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Today's Devotional

“Important duties” which keep us from helping little people are not duties but sins. I shall be forty-six in two weeks. I no longer have the sense that life is all before me, as I had a few years ago. Some of it is behind—and a miserable poor past it is, so far below what I had dreamed that I dare not even think of it. Nor dare I think much of the future. This present, if it is full of God, is the only refuge I have from poisonous disappointment and even almost rebellion against God. Here is this book of Reinhold Niebuhr, a man who seems to pour out wonderful thought as easily as one pours coffee. Why could not the rest of the world, including of course myself, be gifted like he is? And so many of the people here, and everywhere seem to have more cramped lives and hopeless minds even than I have. I have been trying to teach a boy to read this afternoon, but his mind seems to be like pouring water into a mosquito net. He could not pronounce “i” without forgetting “a.” What a tragedy to live in the world he lives in. I felt a warm love for the boy, and he felt it. for his eyes were moist as he told me he had neither father nor mother. At times when one looks out upon life all one sees are wrecks, and in upon life, too—wrecks! Ah, God, what is all this wreckage for?

I sat leaning upon my typewriter for a long while after that sentence, for a voice began to talk to me. “The wreckage is the birth pangs of love.”…As I sit over in that old building day after day patiently toiling with one man or boy to teach him the alphabet, and so hold him to a larger world, I often wonder whether this work is becoming to a man of my age. But when that same man fondly runs his fingers through my hair and looks his love while he says “Mapia bapa”—good uncle—I know that a little love is created. If this entire universe is a desperate attempt of love to incarnate itself, then “important duties” which keep us from helping little people are not duties but sins—or am I all the while trying to justify my own failure?

Home from a wonderful hour with God in the sunset. Oh, those colors, those awful piles of clouds, those misty mysteries, those silent changes across the sky. If one could only forget oneself entirely and enjoy the universe—but some of us are too selfish to wipe ourselves out of the picture.…Here I was engaging in the most glorious action of all human and of all superhuman life—I was communing with the very God of the universe himself. He was showing me his very heart, even the angels can do no more than this…

About the author and the source

In 1930, Frank C. Laubach (1884–1970) was working with Muslims in the Philippine Islands. Deeply discouraged, he sought to live in the presence of God moment by moment. He wrote of his determination and subsequent experiences in letters to his father, arranged in diary form. Today’s devotional is from August 21, 1930. Laubach went on to pioneer a literacy method that was successfully used worldwide.