Mary was silent for a long time as they continued to walk along the seashore. The only sounds were from the waves lapping against the seawall and the gulls squawking overhead.
Finally Mary spoke. “Do what you think is best, George. I can trust God, just like you do.”
George stopped and hugged his wife. Tears spilled down his cheeks. Mary had been right—marriage had not become a prison for him. Instead, it had given him a partner in faith. “God will not let us down,” he said with more confidence than he actually felt at that moment.
The next night after dinner, the two of them went out for another walk, this time in the opposite direction towards Ebenezer Street. When they reached the chapel, George unlocked it, and they both slipped inside. George lit the oil lamp at the back of the room and reached into the canvas bag he was carrying. He pulled out a wooden box about the size of a shoe box that had a slot cut in the top and a hinge door on the side. “Hand me a nail, Mary,” he said in a determined voice. Within five minutes, the box was securely attached to the back wall.
“Do you have the sign?” he then asked Mary.
Mary nodded as she handed it to him.
After George had nailed the sign over the box, he stood back to admire his handiwork. “Yes,” he said, squeezing his wife’s hand. “We are at the mercy of God now.” He scanned the sign and nodded. “Just like it says, Mary, if anyone wants to support us, they are welcome to. We will never ask anyone for money. Instead, we will look to God to supply our needs.”
As the two of them knelt together beside a pew, they asked God to take care of them and give them the faith to keep to their new plan.
As George stepped outside, he grinned widely. He knew he had felt like this once before—when was it? He was halfway home before he recalled that it was the day he had told his father he would no longer accept any money from him for his studies at Halle University. He had that same feeling of freedom, of being dependent on God and not on people. The feeling excited George greatly.
Things did not work out quite as quickly, however, or as smoothly as they had at Halle. The year of 1831 was a trying one for the Müllers. Some members of the congregation continued to drop the same amount of money into the wooden box on the back wall as they had dropped into the offering plate. But many did not, probably because it was no longer “buying” them anything. Of course, this had a great impact on George’s salary.
On one desperate occasion, George and Mary sat down at dinnertime to a table set with empty plates and nothing cooking in the oven. Undeterred, George offered a prayer of thanks. As he prayed, there was a knock at the door. A friend in nearby Exmouth had sent a special delivery—a whole ham! George prayed an even greater prayer of thanks and then carved the ham so that he and Mary could eat. Another time, a total stranger had come to the door. When Mary opened it, she was met by a woman who gave her a curtsy. “I could not eat while I thought of you going hungry, ma’am,” she said, handing Mary a freshly baked loaf of bread. Before Mary could ask her her name or where she was from, the woman had disappeared.
Often, when George was away preaching, the churches he visited would offer him money. George always refused it, saying he did not want to leave the impression he was preaching for money. Not to be put off, the churches found creative ways to “pay” their preacher. Sometimes George would find money stuffed into his Bible, or Mary, who often traveled with him, would find that someone had slipped coins into her purse while she was not looking.
All in all, by the end of the year, George and Mary had learned several things about trusting God. First, He did provide for them. They never missed a meal or had a need that was not met in some way. Second, to trust Him fully, they had to learn to give away any extra money they had. They never kept money they did not need and never allowed themselves to borrow a single penny, even if they had a need. They believed that God would provide exactly what they needed when they needed it. And He had.
In the spring of 1831, George thanked God for how well everything had turned out. He had come to Teignmouth sixteen months earlier with no job, little money, and one friend. Now he could not walk down the street without being stopped a dozen times to talk with friends. He had given up his salary of fifty-five pounds, and in return, God had provided food and rent money. He now had a wife who stood beside him, and in five months their first child would be born. The church congregation had grown to fifty-one members, many of them recent converts. Everything was going well for George in Teignmouth, except for one detail. George didn’t think he belonged there anymore.
Chapter 7
A Mission Field Right Here
Bristol!” Mary Müller exclaimed. “Whatever makes you think we should move to Bristol? Can’t we stay where we are, at least until the baby comes?” She brushed tears from her eyes as she spoke.
George put his arm around his wife. “Mary,” he said gently, “I told you, and I told the whole congregation, that I would stay here only as long as God called me to.”
“But George,” Mary interrupted, “how can you be so sure?”
George was silent for a long moment. It was hard to explain, but the more he had prayed about it, the more he knew God was calling him northward to Bristol. Henry Craik was already living there, and he had written to George encouraging him to visit. In April 1832, George had taken him up on the offer.
Bristol was a bustling port city, second only to Liverpool in the number of ships it serviced. Like any other English city in the early nineteenth century, it was smoky and dirty. Beggars stood on the street corners, and small dirty children weaved though the crowds, no doubt looking for a purse to snatch or pocket to pick. Yet for all its crime and poverty, or rather because of it, George had felt that Bristol was a city he could work in, a city that needed plenty of help.
