A Day at a Time
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This book offers timeless spiritual wisdom and practical comfort for anyone facing uncertainty, grief, or the challenges of daily life.
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Book Summary
Written during wartime, this devotional book offers comfort and hope by urging readers to live one day at a time, trusting in God's provision. It celebrates cheerfulness, resilience, and extravagant love, finding divine presence in everyday life and sacrifice.
Structured as a series of meditations, the book opens with a dedication to Admiral Jellicoe and an epigraph from E. B. Browning emphasizing hope. Each chapter explores a spiritual theme: living in the present moment (A Day at a Time), seeing God in modern industry (God in the Wheels), adopting a motto of making the best of everything (A Triple Best), and practicing generous charity without over-caution (Finical Farming). The author draws parallels between doctors and Christ (The Doctor), urges prompt and dedicated work (Well and Now), and honors the quiet heroism of war-mourners (The Washen Face in War Time). Later chapters find hope in confronting trouble (God’s Door of Hope), critique pessimistic views of the present (Now-a-Days), and celebrate indirection in achieving happiness (Roundabout Roads). The extravagance of love is defended (The Extravagance of Love), the discipline of contentment explored (The Art of Doing Without), and wonder upheld as essential to worship (Wonder). The book culminates in reflections on God’s fatherhood (The Fatherhood of God), the resurrection’s comfort for the fallen (The Unreturning Brave), and the sunset as a divine promise (The Sacrament of Sunset).
Reading guide
Go deeper in A Day at a Time
Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
Jesus Christ
Alexander's book keeps returning to Jesus not as a distant dogma but as the Master whose teaching reframes sparrows, sunsets, and household chores as sites of divine care. The Jesus who emerges here is cheerful rather than severe, a physician for the whole person, and a friend who found rest in a Bethany home. His presence sets the standard against which the narrator measures wonder, duty, and love, making him the quiet center of the book's moral world.
Unknown
This narrator moves through the book as a pastor-thinker, turning a prism, a Psalm, or a wife's patience into evidence that God speaks through the familiar. His recurring anxiety is that habit blunts gratitude, that we slight the 'divinest thing God has given us to know' living under our own roof. His voice gives the book its searching, self-implicating tone, inviting readers to hold the door of the heart ajar rather than merely agree.
Martha
Martha is the robust, capable counterweight to her dreamy sister Mary, the one whose housewifely skill made Bethany a genuine haven for a homeless Master. Her famous moment of irritation, when serving eclipsed sitting at His feet, has been used to diminish her, but Alexander insists she served Christ in the way she served best. She matters because she forces the book's readers to ask whether practical devotion has ever been given its due, or only apologized for.
Paul
Paul stands behind much of the book's argument that Jesus deliberately aligned himself with publicans, sinners, and the unwell rather than the respectable. His image of Christ as physician, not priest alone, lets Alexander reach readers who distrust the Church but trust a doctor's self-sacrifice. Paul's presence gives the devotional reflections a scriptural spine, grounding their warmth in apostolic precedent rather than sentiment.
Mary
Biblical mother of Jesus, referenced as an example of faith and humility.
the Doctor
A character in a story within the book, representing wisdom and care.
Faith and Trust in God
The book consistently emphasizes relying on God's providence, especially during wartime, with the central promise that strength will be given 'a day at a time' and that God's eternal arms are an unfailing refuge.
Living in the Present
A major theme is the importance of living 'a day at a time,' not borrowing anxiety from the future, as exemplified by the biblical promise 'As thy days, so shall thy strength be' and Jesus' teaching that 'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.'
Cheerfulness and Resilience
The book champions cheerfulness as a Christian virtue, especially in the face of hardship and war, celebrating the 'cult of the washen face' and the gallant, undaunted spirit of soldiers and those at home who bear their burdens with a brave smile.
Sacrifice and Duty
The text honors the supreme sacrifice of those who die for a righteous cause, framing it as a noble offering 'for Christ's sake,' and calls on all to 'do their bit' with heart and might, seeing their daily work as service to the Lord.
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