The kitchen light was still on at 2 a.m.

Sandra — not her real name, changed here at her request — was sitting at the table she’d owned for twenty-two years, the one with the small nick in the corner where her son had bumped it with his bicycle helmet one summer morning that now felt impossibly far away. She wasn’t reading. She wasn’t praying. She wasn’t doing much of anything, really — just sitting with the particular exhaustion that doesn’t come from physical labor, but from the slow and invisible work of trying to hold a life together when the seams have quietly been coming undone.

She was forty-five years old. She had a job, a home, two grown children who called on weekends. She had, by every visible measure, a life that looked fine. And she felt completely lost.

“I remember thinking that night: if this is what I worked so hard for, why does it feel like nothing?” she recalled recently, sitting in the living room of her townhouse in a mid-sized city in the Southeast. “There was no crisis. Nobody had died. I hadn’t lost anything dramatic. I just felt like I’d woken up somewhere I didn’t recognize, inside a life that didn’t feel like mine.”

Stories like Sandra’s are increasingly common among women in their forties. Mental health researchers and clergy alike have noted a quiet epidemic of what some describe as “mid-life spiritual fatigue” — a condition distinct from clinical depression, though sometimes overlapping with it. It is the feeling of being simultaneously overwhelmed by obligations and starved for meaning. Of doing more and feeling less. Of praying, and hearing only silence in return.

Sandra had not always felt this way. She grew up in a faith-filled household in Georgia, the daughter of a woman who kept a Bible on the kitchen counter the same way other families kept cookbooks — worn, annotated, consulted daily. Church had been the rhythm of her childhood, a place of belonging as much as belief. She had carried that faith into adulthood, through a marriage that eventually ended, through raising two children largely on her own, through a series of jobs that paid the bills but rarely asked much of her spirit.

But somewhere in the long middle stretch of those years — somewhere between forty and forty-five — the faith that had always been a kind of background music in her life had become harder to hear. It wasn’t that she’d abandoned it. She still attended services most Sundays. She still prayed, in the fragments of time between tasks. She still believed, she thought, in the things she’d always believed. But belief had started to feel like a fact she held at arm’s length rather than a warmth she could actually feel.

“I was going through the motions,” she said. “I’d pray in the morning and feel nothing. I’d read a verse and it would just slide off me. I started wondering if something was wrong with me. Like maybe I’d used up my portion of faith somewhere and didn’t have any left.”

She had tried things, the way people do when they sense something is missing but can’t quite name what. She’d joined a women’s Bible study group that met on Tuesday evenings, which she attended faithfully for three months before quietly dropping out — not because she disliked the women, but because the conversation never seemed to reach the thing she was actually looking for. She’d downloaded meditation apps and used them for two weeks before forgetting they existed. She’d read several books on spiritual renewal, marking passages that moved her in the moment and then losing track of what they’d said by the following weekend.

“Nothing stuck,” she said simply. “I kept trying to patch a leak with things that dried out before they could seal.”

Meanwhile, the ordinary demands of her life continued without pause. There were work deadlines, and her mother’s health to monitor, and a persistent low-grade financial anxiety that she’d learned to keep in a room in her mind and only open sometimes. She slept poorly. She ate without much attention to what she was eating. She answered texts and returned calls and did the things that needed doing, and at the end of each day she fell into bed feeling somehow both drained and restless.

“I know it sounds like I’m describing burnout,” she said, “and maybe part of it was. But it felt deeper than that. It felt like something spiritual was missing, not just something logistical.”

The turning point — if one specific moment can be called that, though Sandra is careful to note that change rarely arrives in a single instant — came on an ordinary Sunday in late autumn.

She had attended the morning service at her church, a mid-sized congregation she’d been part of for a decade. The sermon had been good, she thought, though she couldn’t have summarized it afterward. She was standing in the foyer afterward, making the small talk that happens in church foyers — how are you, how’s your mother, how are the kids — when she found herself in conversation with an older woman named Dora, a retired schoolteacher who had been a quiet fixture of the congregation for as long as Sandra could remember.

Dora had a way of looking at people that made them feel accurately seen, which was not always entirely comfortable. She looked at Sandra that Sunday and said, in her straightforward way: “You seem tired. Not sleepy tired. The other kind.”

Sandra laughed, because the observation was so precise. “The other kind,” she repeated. “Yeah. That’s about right.”

Dora asked if she had a few minutes, and they sat in a quiet corner of the foyer while the congregation filed out around them. What followed was not a formal conversation about spirituality, or faith, or any of the topics Sandra might have expected. It was a conversation about structure — specifically, about the lack of it in Sandra’s spiritual life.