George and Henry Craik had held ten days of meetings at the Gideon and Pithay Chapels in the city. Each night was busier than the night before until, on April 29, Gideon Chapel was filled to overflowing. People sat on the stairs, others gathered outside the open windows, and still more crammed into the foyer at the back of the chapel. Many others had to be turned away because there was simply no more room anywhere for them.
After the meeting, many of the regular members of the congregation at Gideon Chapel begged George to move to Bristol. George and Henry Craik talked long into the night about it, finally drawing up a list of requirements that the congregation would need to agree to before George would even consider such a move. (1) George Müller and Henry Craik would not be traditional pastors, asking the congregation or board members what they thought best for them to do in every situation. Rather, they needed to be free to do whatever they felt God was calling them to do. (2) All pew rents were to be abolished, and neither man would be paid a salary. Together, the pastors and the congregation would trust God for enough money to run the chapel and meet all their needs. (3) George and Henry would be joint pastors, working together as a team, without one being the senior and the other the junior pastor.
George knew that these were not easy conditions for a church to meet, and when he received a letter from Henry Craik saying the congregation had agreed to all of them, he began to feel he should give serious consideration to moving to Bristol. As he prayed long and hard about it, deep down he knew it was indeed time to leave Teignmouth for Bristol.
Finally, Mary sighed. “Do what you think is best, George. I am sure I can have the baby just as well in Bristol as I could here, though I will miss all of my friends.”
George had compasion for his wife. He had lived in many places, but she had been in Devon all her life. He knew it would be hard for her to make new friends, but he was sure he was doing the right thing.
“That’s it, then,” he concluded. “I’ll start visiting everyone in the congregation tomorrow and tell them of our plans myself.”
Two days and many tears later, George Müller had told everyone at Ebenezer Chapel that he was moving to Bristol.
It took less than an hour to pack their few belongings, and with sad hearts, on May 25, 1832, the Müllers boarded a stagecoach for Bristol. George was now twenty-six years old. As the stage rumbled along, he wondered what challenges lay ahead for him.
At first everything went smoothly. The Müllers and Henry Craik found a modest house with five bedrooms and two sitting rooms where they could live together. A rich Christian man had rented a second chapel, called Bethesda Chapel, and the two men divided services between it and Gideon Chapel. Meanwhile, Mary remained in good health, with the baby being due at the end of September.
It was the church bells, though, that first alerted George to the looming disaster in the city. The bells tolled after a funeral, and at the beginning of June, they began to toll almost nonstop. A cholera epidemic had descended on Bristol.
In nineteenth-century England, major differences existed between a city and a village. In villages people lived in their own cottages or in small groups of row houses. They drank water from their own wells and got rid of their bathroom waste in their gardens. In cities, Bristol included, things were much different. People lived in long rows of brick houses that snaked for miles without a single tree or field in sight. Dirty water and sewage overflowed from open drains that ran alongside the streets, and the water that was piped into houses was untreated and often carried germs and bacteria from polluted streams. These differences made conditions ripe for deadly diseases to spread in the city, and no disease was more feared than cholera.
Cholera spread like wildfire, killing thousands of people. George and Henry Craik were called out at all hours of the day and night to pray for those who had been stricken with the disease. Those who caught it usually died quickly. Often it took only twelve hours from the time a person first began to feel sick and started vomiting to the time he or she was laid in a coffin—that is, if a coffin could be found.
The work was exhausting, and it seemed like it would never end. All through July and August, bodies piled up on the sidewalks, waiting for carts to carry them away. Often they lay there rotting for a week or more because the cart driver himself had died of the disease and it was difficult to find someone brave enough to replace him.
Everyone knew that the best chance for staying healthy was to keep away from other people, especially large groups of people, where the disease could spread quickly. However, the folks at the two chapels wanted to continue meeting together to comfort and encourage one another. George and Henry agreed with them, and so they held a prayer meeting each morning to ask God to spare them and to stop the epidemic. Often two or three hundred people would ignore the risks of meeting together and show up to be led in prayer by George or Henry. Even though the people prayed earnestly, the church bells in the city continued to toll.
It was hard for George as he trudged from one end of Bristol to the other. The young pastor was welcomed into any house he stopped at. Even total strangers reached out to grab him as he walked by. George would read the Bible aloud to them and pray for the dying, or he would comfort a hysterical widow who now had no way to feed her ragged, hollow-cheeked children.
Mary Müller was fighting her own battle. Every morning she watched her husband walk out the door and into danger. Each time George reached out to hold the hand of a dying child or help a woman lay her husband’s dead body out or hug a little child, he was exposing himself to cholera.
“What if you get sick?” Mary asked him. “Have you thought of that?”
George nodded silently. Of course, he had thought of it a thousand times. Every meal could easily be his last, especially given the number of people he touched who were dying. “But I have to do it, Mary. Somebody has to help these people and let them know God cares.”
