The Practice of the Presence of God — What If You've Been Looking for God in the Wrong Moments?
You're standing at the sink, water running, staring at nothing. There's a sermon on your phone somewhere. There's a Bible on the nightstand. And yet — nothing. Just dishes, and the dull ache of feeling very far from God.
It's a strange kind of loneliness, this one. You don't stop believing. You just stop feeling anything when you try. Prayer becomes a list. Quiet time becomes a task you check off. And somewhere in the back of your mind, a quiet question settles: Is this it? Is this what closeness with God is supposed to feel like? Romans 8 says the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words — and maybe that's exactly what this hollow ache is. Not absence. Just a groan you don't have words for yet.
He was a soldier before he was a monk. A man who had seen enough of the world to know it didn't satisfy — and who entered the monastery in 17th-century Paris carrying a deep fear that God had no use for someone as unworthy as himself.
He was assigned to the kitchen. Not the chapel. Not the scriptorium. The kitchen — pots, fire, the endless clatter of daily work. And for a long time, he hated it. He wanted to pray. He wanted the high holy moments of contemplation he imagined the other brothers were having. Instead, he had onions.
But something began to shift — so quietly he almost missed it. He started talking to God while he worked. Not formal prayers. Just conversation. A whispered acknowledgment. Here I am. I know You're here. Over years, something remarkable happened: the kitchen became the holiest place he knew. Not because it changed. Because he stopped waiting for a different moment to be with God.
He never wrote a book. He wrote letters. He talked with a friend who took notes. And those fragments — gathered after his death — became something people have passed between each other for three hundred years.
The insight at the center of his life was almost offensively simple.
"The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen… I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees."
Not that prayer isn't important. Not that church doesn't matter. Just that the ordinary moments of your day — the commute, the lunch you're making, the email you're avoiding — are not outside God's presence. They have never been. The question is whether you've learned to notice. What would it feel like to treat the next hour of your ordinary life as a place where God is already waiting?
I came to this book expecting a historical curiosity. What I found was something more like a mirror — and I wasn't entirely sure I liked what I saw in it. The distance I'd been blaming on circumstance turned out to be something I'd been choosing.
Inside the book
How it's structured
It's not really a book, if we're being honest. It's a collection of conversations someone else recorded, and letters Brother Lawrence never thought would be published. Four conversations, fifteen letters — short enough to read in an afternoon, strange enough to stay with you for years.
The thing it keeps coming back to
God isn't waiting for you in your quiet time. He's already in the room where you're doing the dishes. The gap between "spiritual life" and regular life — Brother Lawrence thought that gap was the problem, not the solution. He felt unworthy his whole life, and that didn't stop him. If anything, it was almost the point. His version of prayer was less formal address, more constant low-level conversation: You're here. I know You're here.
Where he's drawing from
Mostly his own life — thirty-some years in a monastery kitchen, which he initially hated. Scripturally, he lives in the Psalms, in John, in Paul's letter to the Philippians. He probably didn't know he was influencing anyone. But you can feel him in Tozer, in Thomas Kelly, in anyone who ever said that holiness happens in the ordinary moments.
Who tends to find this at the right time
Usually someone whose quiet time has started to feel like a chore they're behind on. Or anyone who suspects the spiritual and the everyday shouldn't feel like two different lives — but can't quite figure out how to close that gap. It's for the reader who doesn't need more theory. Just something quiet, and true, and close.
If you find yourself there — in the kitchen, in the ordinary, wondering why God feels absent — I'd gently set something in front of you.
The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence.
If you'd like to read it: The Practice of the Presence of God — Brother Lawrence (Affiliate Link)
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