David Brainerd: Light in a Dark Thick Grove

On a Sunday evening in July 1739, a young man was walking alone among the trees near his home in Connecticut, trying to pray and failing.

His name was David Brainerd. He was twenty-one. For months he had been in a kind of war with God, and he had lost. Two days earlier, on a Friday morning, walking in this same lonely place, he had finally seen that nothing he did could make him right with God: not his prayers, not his Bible reading, not his fasting, not his tears. He had felt, he wrote later, “brought quite to a stand.” Since then he had felt strangely flat, as if “there was nothing in heaven or earth could make me happy.”

For about half an hour he kept trying to pray, “very stupid and senseless,” as he put it. And then, he wrote, “as I was walking in a dark thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the view and apprehension of my soul.”

He was careful to say he saw no light with his eyes. It was, he said, “a new inward apprehension or view that I had of God, such as I never had before.” “My soul rejoiced with joy unspeakable, to see such a God, such a glorious divine Being.” For a while, he said, he hardly thought about himself at all. He stayed there, full of joy and peace, until it was nearly dark, and when he walked home, “I felt myself in a new world, and every thing about me appeared with a different aspect from what it was wont to do.”

We know this because Brainerd kept a diary, which a famous pastor published after his death. It tells of a very short life, full of sickness, sadness and mistakes, given away to people most of the world had forgotten.

Fatherless and Motherless

David Brainerd was born on 20 April 1718 in Haddam, a farming town on the Connecticut River in New England. Britain then ruled a string of colonies along the east coast of North America, on land that had been home to Native American nations for thousands of years.

He was the third son of nine children. His father, Hezekiah, a respected public man, died when David was nine. His mother, Dorothy, lived as a widow for about five years and died in March 1732, when David was thirteen. So, as the account of his life puts it, “in his youth he was left both fatherless and motherless.”

He was not a carefree child even before that. Looking back, he described himself plainly: “I was from my youth somewhat sober, and inclined to melancholy.” At seven or eight he became frightened of death, and found religion “a melancholy business that destroyed my eagerness for play.” When a deadly sickness swept through Haddam in the winter of 1732, he prayed hard. Then his mother died, and he was, he said, “exceedingly distressed and melancholy.”

In April 1733, a few days short of fifteen, he left his father’s house and went to live in East Haddam, across the river, where he spent four years. He was not a wild teenager, but when he did join in with other young people, he said, “I never returned with so good a conscience as when I went.”

Trying Too Hard

At nineteen he moved to work a farm he owned in Durham, a few miles away. He wanted badly to go to college and become a minister. At twenty he began to study, and in April 1738 he went to live with the minister of Haddam, Phineas Fiske.

Now he became very, very religious. Mr. Fiske advised him to stay away from young company altogether and spend his time with “grave elderly people,” and he did. He read the whole Bible more than twice in less than a year. He prayed every day for long stretches. “In short,” he wrote, “I had a very good outside, and rested entirely on my duties, though I was not sensible of it.”

You may know someone like that, or be someone like that: right on the outside, and quietly sure that all the effort must be earning something from God.

Then, one Sunday morning early in the winter of 1738, it all fell apart. He suddenly had “such a sense of my danger, and the wrath of God, that I stood amazed.” For months he was in deep distress. He wrote that he “sometimes envied the birds and beasts their happiness,” because they would never have to stand before God.

What followed was a long, exhausting struggle. He tried to make himself feel the right feelings and become humble enough. Each time he thought he had done enough, he told God so, and waited. When nothing happened, he grew angry. He admitted that at times he wished “there was no God, or to wish there was some other God that could control him.”

What made him furious was that God’s law demanded a good heart, which he could not give himself; that salvation came through faith, not effort (“I could not bear that all I had done should stand for mere nothing”); and that mercy was entirely up to God. He was even angry with a book he was reading, Solomon Stoddard’s Guide to Christ, because it never told him something he could do to get to Christ.

Then, on that Friday in July, he stopped fighting. He saw that he could do nothing at all. He later said that his prayers had no more power to earn God’s favour than “my paddling with my hand in the water.”

A New World

What he saw in the grove two days later was not, first of all, about himself. It was about God: his “excellency, loveliness, greatness.” For the first time in his life, Brainerd was glad that God was God, and not just afraid of him.

And with that came something he had been unable to grasp for years. “At this time,” he wrote, “the way of salvation opened to me with such infinite wisdom, suitableness, and excellency, that I wondered I should ever think of any other way of salvation.” He wondered why the whole world did not see it and accept it: “this way of salvation, entirely by the righteousness of Christ.”

That phrase is the heart of what Brainerd believed for the rest of his life. He could not be good enough for God. But Jesus Christ had lived the perfect life Brainerd could not live and died for the sins Brainerd could not undo. A person is made right with God by trusting Christ, not by piling up good deeds. As Paul wrote, “For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9).

