot.

We had left South Carolina to return home to Cincinnati and were living in a two-bedroom apartment with six kids. We made it work because there was an attic that doubled as one big room for the three older boys.

The apartment was above my father-in-law’s old dental practice, and he let us stay there rent-free. We only had to pay utilities. It was an incredible opportunity to pay off debt and save money.

At the time, I worked in business development and was allowed to work unlimited overtime. So I did. I worked as much as I could. I honestly don’t know how many hours a week I was putting in, but it was a lot.

At the same time, my podcast was really taking off, and I was starting to get invited to speak at conferences. Since I was remote, I could do my job from the road. I would clock out, go speak, then clock back in afterward. It allowed me to maximize the opportunity to build out that ministry while also paying down debt and putting money away for the future.

One day I was at a conference in the Catskills. An evening session had just wrapped up, and I walked out into a big field under a sky full of stars when my wife texted me, “We need to talk.”

I called her and asked what was going on. She had my son with her, who was probably nine or ten at the time. She told me they had been talking about whether or not God was real, and during the conversation he more or less claimed to be an atheist.

So standing there looking up at the stars, I started explaining different arguments about fine-tuning and the nature of the universe. I asked him what he thought about it.

I remember him repeatedly saying, “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

And I kept telling him, “Just answer honestly.”

As I circled around a few apologetic arguments and kept getting basically no real response, it suddenly hit me: this is a ten-year-old boy who has spent his whole life in a Christian home, with parents who love him, and in solid churches.

This was not fundamentally an intellectual problem.

He was not wrestling with the historicity of the resurrection or the complexity of cosmology. There was something much more basic underneath it all.

A big part of it was that we were packed into a tiny apartment, and his dad was gone constantly.

I started realizing the issue was not primarily intellectual. It was relational and social. If my earthly father doesn’t have time for me, if my earthly father feels distant, then maybe my heavenly Father, who already feels distant because He can’t be seen, probably doesn’t care much for me either.

Of course, my son had never consciously worked through it in those exact categories. But children often feel things long before they can explain them.

So I backed off the apologetics.

I just told him, “Hey, I love you. When I get back, we’ll talk more. Don’t worry about it.”

After I returned from that conference, I started taking him with me to my co-working place several days a week. I let him drink however much soda he wanted, sit in on my calls, hang around while I worked, and just talk with me about life.

Nothing dramatic.

I just started spending more hours with him.

And over time, all that stuff faded away.

In fact, over time, he became one of the more vigorous defenders of the Christian faith among our kids.

There is no program that can help struggling children like godly, present parents. I almost wish there were, because a program would feel more manageable. It would require less faith.

But God designed the family to be one of the primary means through which children are shaped into a stable and godly way of life.

We only get so many hours.

We have to spend them wisely.

If you give your heart to your children and walk with God humbly, not perfectly, but humbly, God often uses that to draw your children’s hearts to Himself.