George Müller and the Empty Breakfast Table

On a gray morning in 1838, three hundred orphans sat at long wooden tables in Bristol, England. The plates were empty. The cups were empty. There was no food in the kitchen and no money in the account. George Müller, a Prussian-born pastor who had opened his orphanage on nothing but prayer, bowed his head and thanked the Almighty for the breakfast He was about to provide.

The children stared. The staff held their breath.

Then came the knock. A local baker stood at the door — he had been unable to sleep and felt compelled to bake fresh bread through the night. Minutes later, a milk cart broke down directly outside the orphanage. The driver, unable to continue his route, offered every container of milk rather than let it spoil.

Over his lifetime, Müller cared for more than ten thousand orphans without ever making a single public appeal for funds. He simply prayed and recorded every answer. His journals documented over fifty thousand specific prayers answered — meals arriving at the precise moment of need, coal delivered on the coldest nights, shoes appearing when children's feet had outgrown their last pair.

The psalmist declared that the Lord "gives food to the hungry" and "upholds the fatherless." Müller spent sixty years proving that this was not poetry but biography — that the God of Jacob still sets tables in empty rooms for children no one else will claim.