A Heap of Straw

“We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair.” — 2 Corinthians 4:8 (KJV)

With the door to a normal ministry closed, another opened. A Scottish society that supported missions asked Brainerd to work among the Native American peoples. In April 1743, aged twenty-four, he arrived at a small village called Kaunaumeek, in the woods of what is now New York, about twenty miles from the nearest town.

His diary entry for that first day is not exactly a travel brochure. He “lodged with a poor Scotchman, about a mile and a half distant from them, on a little heap of straw, in a log room without any floor.” A heap of straw, on a dirt floor. That was home.

He couldn’t speak the language, so he worked through an interpreter, a gifted young man from Stockbridge named John Wauwaumpequunnaunt, who spoke and wrote both English and his own language well. Brainerd soon arranged for John to become the village schoolmaster too. Later Brainerd built himself a little hut and lived alone. He was often cold, often hungry, often ill, and almost always lonely. He rode huge distances through forests, and once got lost and spent a whole night out in the open.

Some of the local settlers didn’t want him there. He wrote that they hated him “because I come to preach to them.” But the hardest part wasn’t the cold or the opposition. He wrote that what made all his difficulties “grievous to be borne, is, that God hides his face from me.” When God felt far away, everything else felt heavier.

Why did he stay? Because he loved the people he had come to serve and wanted them to know Jesus. On one of his better days he wrote: “I cared not where or how I lived, or what hardships I went through, so that I could but gain souls to Christ.”

You will probably never sleep on a heap of straw on a dirt floor. But you will have seasons when following Jesus costs you something: a friendship, a reputation, comfort, or plans you had for yourself. Brainerd’s life says that this is normal, and that God is still there, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Paul wrote that we are troubled on every side, yet not crushed; puzzled, but not in despair. That was Brainerd at Kaunaumeek: troubled, puzzled, often low, but still there, still serving, still praying.

One thing to do this week: do one thing this week that costs you some comfort for the sake of someone else: give up your seat, give time you’d rather spend on yourself, help someone nobody else is helping. Do it quietly, for Jesus.