The Theologian Who Could Not Stay in New York

In June 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived in New York City with every reason to stay. Friends had arranged a safe teaching position at Union Theological Seminary, far from Hitler's tightening grip on Germany. He had escaped. He was free.

But from his very first night in Manhattan, something would not let him rest. A voice — not audible, but unmistakable — kept pressing on his conscience. He tried to dismiss it as guilt. He tried to lose himself in the city's theological conversations. He wrote in his diary that he could not stop thinking about his brothers and sisters back home.

For twenty-six days, the call persisted. Bonhoeffer confided in his host, Paul Lehmann, and in Reinhold Niebuhr, the very man who had arranged his escape. They urged him to stay. But like young Samuel hearing his name called in the darkness of the temple at Shiloh, Bonhoeffer gradually realized this restlessness was not homesickness — it was the voice of God.

He booked passage back to Germany. "I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America," he wrote to Niebuhr. In those words was the same surrender Samuel offered: "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening."

God's call does not always come as a thunderclap. Sometimes it arrives as a quiet insistence we keep mistaking for something else — until, like Samuel, we finally recognize who is speaking and say, "Here I am."