David Given Schwarm

I met Brother Lawrence for the first time today. he told me that God had been especially good to him in his conversion. He was eighteen at the time and still in the world. he told me that it had all happened one winter day, as he was looking at a barren tree. Although the tree’s leaves were indeed gone, he knew that they would soon reappear, followed by blossoms and then fruit. This gave him a profound impression of God’s providence and power, which never left him. Brother Lawrence still maintains that this impression detached him entirely from the world and gave him such a great love for God that it hasn’t changed in all of the forty years he has been walking with Him.

Brother Lawrence had formerly been a servant to the treasurer of the monastery and had been very clumsy. He believed that in order to be saved, he would have to be punished for this clumsiness. Thus, he sacrificed all of the pleasures in his life to God. However, rather than punishing him, God gave him nothing but wholehearted satisfaction. He would tell the Lord endearingly and often that he felt deceived, because his Christian walk had thus far been so pleasant and not filled with suffering as he had anticipated.