Practicing the Presence of God: What Gerhard Tersteegen Taught in 605 Letters

By Jarred Fenlason · Encounter Press · 11-minute read

A Question People Still Ask

How do you stay aware of God in a crowded, ordinary life? Not on retreat, not in the quiet hour you keep meaning to find, but at the sink, at the desk, in traffic, on the night you cannot sleep.

For most readers, the first name that comes up is Brother Lawrence. Born Nicolas Herman in Lorraine around 1614, he was a former soldier who became a lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in Paris and spent much of his life working in its kitchen. He learned to keep company with God among the pots and pans, and said he was as near to God in the clatter of the kitchen as on his knees before the altar. After his death in 1691, Joseph de Beaufort gathered his conversations and letters into two small books, known in English as The Practice of the Presence of God. Three centuries later, people are still searching for that practice, because the hunger behind it has not gone anywhere.

What almost none of them know is that a generation later, in a small town on the Ruhr, a Protestant did the same thing, for the same kind of people, at far greater length.

The Weaver Who Answered It for Fifty Years

Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1769) was a ribbon-weaver in Mülheim, Reformed by confession, never ordained and never married. He lived plainly in rented rooms, worked at his loom, and refused to found a sect or take an office. Yet for nearly fifty years, from the 1720s until his death in 1769, people would not leave him alone. Merchants and servants, widows and young preachers, a countess and the dying came to him and wrote to him, and he answered them. Six hundred and five of those letters were printed soon after his death, and they are now in English for the first time, free to read at gerhardtersteegen.com.

You may already know his voice without knowing his name. John Wesley translated two of his hymns, "Thou Hidden Love of God" and "Lo! God is here! let us adore," and the second, Gott ist gegenwärtig, is still sung in Lutheran, Reformed, Presbyterian, and Baptist hymnals. (His life is told in full in Who Was Gerhard Tersteegen?)

His correspondents brought him the troubles people still bring: prayer gone dry, a life too busy to hear God in, a conscience that would not stop accusing. And to almost all of them he gave one counsel, in a hundred forms. God is here. Here is what that counsel sounds like in his own words. The quotations below follow the letter texts on gerhardtersteegen.com, and each names the letter it comes from and, where it has one, the reading of God Is Here that draws on it.

God Is Already Here

Tersteegen's starting point is not a technique but a fact. The presence of God is not something you produce by concentration. It is already true, before you notice it and whether or not you feel it.

He is near us — not only according to His general presence, in which He is near even to all irrational creatures: but in the lovely name Jesus-Immanuel this most blessed Good is nearer to our spirit than we are to ourselves; and that as a loving Friend — to save us, to cleanse us, to dwell in us as in His kingdom…

Letter to Anna Maria Kohl, 15 June 1740 (also in God Is Here, Reading 1)

That changes the whole task. If God were far off, the spiritual life would be a long climb toward Him. Because He is near, it becomes a matter of turning toward someone who is already there. Tersteegen put it in a line his readers never forgot:

Often we think a thing far off, and we only make it far off through our gross and self-ish part; therefore I say sometimes: one must not seek God, but only find Him. Ah, were we but childlike enough!

Letter to a sister, undated (also in God Is Here, Reading 1)

Prayer Is No Art

Many people give up on the practice of the presence of God because they assume it requires a skill they do not have. Tersteegen's answer was that it requires no skill at all.

No art in the whole world is simpler and easier than to pray rightly — nay, it is no art at all; and when we think we cannot pray, that is a sign that we do not yet rightly understand what prayer is. To pray is to look upon the ever-present God, and to let oneself be looked upon by Him.

Letter to Else Otterbeck, 4 December 1731 (also in God Is Here, Reading 2)

Look, and be looked at. That is the whole practice in seven words, and the second half matters as much as the first. You are not only attending to God; you are letting Him attend to you. Which means that a bad day for prayer is not a failure of the practice. It is simply something more for Him to see. If you are distracted, dark, and unfeeling, tell Him so, and let Him see it. To a sister who said she could not pray at all, he wrote:

You say that you cannot pray. Is there then no O, no Ah in your heart? And supposing you could not find even this so, then just tell Jesus simply that you cannot pray — and already you are praying.

