Try to imagine a war fought in your homeland for thirty years. Our country was brought low by a four-year Civil War. What would have been the carnage caused by thirty continuous years of bloodshed? For the first half of the seventeenth century, armies from all over Europe fought on German soil during the Thirty Years War. When the Peace of Westphalia treaty was finally signed in 1648, a quarter of Germany’s population had died, and its economy was in shambles. The damage done to its moral fiber was catastrophic. While most of its citizens still believed in God, many functioned as if faith no longer made an appreciable difference in their real lives. A movement called Pietism emerged to revitalize spirituality in dead churches.
Nobody aspires to piety anymore. “Don’t be so pious” isn’t something we want said of us. How strange that the word “pious.” once used as a term of honor, has now become a put-down. Piety in its original sense meant fidelity and loyalty to God. Pietists were people who sought a personal relationship with Jesus with its attending implications for a faith-filled life.
Johann Frederick Starck (1680-1756) had pietistic sympathies as he served rural and city churches in Germany. He also was a popular preacher in poorhouses, orphanages, and to criminals on death row. His enduring contribution was a devotional, The Daily Handbook in Good and Bad Days. Don’t you love the title? It was, as advertised, a handbook for prayer to address every conceivable situation. Not only did Johann include morning and evening prayers and intercession for the sick and dying, but he also supplied prayers for circumstances I have never seen in print. He wrote prayers for use during and after a thunderstorm, prayers while taking medicine, even prayers for women in labor. His handbook taught future generations how to pray and has been reprinted hundreds of times, as recently as 1999. His prayer “for those in affliction” leads us to pray: