Brother Lawrence

He was born Nicolas Herman in Lorraine, served as a soldier in the Thirty Years' War, and came out of it with a wound that left him limping for life. After a spell as a footman — by his own account a clumsy one who broke things — he joined the Discalced Carmelites in Paris as a lay brother and was put in the kitchen, where he stayed roughly fifteen years, later repairing sandals when his leg would no longer take standing. He said plainly that he disliked kitchen work.

What he learned there was to keep up a running conversation with God through the noise and the hurry, so that, as he put it, the time of business did not differ from the time of prayer; he could hold God as near among his pots and pans as on his knees. He published nothing. A church official named Joseph de Beaufort wrote down their conversations and gathered his letters after he died, and that small book has never gone out of print.