For years he had treated faith as one more thing to achieve. That evening it was more like letting go.

One Sentence at Yale

In September 1739, two months after the grove, Brainerd went to Yale College in New Haven to train for the ministry. He was nervous about it. He worried, he said, that he would not be able to live a life “of strict religion in the midst of so many temptations.” He was right that it would be hard, though not in the way he expected.

In January 1740 measles spread through the college and he went home very ill. That summer he studied so hard that he began to cough up blood, and his tutor sent him home to rest. This was probably the first sign of the tuberculosis that would kill him.

Meanwhile the colonies were caught up in what historians call the Great Awakening, when huge crowds gathered to hear preachers like the English evangelist George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent of New Jersey. In early 1741 it reached Yale, and Brainerd was, he wrote, “much quickened.” But revivals can bring out pride as well as prayer. Some excited young converts began saying openly that this or that minister did not seem truly converted. The college authorities, led by the rector, Thomas Clap, were alarmed.

Brainerd’s diary for those months has not survived; on his deathbed he asked for it to be destroyed. He knew he had been hot-headed. He later said he had since become more “refined from some imprudences and indecent heats.”

The trouble came in one sentence. One day after a tutor named Chauncey Whittelsey had prayed with the students in the hall, Brainerd and a few close friends stayed behind. One of them asked what he thought of Mr. Whittelsey. Brainerd answered: “He has no more grace than this chair.” He meant that, as far as he could tell, the man did not really know God.

But a first-year student outside the hall overheard, and told a woman in the town, who told the rector. The friends were made to say who had said it, and about whom. The college demanded a public confession. He refused, thinking it unfair to be shamed in public for something said in private. He had also gone, against the rector’s orders, to a meeting of a “Separate” congregation that had split from the town’s church. In the winter of 1742, in his third year, he was expelled.

Many people at the time thought the college had been far too severe. Jonathan Edwards, the pastor who later published his diary, politely declined to judge, but he plainly thought Brainerd had been harshly treated. But over time Brainerd came to see his own part clearly. In 1743 he offered the college a written apology, and it is a model of how to say sorry. “I humbly confess,” it says, “that herein I have sinned against God, and acted contrary to the rules of his word, and have injured Mr. Whittelsey. I had no right to make thus free with his character.” He did not add a “but.”

Yale did not take him back. On 14 September 1743, the day his class graduated, he wrote: “This day I ought to have taken my degree; but God sees fit to deny it me.” He had dreaded the day; instead, he said, God gave him calm.

In New England then, the normal road to the ministry ran through college. Brainerd, at twenty-three, had shut it with one careless remark. The closed door sent him somewhere he might never otherwise have gone.

A Heap of Straw

In 1742 a group of ministers licensed him to preach anyway, and that autumn he was taken on by a Scottish missionary society. He was sent to Kaunaumeek, in the woods about twenty miles from both Stockbridge in Massachusetts and Albany in New York, to a small community of Mahican people.

He arrived on 1 April 1743. He was twenty-four. That first night he slept at the house of a poor Scottish settler, he wrote, “on a little heap of straw, in a log room without any floor.” His interpreter was a young Mahican man named John Wauwaumpequunnaunt, who could read and write both languages. Brainerd rode twenty miles through the forest, again and again, to study the language with John Sergeant, the missionary at Stockbridge. He lived for a while in a wigwam, then built himself a small house. His bread came from ten or fifteen miles away, sometimes “mouldy and sour before I eat it.”

And he was desperately low. A week after he arrived he wrote that he felt “exceedingly ignorant, weak, helpless, unworthy, and altogether unequal to my work.” Then: “My soul was weary of my life; I longed for death, beyond measure.” In other entries he called himself “the vilest, meanest creature upon earth.”

We need to stop here and be honest. Jonathan Edwards, who knew Brainerd at the end of his life, wrote that he was “by his constitution and natural temper, so prone to melancholy and dejection of Spirit.” Today we would probably say that Brainerd lived with depression, for much of his life. Loneliness, sickness, overwork and poor food made it far worse. He sometimes read his darkness as spiritual failure, and he was wrong about that. Depression is not a sign that God has given up on you, and it is not a lack of faith.

If you ever feel the way Brainerd felt, so low that you are weary of your life, please do not carry it alone the way he did. Tell a trusted adult: a parent, a teacher, a pastor, a doctor. And if you ever think about harming yourself, tell someone right away. Getting help is not weakness; it is one of the ways God looks after us.

What is remarkable is that Brainerd kept bringing his darkness to God, often on the same page, and that there were brighter days too. At Kaunaumeek he translated prayers and some psalms with his interpreter’s help, learned to pray with the people in their own language, and set up a school, which John Wauwaumpequunnaunt taught. After a year he advised the Kaunaumeek families to move to Stockbridge, where they could have a settled minister and school, and they did.

