A Short Life

“For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” — James 4:14 (KJV)

David Brainerd lived for twenty-nine years. He spent barely four of them as a missionary. He never led a big church, never wrote a famous book while he was alive, and died of tuberculosis in someone else’s house. By most measures, it was a small life.

And yet the diary he kept has sent more people around the world to serve God than almost any other book outside the Bible. William Carey took it to India. Henry Martyn read it at Cambridge and gave his life to missions in the East. Two hundred years later, Jim Elliot filled his own journals in the same spirit before he was killed in Ecuador. Brainerd’s short life turned out to be anything but small.

He was born on a Sunday, 20 April 1718, in Haddam, Connecticut, one of nine children. By the time he was fourteen, both his parents had died. He grew up serious, thoughtful and often sad, and very interested in God, though for a long time God felt more like a problem than a friend.

This book follows his story: how he tried to earn God’s approval and failed; the evening God met him in a dark grove; how one careless sentence got him thrown out of Yale; years alone in the woods with almost nothing to show for them; and then, in August 1745, a day he said was unlike any he had ever seen.

It is also an honest story. Brainerd struggled with what Jonathan Edwards, the pastor who published his diary, called a natural tendency to “melancholy and dejection of Spirit.” He had long seasons of darkness. He pushed his body too hard. He was not a smiling, untroubled saint, and this book won’t pretend he was.

But that is part of why his diary has helped so many people. It shows a young man, often sick, often sad, often doubting himself, holding on to God through it all, and being held. If your faith feels like a struggle sometimes, Brainerd is good company.

Edwards put it this way: what the diary shows is “a remarkable instance of true and eminent piety.” Piety means real devotion to God. Not a perfect life, but a real one.

One thing to do this week: ask yourself honestly: if your life were measured by how much you loved God and other people, not by how big or impressive it looked, how would it measure up? Talk to God about what you want your life to count for.