The Guy Who Broke Everything

“For man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.” — 1 Samuel 16:7 (KJV)

Some people are naturally graceful. They can carry three drinks across a crowded room and never spill a drop. Nicolas Herman was not one of those people.

He was born around 1614 in Lorraine, a region in what is now eastern France, to a poor family who loved God. As a young man he went off to be a soldier. In 1635 he was wounded in the leg, and he limped for the rest of his life. After the army he got a job as a footman, a servant to a rich treasurer named Monsieur Fieubert. A footman’s whole job was to fetch, carry and keep things looking smart.

It didn’t go well. Years later, when a visitor asked him about his life, he described his younger self in one unforgettable line:

“A great awkward fellow who broke everything.”

We know about Nicolas because that visitor, a priest named Joseph de Beaufort, wrote down their conversations. The first one took place on 3 August 1666. By then Nicolas was an old man with a different name: Brother Lawrence, a lay brother in a monastery in Paris. Beaufort had come because people said this limping, ordinary man lived closer to God than anyone they knew.

That is worth stopping on. Brother Lawrence never became a famous preacher or a scholar. He never wrote a long book. He spent his working life in a kitchen and a sandal workshop. And yet people have been reading his few conversations and letters for more than three hundred years, Catholics and Protestants alike. John Wesley read him. So have countless ordinary people who were trying to work out how to actually live with God on a normal Tuesday.

So if you sometimes feel clumsy, unimpressive, or like the person who always drops the ball, you are in good company. God was not waiting for Nicolas Herman to get more coordinated. He was after his heart.

This book is about what happened to that heart, and about a habit that Lawrence spent his whole life learning. He called it the practice of the presence of God. In plain words: remembering that God is with you, and talking to him, all day long, in the middle of whatever you are doing.

One thing to do this week: write down the three things you are worst at, the stuff that makes you feel clumsy or behind. Then pray over the list: tell God honestly how you feel about each one, and thank him that he looks at your heart, not your coordination.