O.K., I’ll admit it. I am the last person on earth to get around to reading The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. Actually, it’s only a few dozen pages, but I am slowly working my way through this classic.
It’s written in an older style of English for one thing. Not exactly Shakespeare, but I have to read a single sentence several times in order to get what I think it means.
But mostly it’s a rich text. And no, I don’t mean “rich text” in the HTML sense. I mean it’s deep. Simple, but very, very profound.
Much like Brother Lawrence himself. This guy had no real claim to fame. He would be voted “least like to have inspired a Christian book that has sold millions of copies.”
In the monastery where he served, he was the guy who worked in the kitchen. That’s it. Every once in awhile he got sent out on some purchasing mission which, to hear how it stressed him, you would think it was a trans-Atlantic crossing.
But he trusted God for everything. In everything. Through everything.
But it was never a big deal. For him it was natural.
He could pray a formal prayer, but when it done, then he would simply go back into the normal, ongoing discourse he had going with God. And the latter type of communication with God was for him, the better and more effective of the two.
He could so some act of service, but when it was done, he would go back to the mundane activity of his work, but do it as onto God. And for him, the latter type of effort was, he felt, the higher of the two.
Kinda the opposite of how we normally see things.
I think the style of the book is actually its best asset. You have to mine to get the nuggets of gold it contains. And I’m only mere pages into it, just finishing the “Conversations” section.
If you’ve missed out, get a copy. It’s certainly not an expensive book, but its worth on a “per-page” basis is way up there.
Christianity 201 