The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence

Week 2: The Four Conversations — Learning to Walk with God

Read all four Conversations in The Practice of the Presence of God.

In these four interviews, Joseph de Beaufort gives us our most direct window into Brother Lawrence's mind and method — his struggles, his discoveries, and his unflinching honesty about both his failures and his joys. Read them slowly, as though you were sitting across from the man yourself.

Discussion Questions

9 questions

1.In the First Conversation, Brother Lawrence describes his conversion at eighteen: seeing a bare winter tree and receiving 'a high view of the Providence and Power of God which has never since been effaced from his soul.' He could not tell whether his love for God had increased in the forty years since.

a.Have you had a moment — a scene, a sentence, a crisis — that gave you a new or deeper sense of God's reality? Describe it briefly.

b.Brother Lawrence says that vision 'set him loose from the world.' What does it mean, practically speaking, to be 'set loose from the world'? What would that look like in your daily life?

2.In the Second Conversation, Brother Lawrence describes four years of torment in which he feared he was damned, and no one could persuade him otherwise. His resolution was striking: 'Whatever becomes of me, whether I be lost or saved, I will always continue to act purely for the love of God.' After that, he lived in 'perfect liberty and continual joy.' What does this tell us about the relationship between love for God and anxiety about our own spiritual standing?

3.Brother Lawrence makes a sharp distinction in the Second Conversation between 'acts of the intellect' and 'acts of the will,' saying the first are 'comparatively of little value' while the second — loving and delighting in God — are 'all important.' He also said that 'all possible kinds of mortification, if they were void of the love of God, could not efface a single sin.' How does this challenge common assumptions about spiritual discipline and growth?

4.In the Second Conversation, Brother Lawrence describes being sent to Burgundy to buy wine — a task he hated and was physically ill-equipped for. He simply told God, 'It is His business he was about,' and found it 'very well performed.' He applied the same logic to fifteen years of kitchen work he found naturally repellent. How would it change the way you approach your least-favorite responsibilities if you genuinely offered them to God before beginning them?

5.In the Third Conversation, Brother Lawrence says he was 'more united to God in his outward employments than when he left them for devotion in retirement.' This seems to contradict the common idea that withdrawal and silence are the primary routes to God's presence. What do you make of this claim? Does it challenge or confirm your own experience?

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Closing Prayer

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Father, we confess that we have often mistaken the means for the end — filling our days with devotional activities while the actual love and awareness of You grows thin. Like Brother Lawrence in his four years of torment, we sometimes fear we are too far gone, too inconsistent, too ordinary for real communion with You. Remind us of the bare winter tree — that what looks dead is not dead, and that Your Providence and Power are at work in the seasons we cannot yet see. Teach us to offer You our wine-buying and our kitchen work, our least favorite hours and our most cluttered days. And in those moments when we fail and wander, give us the grace to confess simply and return — without drama, without long delay — to Your presence. Amen.

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