Helmut Thielicke says that during World War II, his students often wrote from the battlefield saying, "I am so exhausted from marching, my stomach is so empty, I am so plagued with lice and scratching, I am so tormented by the biting cold of Russia and so dead tired, that I am totally occupied, without the least bit of inner space for any speculative thinking." Sometimes they would write that they were too weak to leaf through the Bible and were even lazy about the Lord's Prayer. Dr. Thielicke would reply, "Be thankful that the Gospel is more than a philosophy. If it were only a philosophy, you would just have it as long as you could keep it in mind and it could afford you intellectual comfort. But even when you can no longer think about God, he still thinks about you."