Nine of us ate at my table every Sunday and nobody said a real word. Then my granddaughter put a green box next to the gravy.
I'm seventy-two, and for four years Sunday dinner at my house was forks, phones and the weather. Six weeks after that green box came out, my son read a card out loud and didn't pass. Nobody at that table was ready for what he said next.
I'm seventy-two, and I've cooked Sunday dinner for my family for forty-one years. My husband Harold said grace at the head of that table every week until he passed, four years ago this March. After that, nobody said much of anything.
They still came, every week. My son Mark and his wife Denise, my daughter Lisa and her husband Tom, and four grandchildren between ten and seventeen. Nine of us around the big oak table Harold built, with pot roast, green beans and rolls from the church bake sale.
But you could have set a clock by the conversation. The weather. The Buckeyes. Whose car was making that noise again. Then the plates went in the sink, the phones came out, and by half past six the driveway was empty.
Grace had turned into a mumble, and some weeks into me saying it alone while everyone waited politely with their forks. Mark hadn't been inside a church since his father's funeral. I tried to bring it up once, over coffee, and he found a reason to leave early. I didn't try again.
I'd stand at the sink after they'd gone with a dish towel in my hands and think: I have every one of them in one room, every single week, and I have no idea what's going on inside any of them.
I prayed about it. I'll be honest, some Sundays I prayed about it with a little bit of an edge.
The answer turned up in a box of cards, and my granddaughter was the one who opened it.
What Ruth told me in the church parking lot
Ruth and I have sat in the same pew for twenty years. After Wednesday service she caught me in the parking lot, and she had the look she gets when she's about to tell you something she's already sure of.
Their women's supper night had played a card game after dinner. They only got through three questions before somebody had to lock up the fellowship hall. "Joan, three questions," she said. "Carol cried, Betty laughed so hard she had to sit down, and I found out things about women I've known since 1985."
I asked what kind of game makes grown women cry at a supper night. She pulled it up on her phone. Not Just Sundays. A box of question cards for families, friends and small groups that starts light and goes deeper as you play.
My first thought was that my family would roll their eyes. Mark especially.
Ruth said the first questions are just fun, the kind anybody can answer, and you can pass on any card you like. "You start talking," she said, "and it takes you where it takes you."
It was $34. I ordered it that night on my iPad, with Ruth's text still open in the other window.
It came on a Tuesday. A dark green box with gold letters on the lid, and when I lifted it, printed on the inside: "What if one question changed everything?" I sat at the kitchen table with my reading glasses on and read about twenty of the cards while my coffee went cold.
The first Sunday, I lost my nerve and hid it in the buffet
I had a whole plan. After the pie, I'd bring it out, casual as anything. Then Sunday came, Mark walked in looking worn out, and I put the box in the buffet drawer with the good napkins.
Emma found it. She's seventeen, and she'd been sent for napkins. She came back holding it up like she'd caught me with contraband. "Grandma. What is this?"
Every head at the table turned. I said a friend from church had told me about it and maybe we'd try it some time. Emma already had the lid off.
The cards come in three levels. The first is called Open, and it's all easy questions, the kind that get a room laughing inside five minutes. Emma drew one and read it out: "If I were a playlist, what would the title be?"
Tom said his would be "Songs to Fix a Carburetor To." Caleb said his would be "Mostly Hymns Grandma Hums." I didn't know he'd ever noticed that I hum. Noah laughed so hard he had to put his milk down.
The box says fourteen and up. Lily is twelve and Noah is ten, so they stuck to the easy first-level cards, Emma read Noah his, and he answered every one like he was on a game show.
Nobody touched a phone. I only noticed that afterward. We went around twice, then a third time, and it was past seven when Lisa looked up at the clock and said, "Mom, we never stay this late."
They carried their plates to the sink, and then they came back and sat down again.
Why my son was asking for the cards by the third Sunday
By the third Sunday, Mark was the one asking "Are we doing the cards?" before the dishes were cleared. It had taken three weeks. I wanted to understand why, so I read the little guide that comes in the box and asked Ruth a great many questions.
Why nobody at the table feels singled out
The one time I asked Mark to come to church with me, he heard his mother checking up on him, and he changed the subject.
With the cards, everyone draws and everyone answers, the grown-ups and the kids alike. Nobody is picked out, so nobody has to defend themselves, and a hard question feels a lot less like an ambush when you just watched your brother-in-law answer one about his playlist.
Why the easy questions come first
The three levels are the whole trick. Open is laughter and easy stories. Uncover asks the kind of thing you can't answer on autopilot, so you stop, you think, and everybody actually listens. Reveal is where people say what's really true for them.
Ruth put it this way: "By the time you get to the deep ones, you've been laughing together for an hour. It doesn't feel like a leap anymore."
Then there are the Wildcards, shuffled through every level. They stop the game so you do something together: encourage the person next to you, write somebody a note, sit quietly for a moment, or pray. The first time we pulled one that said to pray, Noah volunteered. He prayed for the dog.
What's actually in the box
Here's what you get when you lift that green lid:
150 question cards across three levels: Open to warm up, Uncover to go deeper, and Reveal for the honest ones. They move from laughter to reflection, trust and testimony
15 Wildcards, mixed through every level, for spontaneous prayer, encouragement and gratitude. The last one opens the door to Jesus, whenever someone at the table is ready for it
A game guide with simple setup instructions, tips for good conversation and ideas for playing as a group
It's made for ages fourteen and up and plays best with two to eight people, though there's no hard limit. We play with nine. Anyone can pass on any card, which mattered more to Mark than he would ever admit. And it's written for every stage of faith, which in my family runs from Lisa, who teaches Sunday school, to a son who hadn't prayed out loud in four years.
The Sunday Mark drew a card from the third level
We were about six weeks in. An ordinary Sunday: meatloaf, rain on the windows, Noah under the table with the dog. We'd worked our way through Open and Uncover, and that night, for the first time, we'd moved on to the Reveal cards.
Mark drew one and read it to himself first. I watched his jaw do the thing his father's used to do.
Then he read it out loud. "If God sent you one text right now, what do you hope it says?"
He could have passed. Anybody can pass. He sat there for what felt like a whole minute, and nobody filled the silence. Not even Noah.
"I hope it says He's not mad at me," Mark said. "For how I've been since Dad."
Then he told us things I never knew. That he'd driven to church the Sunday after the funeral and sat in his truck in the parking lot and couldn't make himself go in. That he'd done it more than once. That he'd been angry at God for four years and found it easier to stay away than to say so.
Denise had hold of his hand. Lisa was crying. Emma got up and hugged her uncle from behind, which she hasn't done since she was about ten.
I reached over, put my hand on his arm, and said, "Your father wouldn't be mad at you, honey. And neither am I."
We didn't finish the game that night. We didn't need to.
The next Sunday, Mark was in the pew beside me at ten o'clock, and he's come most Sundays since.
The eight Sundays I checked off on the kitchen calendar
I started putting a little green check on the kitchen calendar every Sunday we played. Harold used to say I'd keep score at a potluck. He wasn't wrong.
Weeks one and two were all laughing. Playlists, embarrassing stories, first jobs. The grandkids heard things about their grandfather they'd never known, because every other answer from the grown-ups seemed to have Harold in it somewhere.
By week three there was a basket on the counter by the back door. Nobody made a rule. Caleb dropped his phone in it on the way in, and the rest followed him.
Weeks four and five we lived in the second level. Lisa and Tom talked about the year they nearly lost the house, which the kids had never heard about. Emma turned a question back on her mother, and I think it had been waiting a long time.
Week six was Mark's card.
Weeks seven and eight, the grandchildren started putting the box on the table themselves, before the rolls were out. Lily, who's twelve and hardly speaks at dinner, drew a Wildcard that asked us to encourage someone at the table. She picked me. I won't tell you what she said. I wrote it on the back of a church bulletin and it's tucked in my Bible now.
By the end of those eight weeks we'd been through the whole deck, and we started again. The questions land differently the second time, because the people answering them have changed.
Why nobody had asked my son the one question he needed
And here's the part I keep coming back to.
I gave my children space for four years, the way everybody tells you to once they're grown.
