Julie Ashton Facebook ad: “My husband hasn't missed a morning in 47 days. Read this.”

About this ad

Meta Ad Library ID

33967247419587777

Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger

Relaunches

0

Niche

Parenting & Kids

How we count

Ad text

My pastor's wife pulled me aside after the Sunday service and said, "Whatever you gave Marcus, every wife in this church needs to know about it." I'd mentioned, almost offhandedly, that my husband had read something every single morning for 47 days straight. She looked at me the way you look at someone who just told you their kid slept through the night at three weeks old. "Every morning?" she said. "Including weekdays?" Including weekdays. Here's what you need to understand about my husband, David. David is a good man. A genuinely good man. He coaches our son's baseball team, he shows up, he provides, and he loves us in all the ways that actually count when the lights go out and real life happens. But for eleven years of marriage, I watched this man — a man who reads industry reports for fun, who has probably memorized the entire ESPN injury report at any given moment — pick up his Bible approximately four times a year. Christmas Eve. Easter. When his dad had a health scare in 2019. And once, randomly, on a Tuesday in March when I think he lost a bet with himself. I want to be careful here, because I know how this sounds. I am not one of those wives who weaponizes her husband's spiritual life against him. I have never once said, "You need to be the spiritual leader of this home." I have watched enough women do that exact thing to know it has approximately a zero percent success rate and a one hundred percent chance of making your husband feel like a failure and go silent for three days. So I kept quiet. For years. But I noticed things. I noticed that David was shorter with the kids on Sunday mornings than any other day of the week. I noticed that when things got hard — when we lost a contract, when his mom got sick, when our youngest started struggling in school — he went quiet in a specific way. Not the processing-his-thoughts quiet. The other kind. The kind where a man is by himself even when he's standing right next to you. I noticed that he'd come home from work and sit in the car in the driveway. For twelve, sometimes fifteen minutes. Just sitting there. I didn't knock on the window. I just watched from the kitchen and felt the gap between us like a physical thing. I want to tell you I handled this gracefully. I did not. I tried the direct approach exactly once. In 2021, after a particularly hard season, I suggested we try doing a couples devotional together every morning. Just ten minutes. David looked at me like I'd suggested we take up competitive fencing. "I'll try," he said. In the tone that means, "I love you and I will now try this thing for four days before it quietly disappears and we never speak of it again." He lasted six days. Which, to be fair, was impressive. After that I let it go completely. I stopped mentioning it. I stopped buying him things. I stopped forwarding him podcast episodes with passive-aggressive subject lines. I deleted the habit tracker I had optimistically installed on both our phones. I just prayed about it. Not in a dramatic, on-my-knees-weeping way. More like a quiet, running prayer I'd carry around during the day like a stone in my pocket. *God, would you just meet him somewhere he can actually reach?* --- Fast forward to last November. I was Christmas shopping online at 10:30 at night, the way every mother does, in a semi-conscious e-commerce trance while David watched something in the other room. I wasn't even looking for this. I was looking for his actual gift — a new reel for his fishing setup. But I fell into a rabbit hole of "gifts for Christian men" and something caught my eye because the title made me laugh out loud. *One Minute With God for Men.* One minute. I assumed it was a joke. Or a children's book. Or something so watered-down it would be essentially useless. I almost kept scrolling. But something made me stop. Maybe it was the design — it looked substantial. Real faux leather cover, gold edges, the kind of thing that looks like it belongs on a serious man's desk rather than in a church gift shop next to the cross-shaped paperweights. I read the description. 365 daily entries. Each one takes exactly 60 seconds. One scripture. One direct truth. One immediate challenge for the day. That's it. In and out. Sixty seconds. My first thought — and I'm being honest — was: *Is that even enough to count?* My second thought was: *This man has opened his Bible four times in eleven years. Let's recalibrate what "enough" means.* I ordered it. $34.99. Wrapped it. Put it under the tree with a card that said, "No pressure. No tracking. Just something I thought you might like." That last part was important. No pressure. No tracking. Because I have learned — the hard way, more than once — that the fastest way to make a man not do something is to let him know you are watching to see if he does it. --- Christmas morning. He opened it. Read the back. Nodded in the way that means "this is thoughtful and I will engage with this later." I assumed "later" meant February. January 3rd, I woke up at 6 AM to get the kids ready for school and David was already in the kitchen. Coffee made. Sitting at the island. That little leather book open in front of him. I did not say anything. I made myself a coffee and went about my morning. January 4th. Same thing. January 5th. Same thing. By the second week I mentioned it, lightly, once. "Hey, is that book any good?" He looked up. "Yeah, actually. It doesn't waste my time." Coming