txt First: One Prayer. Five Minutes. Everything Changes.

You are performing well yet living poorly.

You are tired in ways that sleep does not fix. You give everything you have and still reach the end of your best days missing something you cannot name. Not from your calendar. From you.

The harder you drive, the less solid it all feels. The shaking is not the market. It is the foundation you have been standing on.

Your faith is real. Somewhere between Sunday morning and Monday's first meeting, it stopped changing how you lead.

Joe Petersen led that way for thirty years, climbing to the top of American real estate, until stage-four cancer took everything his striving was built on. What was left was one thing he could still give God: the first minute of the morning.

He gave it. That is the Sacred Start Prayer, five movements prayed in five minutes, before you are fully awake. It is printed inside this book, and you can pray it tomorrow.

The prayer's shape is not new. It rises out of the prayer Jesus gave His disciples and the pattern the church built on it for centuries, carried to us through an English bishop named Thomas Ken, whose 1674 morning prayer ended with four lines you already know. You have sung them a hundred times. They became the Doxology.

It also answers the loneliest part of leading. You can be surrounded by people all day and still carry the weight of every real decision by yourself. The first minutes of your day were never yours to carry alone. This prayer is where you finally see it.

FIRST follows that first moment outward, into the day it reorders and the people who will carry your words after you are gone. Twelve chapters, three sections: Start, the morning foundation and where the prayer comes from; Live, what surrender looks like under real pressure; Love, how a surrendered life overflows into the people you lead.

For thirteen years, one day a month, Joe has sat in a closed room with a dozen chief executives who agreed to tell each other the truth. He started with no degree and no capital, and thirty years later the National Association of Home Builders named him America's Multifamily Builder of the Year. He does not teach surrender from a safe distance. He works at it every morning, and some mornings he loses, the same as you.

You have been giving God your leftover moments. He has been waiting for your first one. Begin tomorrow. Before your feet touch the floor.