Most people are waiting for somebody to ask. My son was carrying his father's death by himself in a truck in a church parking lot. He'd have told me years ago if someone had asked him the right question in a room that felt safe. Nobody did. I didn't know how.
People my age were raised to keep the private things away from the table. Faith, grief, money, whatever you were scared of. We said grace and passed the potatoes. My children learned that from us, and their children learned it from them.
The cards give everybody at the table permission. When it's the card doing the asking, a seventeen-year-old can ask her mother something hard, and a grown man can say out loud that he's been angry at God.
Emma told me on the porch swing a few weeks later that her friends' families don't talk like this. "We didn't either, Grandma," she said. "Until the box."
I'm seventy-two. I don't know how many Sundays I have left at that table. I want to spend them knowing my people, and feeding them too.
Why I'd put it on your table this Sunday
This was the line from Ruth that stuck with me:
"You've got all of them in one room every week, Joan. Most people would give anything for that. Don't spend another Sunday on the weather."
I'll say it plainly, for anybody reading this with a quiet table of their own.
Families don't stay at one table forever. Emma leaves for college next fall. Caleb already works Saturdays and has a summer job at camp lined up. Grandchildren grow up faster than you'd believe, and there are only so many years when they'll all sit down at their grandmother's for Sunday dinner.
It doesn't have to be dinner, either, or nine people. The cards work one-on-one. I've played them with Emma on the porch, and Ruth takes a few along when she visits her sister at the care home.
None of it is complicated. You open the box, somebody reads the first card, and you go around the table. The first questions are easy on purpose. Nobody needs to know their Bible, and nobody gets put on the spot. If a card is too much, you pass, and the next person draws.
What I wish I'd understood four years ago is that a quiet table doesn't fix itself. Somebody has to put the first question on the table.
I've bought three more boxes since. One for Ruth's supper night, because theirs is falling apart from use. One for Mark and Denise to keep at their house. And one for my sister in Tulsa, who called me two Sundays later and said, "Joan, what have you done to me? We were up until eleven."
Believe me, I wish I'd done this the first Sunday after Harold's funeral. I have this Sunday, and the one after it, and I intend to use them.
Where to get it, and what it costs
You order it from the Not Just Sundays website. That's where I got mine, and it's where I send everyone who asks me about it, which by now is most of my Bible study.
It's $34 for the box, and every order comes with 30 days of the PrayLight prayer app, free. No minimum, no bundle to buy. I had no idea what a prayer app was. Emma set it up on my phone, and I use it most mornings with my coffee, which Harold would find very funny.
It comes with a 100% money-back guarantee and 30-day hassle-free returns, which made it an easy yes for me.
One more thing that mattered to me: they give 10% of their profit to churches and missionary work around the world.
My advice? Order one for your own table. And if you know someone else with a quiet table, order two.
Get your family talking past the small talk
150 question cards across three levels, plus 15 Wildcards for prayer, encouragement and gratitude. Ages 14 and up, 2 to 8 players.
GET THE DECK →What other families are saying
Real reviews from people who have played Not Just Sundays
I played with my two nieces ages 16, 11, my son 24 and self 51. This was sooo much more than a game! We laughed, cried and just connected on so many different things!
Yes we played Friday night! I ordered 4 and gave the other 3 away as gifts. Eight of us couples played together that night. EVERYONE LOVED this game. We laughed, and yes there were tears.
I played the game with my Lifegroup of 9th grade girls. I'm their leader. The Lord used this game so beautifully. Some laughter, some excitement, and absolutely some tears as we moved through the levels.
Nine places, one green box, this Sunday
For four years I set nine places every Sunday and hoped somebody would say something real.
Then came that rainy Sunday when Mark read a card out loud and didn't pass.
A box of good questions gave everyone at that table a safe way in, and then it got out of the way.
For a while I'd quietly decided this was simply how families get as everyone gets older. I'd stopped expecting anything from Sunday but clean plates.
Now the grandkids set the box out before the rolls, Mark says grace some weeks, and it's past eight before the driveway empties. It's the same oak table Harold built, and it's loud again.
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