Letter to a sister, Mülheim, 15 November 1737 (also in God Is Here, Reading 2)

At Your Work

This is where Tersteegen and Brother Lawrence stand closest together. Both refused to divide life into holy hours and ordinary ones. But Tersteegen was writing to people with shops, households, and children, and his counsel is full of their work.

It is not the work that brings the harm, so long as only the work is in the hand and in the outward man, but your heart stays within, with God: but when the work presses in through too strong a pleasantness, and the heart goes out with too much devotion and life onto the work, then it all gets confused. Commend yourself to the Lord when you go to your work…

Christmas letter to a sister, undated (also in God Is Here, Reading 11)

To a woman with a husband, a child, and a household to run, he drew a double picture of her life: inwardly His friend, outwardly His handmaid.

As His friend you must love Him heartily, keep more with Him, trust Him all things childlike, reveal to Him all your secrets… As His handmaid you must stand resigned to His nod, obey Him with willingness, and all that you do (as: to tend your household, to wait upon your child, to serve your husband or others, and all else that falls to be done) seek to perform out of free love to Jesus, and count no thing mean or hindering that you can perform to Jesus’ love and honor.

Letter to a sister, undated (also in God Is Here, Reading 11)

And to a merchant who was thinking of giving up his business, he wrote, "for He is present also in your counting-corner, and will gladly keep you company and lend you help there" (letter to a brother, Mülheim, 16 December 1735; also in God Is Here, Reading 11). Then, as he so often did, he made the counsel small enough to carry:

Remind yourself often in the day of the dear, present God, and His remembrance will keep you, so that, even when you must work much with your hands, you will yet not, in your heart, become busy or drawn out.

Letter to Anna Maria Reinertz, 6 February 1734

He spoke from experience. He had worked at a loom for years, and in 1745 he told a Swedish friend that he had "many times felt profit, inward approbation and the divine presence under work." When he was tempted to be diligent only to earn his living, he heard a quiet correction: "Work for Me, and not for your living" (letter to Lars Segerholm, 1 April 1745; also in God Is Here, Reading 11).

The Little Chamber

Tersteegen's best-known image for the practice comes from a letter written in 1736 to someone he addressed simply as "Dear child." It is the picture of a room inside you, where Someone is waiting.

Let it be to you as if, in your inward, there were a secret little chamber, where your dearest Friend Jesus were present and waiting for you; there Love must now well constrain you, that you sometimes buy out a little time, and where possible for outward solitude too, so that you may once go in to your Friend, into the little chamber, to speak with Him eye to eye, and to tell Him how it still goes with you, and that you would gladly love Him sincerely. Do you then go back again to your affairs — so let it be to you as if you took your Friend by the hand and asked Him: might He go with you, and keep you company under the work, and guard you — which He will then very gladly do.

Letter to a spiritual child, 29 February 1736 (also in God Is Here, Reading 5)

Notice how little he asks: "sometimes," "a little time." The chamber is not a place you move into and never leave. It is a place you step into for a minute and come out of holding someone's hand.

Abide in the Present

One of the quiet obstacles to living in God's presence is the belief that it will be possible later: when the children are older, when work slows down, when this season ends. Tersteegen named that belief plainly as a deception, and gave the alternative in the same breath:

What one cannot alter or escape, then, one must take confidently from His Father’s hand and direction; do all and suffer all to Him alone, as well and as quietly as one can; commit and entrust oneself and one’s affairs to Him in childlike wise; and amid all unrest and multiplicity keep short, abiding in the present, and practice and preserve as best one may the heart’s recollection and devotion. For this is a deceit which the enemy slips in, when one thinks that one cannot rightly serve God according to one’s inward call until one were out of these or those present circumstances…

Letter to Carl Friedrich Schott, 30 August 1746 (also in God Is Here, Reading 12)

And he taught people to notice the small inward nudges toward God that come in the middle of the day, and to follow them at once:

When something unexpectedly announces itself amid the work and among people, that reminds you to be still — even though it be quite hidden and without unction — then follow, in childlike simplicity, at that very moment, when circumstances allow; or let the work drop for a moment; you will experience the benefit of it — it is the moment of God.

Letter to Eva von Eiken, 17 August 1728 (also in God Is Here, Reading 12)

When the Sweetness Goes

Here Tersteegen offers something readers of Brother Lawrence rarely find: sustained counsel for the long dry years. He had lived through them himself. As a young man he went through five years in which God seemed to have withdrawn entirely, and so when he writes to people in the dark, he is not guessing.

