The Experiment
One Focus
Can a person stay aware of God through an entire day? We’ve discussed this in past posts, but frankly the answer seems to be no. An hour can feel impossible, much less an entire day.
In January of 1930, a missionary named Frank Laubach decided to truly test it. He wrote down what happened for two years, including the weeks he failed.
Laubach was an ordained minister for fifteen years and a missionary in the Philippines. He seemed to be a model Christian.
But he did not think so. He wrote that after fifteen years in ministry, he had not lived his days in a minute by minute effort to follow the will of God. Two years before this, he had tried checking in with God every fifteen minutes or so. The few people he told said it could not be done. He mostly agreed with them, and he kept falling short of even that.
Then he went to work among the Moros, a Muslim people who historically distrusted Christians. His wife and his son Robert stayed behind on another island for health and schooling. He did not speak the language yet, and he was completely alone.
That loneliness is what pushed him into it. He wrote later that it was unbearable except by talking with God.
So he set himself a rule. He would try to bring God to mind at least one second out of every minute he was awake. He would not try to quit doing things so that he could do this, he would simply bring God into the moment alongside him. While shaving, while eating, while meeting strangers.
The early results were poor. He wrote that the thought of God slipped out of his sight for what he guessed was two thirds of every day. One week he reported that the experiment had been a failure for most of it, that his body was worn down and the distractions were too many, and that God had not been at the center of his mind for a fifth of the time, or maybe only a tenth.
He wrote that while trying to be witty he had said biting things that hurt people, and that he had been short and impatient with them. He was ashamed, because he had told at least one of those men about the experiment, and now that man would judge the whole thing by how he had behaved.
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He realized he was actually running two experiments at once. The first was whether a person could hold God in mind all the time. The second was whether attempting this did anything for him. He noted that for the first experiment there was a high percentage of failure. With the second experiment he found that every time he turned back toward God, something in him changed, like a current switching on.
He wrote that he was “hardly” able to do it all the time, but the effort helped “tremendously”.
And he did find benefits. He described his worries fading out, sleeping through the night, thinking more clearly, and forgetting things less often. He stopped feeling in a hurry. Work that he said used to strain him became much easier. People who had been suspicious of him became friendly. Two of the leading Muslim priests in the province went around telling everyone that this man would help the people know God.
Now the second stretch of the experiment was much different than the first. The first stretch of the experiment happened while he was alone. He said it had always been easier for shepherds and monks and hermits than for people surrounded by crowds. So when the second stretch began, where he was surrounded by people, he said the whole thing became much more difficult.
But he said if this experiment was going to be worth anything, it had to work for busy people too.
And Laubach was certainly not idle. During these years he built a reading method for the Maranao people in their own language, then had each new reader teach the next one. Tens of millions of people eventually learned to read through that method. He worked at it until his death at 85.
Over twenty years after his experiment he published a short booklet explaining how to do it, and his suggested version was more beginner friendly. He told people to try it for a single hour, and to stop before the hour was up if it started to wear on them. He told them that if they forgot about it for hours or for days, they should not sit around repenting over it, they should just start again. To him the point was relationship, not a new form of legalism.
Laubach was not counting minutes to prove anything or to earn anything. He already had the Father’s love and knew it. He was training his attention, the way you train anything, so that he could focus more on the One he loved.
If you want to try this, you do not have to attempt every minute of your day. Pick an hour. Pick a mundane task where you wouldn’t have been doing much anyways. See how much of it you can spend aware of the Lord’s presence. You may likely lose track almost immediately. That’s ok.
You can always return the next minute.
Meditation: Sanctuary
May you always return to Him.
Sources:
Laubach, Frank C. Letters by a Modern Mystic. Revell, 1937. Full text, including The Game with Minutes (1953): https://www.priorychurch.com/lent2024/Frank%20C.%20Laubach%20-%20Letters%20By%20A%20Modern%20Mystic.pdf
Frank C. Laubach Collection, Syracuse University Libraries: https://library.syracuse.edu/digital/guides/l/laubach_coll.htm