“She didn’t tell me I was doing anything wrong,” Sandra said. “She just asked me a question: ‘What does a structured day with God actually look like for you?’ And I realized I didn’t have an answer. I had fragments. Prayers said quickly in the car. Verses read when I thought of it. Nothing that actually had a shape to it.”

Dora, it turned out, had been working with a structured daily discipline for several years — a practice she’d encountered through a program built around the wisdom literature of the Hebrew scriptures, particularly the writings traditionally attributed to Solomon: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the wisdom psalms. She described it not as a religious program, exactly, but as a framework for daily reflection — a set of structured practices that, over time, had helped her develop what she called “a more anchored life.”

“She didn’t oversell it,” Sandra said. “She actually said to me: ‘It won’t fix anything immediately. It’s not designed to. It’s designed to build something, slowly.’ That’s what made me pay attention. Because everything else I’d tried had promised to fix something immediately, and none of it had.”

The framework Dora introduced Sandra to was built around a 21-day structure — a period drawn from the biblical tradition of consecrated time, referencing the three weeks of focused prayer and discipline described in the book of Daniel and echoed throughout the wisdom literature Sandra had grown up hearing but never deeply studied.

The emphasis on Solomon’s writings was deliberate. The wisdom literature of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes occupies a unique place in the biblical canon: it is less concerned with miraculous intervention than with the long, patient work of becoming a person of discernment. It asks not “how do I receive a blessing” but “how do I become someone who can recognize and steward one.” It is literature rooted in discipline, observation, and the slow accumulation of understanding — not revelation, but formation.

Sandra began the program on a Monday in early December, with some skepticism and moderate expectations. She had not been told to expect transformation, and she was grateful for that. She had been told to expect structure — and to see what structure, maintained consistently, might quietly produce.

Each day included a brief morning reading from the wisdom literature, a short written reflection (no more than a paragraph, she was told — the brevity was deliberate), a single practical intention for the day drawn from the reading, and an evening review lasting no more than five minutes. There was nothing elaborate about the practice. That was, she would later understand, part of the point.

Sandra’s experience, while personal and particular, reflects patterns that researchers studying habit formation and spiritual practice have documented more broadly. The psychology of routine — and its effects on wellbeing — has been a focus of significant academic attention in recent years, with findings that tend to confirm what practitioners of contemplative traditions have long maintained: that consistent, structured practice changes people, but it does so gradually and non-dramatically.

Psychologist and habit researcher Wendy Wood, whose work on the science of behavior change has influenced both clinical and organizational settings, has written extensively on the distinction between motivation and routine. Motivation, she argues, is an unreliable engine — it peaks, it wanes, it is subject to mood and circumstance in ways that make it a poor foundation for lasting change. Routine, by contrast, operates below the level of conscious motivation. It becomes embedded in the structure of a day rather than dependent on the energy any given day provides.

This distinction is particularly relevant to spiritual practice, which by its nature asks something of practitioners on days when they may feel least inclined to offer it. The wisdom literature itself acknowledges this openly: Proverbs does not appeal to feeling, but to the accumulated wisdom of committed practice. “Bind them on your heart always,” it instructs. Not when you feel like it. Always.

Therapists who work at the intersection of faith and mental health have noted a similar pattern in their clients. The problem, many report, is not a lack of belief, but a lack of structure to give that belief a daily form. People often have genuine faith and genuine intention, and yet no framework robust enough to carry that faith through the ordinary texture of an ordinary week. The 21-day format is not arbitrary in this context — behavioral research consistently shows that it takes a minimum of several weeks for a new routine to begin feeling automatic rather than effortful, though the exact timeline varies considerably between individuals and practices.

What makes the Solomon-inspired framework distinctive, those familiar with it suggest, is its emphasis on formation over information. It does not primarily seek to tell practitioners new things about scripture, but to use scripture as a tool for attending differently — to themselves, to their circumstances, to the quiet patterns in their own lives that are easy to miss when the days are moving quickly.

Sandra has now completed the 21-day program twice. She is not, she says, a changed person in any dramatic sense. She is still the same woman who sat at that kitchen table at 2 a.m., struggling with the same large questions. But she has a different relationship to those questions now — less panicked, more patient. The silence she used to find frightening in prayer has become something she moves into with more willingness. The fragments of faith that once felt like inadequate patches have begun to feel more like something that might, over time, cohere.

“I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the way I was living,” she said. “Not because I had some miraculous experience. But because I know now what it feels like to have a structure, and I don’t want to live without one.”

She paused and looked out the window at the unremarkable afternoon outside: a parking lot, bare trees, the gray sky of a southern winter. “I think that’s actually what I was looking for, all those years. Not a miracle. Just a shape. Something to pour myself into every day that wouldn’t just run straight through.”