…for God is Love, and God remains unchanged, eternally Love; whether we feel and sense it or not, He still remains the very same.

Letter to a friend and sister, undated (also in God Is Here, Reading 16)

And to another correspondent, in 1738:

God is as near when it is night as when it is day: believe Him, then, just as near, just as favorable, just as lovely, when you feel nothing of it, as when you have feelings.

Letter to an awakened person, Mülheim, 11 November 1738 (also in God Is Here, Reading 16)

He did not treat dryness as proof that something had gone wrong. He told one correspondent that "you are living not in blossoming May, but in winter. Let it not seem strange to you!" (letter to a brother, undated; also in God Is Here, Reading 16). The felt sweetness of God's nearness is a gift; the nearness itself is a fact, and it does not leave when the feeling does.

Brother Lawrence and Tersteegen: Two Men, One Practice

Calling Tersteegen "the Protestant Brother Lawrence" is our description, not his, and it describes a parallel, not a lineage. Tersteegen read and translated French Catholic writers, among them Jean de Bernières and Madame Guyon, but there is no evidence that he read Brother Lawrence. The two men arrived at the same practice by different roads.

The difference that matters most to a modern reader is the audience. Brother Lawrence's counsel comes to us from inside a monastery. Tersteegen's comes from a man who never left ordinary life, writing to people who could not leave it either. If you have ever read Brother Lawrence and thought, "That is beautiful, but he did not have my life," Tersteegen wrote to people who had yours.

Where to Begin

I came to Tersteegen the way most English readers have, by accident: a slim book, Emily Chisholm's The Quiet Way, found while I was looking for people who wrote from God and not only about Him. One reading told me I had found a witness; the third told me I had found a guide. Years of translation followed. If you want to start where I would start a friend, here are four doors.

• God Is Here: Forty Readings from the Letters of Gerhard Tersteegen. Forty short readings, each the length of a cup of coffee, gathering what he said on one subject across his letters. Every sentence of counsel is his. Kindle $7.99, paperback $12.99, hardcover $19.99. The readings in God Is Here are lightly adapted from these letters for devotional reading; the quotations above follow the letter texts on gerhardtersteegen.com.
• The letters themselves, free. All 605 are at gerhardtersteegen.com, with a guided selection on living in God's presence.
• The Nearness. The same practice in my own voice: fourteen letters from a father to his daughter on God's company in an ordinary, distracted life.
• Hidden in God. Tersteegen's life, treatises, sermons, and hymns in one modernized volume.

If his whole counsel had to fit on a card, it would be four short sentences: Turn inward. Become like a child. Tell Him everything. When it is dark and dry, go on believing. That is how the preface to God Is Here sums him up, and it is a practice anyone can begin today, at the sink or the desk, because the One it turns toward is already there.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the practice of the presence of God?
It is the habit of living aware that God is present, not only at set times of prayer but in work, conversation, and ordinary hours. The phrase is best known from Brother Lawrence (c. 1614–1691), a Carmelite lay brother in Paris. Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1769), a Protestant ribbon-weaver in Mülheim, taught the same practice in his letters: prayer, he wrote, is "to look upon the ever-present God, and to let oneself be looked upon by Him."

Did Tersteegen read Brother Lawrence?
There is no evidence that he did. Tersteegen read and translated French Catholic writers, among them Jean de Bernières and Madame Guyon, but no source shows that he knew Brother Lawrence. The likeness between them is a parallel, not a lineage: two men who arrived at the same practice and taught it to ordinary people.

How do you pray when you feel nothing?
Tersteegen's counsel was to come before God just as you are, "with all our misery, deadness, darkness, unfeelingness, hardness and scatteredness" (letter to a sister, Mülheim, 6 May 1750), and to tell Him so. If you cannot find even a sigh in your heart, tell Jesus simply that you cannot pray, and already you are praying. He taught that God is as near in the night as in the day, and is to be believed just as near when you feel nothing as when you have feelings.

Where can I read Tersteegen's letters in English?
All 605 letters of the collected edition printed in 1773–75 are free to read in English at gerhardtersteegen.com; it is the first time the whole collection has appeared in English. For a short devotional way in, God Is Here (Encounter Press, 2026) gathers his counsel into forty readings.