Too Many Methods

“Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful.” — Luke 10:41–42 (KJV)

When Brother Lawrence started out, he did what keen people often do. He read everything. Books on prayer, books on the spiritual life, books with steps and stages and systems. Then he got confused. Years later a friend begged him to explain how he had come to live so close to God, and he finally agreed to write it down, on condition that the friend show the letter to nobody. (Happily for us, it did not stay secret.) Here is how the letter begins:

“Having found in many books different methods of going to God, and divers practices of the spiritual life, I thought this would serve rather to puzzle me than facilitate what I sought after, which was nothing but how to become wholly God’s.”

You may know that feeling. There are endless plans, apps, journals, challenges and techniques for growing as a Christian. Some of them are really helpful. But it is possible to spend so much energy comparing methods that you never actually get round to God.

So Lawrence cut through it. He says it made him “resolve to give the all for the all.” He gave himself completely to God, let go of everything that was not God, and then did something beautifully simple:

“I began to live as if there was none but He and I in the world.”

That doesn’t mean he ignored other people. He was kind and calm and helpful to everyone in the house. It means that in his own heart, God was the one he was always facing. Sometimes he pictured himself as a guilty prisoner before a judge; other times as a son with his Father. Either way, he kept turning towards God, “recalling it,” he says of his mind, “as often as I found it wandered from Him.”

Was it easy? No. He says he “found no small pain in this exercise,” and kept going anyway, without beating himself up when his mind drifted. He did it at set prayer times and all day long, “every hour, every minute, even in the height of my business.” Over time, he says, these repeated acts “become habitual, and the presence of God rendered as it were natural to us.”

Jesus once told a busy, stressed friend named Martha that she was worried about many things, but only one thing was needed. Lawrence would agree. Methods can help. But the one thing is God himself.

One thing to do this week: pick one simple prayer you can say anywhere, like “Lord, I’m here with you,” and use it every time you notice you have been away from God in your thoughts. Keep it that simple all week.