from David, that is a five-star review. By the end of January I noticed something strange. Or not strange — I knew what it was. I'd prayed for it for years. But seeing it in the actual texture of our daily life felt almost surreal. He was calmer at dinner. Not dramatically. Not in a way I could point to if someone asked me to describe it. But the temperature in the room when he walked in from work was different. Slightly lower. Slightly more settled. He stopped sitting in the driveway. One night in early February he put the kids to bed, came back downstairs, and sat next to me on the couch — not across the room in his chair — and we talked for an hour. About real things. The kind of conversation we used to have in the first two years when everything still felt like it had room to breathe. I don't want to over-promise you anything here. One little book did not fix eleven years of distance in forty-seven days. We still have hard days. He still gets quiet in the way I don't love. But something shifted. Something small and real and structural. He told me recently — and he would die if he knew I was repeating this — that he used to feel like he was supposed to be doing something he just couldn't make himself do, and that every day he didn't do it was just more evidence that he wasn't who he thought he was. He said the one-minute thing felt like finally being handed something that fit the shape of his actual life instead of the life someone imagined he had. He's on day 47. Counting. --- I've thought a lot about why this worked when everything else didn't. It's not because David suddenly became more disciplined. He didn't. If I gave him a reading plan or a 30-day challenge or another accountability thing, it would collect dust exactly like the others. It's because this thing removed the one excuse that actually worked on him: *I don't have time.* Sixty seconds. Before the coffee gets cold. Before the emails start. Before the kids explode out of their rooms. Sixty seconds is frictionless. His brain can't organize a real resistance to sixty seconds. And somehow, sixty seconds every single day for forty-seven days has done something that forty-five-minute Sunday sermons and well-meaning accountability groups and my six-day couples devotional experiment never managed to do. It gave him a daily win that's actually his. Not performed for me. Not reported to anyone. Just his. I think that part mattered enormously. Men in this season of life are performing constantly — at work, for their families, in their communities. The last thing most of them need is one more arena where someone is watching their score. This is private. It's fast. It's real. And it's designed specifically for men, which sounds obvious but apparently is rare — most men's devotionals are just regular devotionals with a football on the cover. This one asks hard questions. It doesn't pad things out with personal anecdotes from the author's golf game. It doesn't do sports metaphors. It's just one verse, one truth, one challenge. That's it. David told me the questions it asks are ones he actually thinks about during the day. While he's driving. While he's in meetings. That a single line from a 60-second reading somehow rides along with him for the next twelve hours. I didn't engineer that. The format did. --- I've bought four more since Christmas. One for my brother-in-law, who I've watched my sister quietly worry about for years in the same way I used to worry about David. One for my dad, who I love deeply and who has not been inside a church since Bill Clinton was president. Two more that are sitting in my closet for Father's Day, because I now have a theory that every woman reading this has a man in her life she's been carrying a stone in her pocket for. A husband. A dad. A son. A brother. A friend. Someone she prays about in that quiet, running way. Not desperate. Just persistent. Just *God, would you just meet him somewhere he can actually reach?* Here's what I want to tell you: The $34.99 is nothing. I spend more than that on a single Costco run. The physical book is beautiful — it looks like something that matters, which apparently is not irrelevant when you're handing something to a man and hoping he'll actually use it. The gold edges, the real leather feel, the ribbon marker — it telegraphs value in a way a cheap paperback simply wouldn't. But more than the price and more than the packaging: it requires nothing from him that he can't actually give. It doesn't ask him to become a different person. It doesn't require a personality transplant or a schedule he doesn't have. It asks for sixty seconds before the chaos starts. Most men, in my experience, will do sixty seconds. They'll do it when they won't do an hour, won't do a reading plan, won't do an accountability group, won't do the thing you've gently suggested four separate times. They'll do sixty seconds. And apparently, sixty seconds is enough. Forty-seven days in, I have the receipts. If you have a man in your life you've been quietly hoping for — if you've been carrying that stone in your pocket for a while — this is the closest thing I've found to a real, non-threatening, non-naggy, this-might-actually-work solution. Get it for Father's Day. Get it for his birthday. Get it for no reason and leave it on the kitchen counter with no note. Just order one. And then, like me, don't say a word. Don't track it. Don't check in on it. Don't make it a thing. Just wait. And watch what happens when a man finally finds something that fits the shape of his actual life.

Where the ad sends people

shopaqora.com

My husband hasn't missed a morning in 47 days. Read this.👆

Daily Devotional for Men