The Way That Is Hard

“Good understanding wins favor, but the way of the unfaithful is hard.” — Proverbs 13:15 (WEB)

Before George Müller was a man anyone admired, he was a liar and a thief, and he wants you to know it. He doesn’t clean up his own past in this book. He lays it out.

His father, an official in Prussia, gave his boys plenty of money and few limits. That was the whole problem. Before he was ten, George was already stealing from his father — including government money his father was responsible for. His father grew suspicious, so one day he counted out a sum, left it in the room, and walked out. George took some and hid it under his foot inside his shoe. When his father returned and counted, the money was short. He searched his son, and there it was.

That should have been a wake-up. It wasn’t. The stealing became lying, the lying became a way of life. The night his mother lay dying, fourteen-year-old George was out playing cards until two in the morning, and the next day wandered the streets half-drunk with his friends. He was confirmed in church, took communion, swore to God he’d change — and forgot it within days, every time.

At sixteen it caught up with him. He’d been living in expensive hotels on money he didn’t have, running out before the bill came, leaving his best clothes as security. In one town he slipped quietly out of the inn yard and ran — and was seen, chased, arrested, and locked in a cell with thieves and murderers. He sat in that prison from December 18 until January 12, until his father sent money to cover his debts. And here’s the detail that tells you how far gone he was: two hours after walking free, still on his way home to a furious father, he deliberately picked a known troublemaker as his travelling companion. He hadn’t learned a thing.

He was, by every outward measure, doing fine — top of his class, admired by his teachers, bound for university. Inside, he was empty. He owned about three hundred books and not one Bible. He knew, in the honest moments, that a life like his ends badly. He just couldn’t stop, and pretending to reform only made him better at pretending.

You probably don’t steal from your parents or wake up in jail cells. But you may know the quieter version: the gap between who people think you are and what you actually do when no one’s watching. The reputation that runs ahead of you while the real you falls behind. Müller’s life says two uncomfortable things and one hopeful one. First, you can be respected and rotten at the same time. Second, good intentions — the oaths, the “Monday I’ll change” — are worth exactly nothing on their own; George made them constantly. And third, the hopeful one: this same person, this thief, is the one God was about to completely turn around. Your track record is not the final word on you.

One thing to do this week: stop performing for a minute and tell one true thing about yourself to God — the actual thing you do when no one’s looking, named plainly, no excuses. Müller’s whole change started when he quit dressing up his own reflection. You can’t be met where you’re pretending to be. Only where you actually are.