In our house, George Müller is a verb.
But I’ll start from the beginning…
Once upon a time, when matching nightgowns were as necessary as princess toothbrushes, my girls fit themselves into me like puzzle pieces each evening on the couch, and I read them bedtime stories. As they grew, the stories grew harder and richer, and we traveled the earth together each night with the heroic ones this world didn’t deserve. We struggled and battled and overcame with Amy Carmichael, Gladys Aylward, Adoniram Judson, Lillian Trasher, “Bruchko”, Corrie ten Boom—and many more—in those hours before our yawns tugged us all back to the present and into our beds.
One bedtime, we visited the Ashley Down orphanage in Bristol, England, in the 1800s, and stepped into the life of George Müller.
A matron of the orphanage scurried to Mr. Müller, the director, one morning, and my girls watched the woman twist her apron in her hands.
“I hate to bother you, but the children are ready for breakfast,” she said, “and there’s nothing for them to eat.”
The pantry was bare and the money gone, but there in the dining room stood three-hundred children in neat rows behind their chairs. And on the table in front of each child was a plate, a mug, and a spoon.
“Where’s the food?” someone whispered.
Mr. Müller lowered his head. “Dear God, we thank you for what you’re going to give us to eat. Amen.”
He looked up and nodded. Three-hundred chairs scraped across the wood floor, and the three-hundred children sat in front of their empty plates.
A knock on the door rattled the hall. The baker from down the street strode into the room.
“Mr. Müller,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept thinking you would need bread this morning, so I stayed up all night to bake three batches for you. I hope you can use it.”
George smiled, accepting the gift from the baker. “You’ve blessed us today.”
While the children enjoyed the fresh bread, a second knock sounded. This time, the milkman entered, stood in front of George, and removed his hat.
“I need a little help. The wheel on my cart broke right outside your door. I’ll have to lighten my load to fix it. There are ten full cans of milk on it. Could you use them? No cost to you, of course.”
George dispatched twenty of the older children to fetch the milk. There was plenty for each to have a mug full with their bread and enough left over for them to enjoy with tea later.
I bit my lip and paused my reading, my throat too tight for words to pass. I blinked away the blur.
My girls switched their gazes from the book to my face.
“Oh, Mama,” Flicka said, rubbing my arm.
“Maybe we can live this way too.” But my words came out soft—meant more for me than them.
Could I? Could I live like George Müller, a man known for his faith? Could I be someone who, on first impulse when confronting hardship, looked up—and not around—for help too?
George’s life would be the risky life—walking an edge that scared me, moving forward into hard things, leaning on Someone I couldn’t see. But since those nights of traveling the world by book with my girls, I’ve often stepped into uncertainty, imagining how the guardian of Bristol’s orphans would’ve done it.
Yesterday, I picked through the tangled reality of the ones we love—the baby triplets, their two older siblings, and their mama. The confusion of their lives offered no clear path and no quick solutions for them or for those of us helping them.
Memories of the man from England who served thousands of orphans two centuries ago interrupted my thoughts. We had enough food and supplies to thrive, but our needs stretched far beyond the material. I couldn’t unknot the current situation, but peace filtered in anyway. And I knew exactly what to do.
“Let’s just George Müller it,” I said to my girls.
*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.