The People at the Forks

In June 1744 Brainerd was ordained, and moved to the Forks of the Delaware in Pennsylvania, where the Delaware River meets the Lehigh. The people there were Lenape, whom the English called the Delaware.

Something had just happened to them. In 1737 the colony’s proprietors had used an old and doubtful deed to claim a huge stretch of Lenape land, by the distance a man could walk in a day and a half. They hired fast runners and cleared a path in advance. This Walking Purchase took the Forks from the people who lived there. Many Lenape had good reason to distrust white men who called themselves Christians.

Brainerd was a man of his time. His diary speaks of “poor Indians” and “pagans,” and he saw no value in Lenape religion, which he called idolatry. When he heard the people were about to hold a great feast and dance, he went alone into the woods on 21 July 1744 and prayed so hard that, he wrote, “the sweat ran down my face and body.” We can see what he could not: that he was a guest in someone else’s homeland, and that much of what he called heathen was a whole way of life he never tried to understand. But he also cared about these particular people more than almost anyone in the colonies did, and gave up everything to be with them.

For a year at the Forks there was almost nothing to show for it, even after two hard journeys to the Susquehanna River, sleeping in the open woods. The one great exception was his own interpreter, a Lenape man usually named in the records as Moses Tatamy. In July 1745 he and his wife publicly professed their faith in Christ, the first Lenape converts of Brainerd’s work.

“I Never Saw Any Day Like It”

In June 1745, discouraged and ill, Brainerd rode about eighty miles south-east to Crossweeksung in New Jersey, where there were some scattered Lenape families. He found only a handful of people at home, “none but a few women and children.” He preached to them. Then the women set off and travelled ten or fifteen miles to fetch their friends, so that others could hear too. Brainerd compared them to the woman of Samaria in John 4, who ran to tell her town about Jesus.

The numbers grew: seven or eight, then nearly thirty, then about forty. They asked him to preach twice a day. And on the afternoon of 8 August 1745, with about sixty-five men, women and children gathered, something happened that he struggled to describe. “The power of God seemed to descend upon the assembly ‘like a mighty rushing wind,’” he wrote, borrowing words from the story of Pentecost in Acts 2, “and with an astonishing energy bore down all before it.” People of every age were in tears, praying for mercy. He recorded what they were saying in their own language: “Guttummauhalummeh; Guttummauhalummeh,” which he translated as “Have mercy upon me; mercy upon me.” He wrote: “I never saw any day like it, in all respects.”

What Brainerd preached at Crossweeksung was not mainly fear. He wrote that he spoke most of all of the love and compassion of Christ for sinners, and invited people to come to him freely. And the change was not just a feeling. People gave up heavy drinking, paid their debts and made peace with each other. Among them was a healer and conjurer Brainerd had all but given up on, who came slowly to faith.

The Crossweeksung believers are the real heroes here. They walked miles to hear, brought their friends, and went on following Christ long after Brainerd was gone. Old debts and settlers’ claims threatened the little land they had, and money collected for the mission was used to clear the debts. In 1746 they moved together to land near Cranbury, New Jersey, to farm and to keep their community together.

What Came After

Brainerd had little time left. In 1746 he made one more journey to the Susquehanna with six of the Christian Lenape. His tuberculosis grew worse. By spring 1747 he could no longer ride, and he left the people at Crossweeksung in the care of others.

At the end of May he came to Northampton, Massachusetts, to the home of the pastor and theologian Jonathan Edwards. There Edwards’s daughter Jerusha, who was seventeen, nursed him through his last months. Some have said the two were engaged; there is no real evidence of that. A few days before he died he asked her, “Dear Jerusha, are you willing to part with me?” and told her he had committed everyone he loved to God. When someone asked how he was, he answered, “I am almost in eternity; I long to be there. My work is done.” He died early on the morning of Friday, 9 October 1747. He was twenty-nine. Jerusha died the following February, aged seventeen, possibly of an illness caught while nursing him.

His younger brother John Brainerd took over the work among the Lenape believers in New Jersey and stayed with them for years. In 1749 Edwards published the diary, which became one of the most widely read Christian books in the English language. William Carey, whose story comes next, treasured it. Henry Martyn read it at Cambridge and went to India, and two centuries later Jim Elliot, whom you will also meet in this book, read it as a young man.

It would be wrong to tell Brainerd’s story as if it were a pattern to copy in every way. He drove himself until his body broke, judged himself and sometimes others far too harshly, and spent long months alone when he needed friends. Edwards noticed that Brainerd himself slowly learned to tell which dark thoughts came from his “melancholy” rather than from God. But the centre of his life is worth copying: a young man who discovered that he could not save himself, found that Christ had done it for him, and then gave what time he had to telling other people so.

In Their Own Words

“I cared not where or how I lived, or what hardships I went through, so that I could but gain souls to Christ.”

— David Brainerd, diary for 21 July 1744, in The Life and Diary of David Brainerd (1749)

Think It Through

1. Before the grove, Brainerd had “a very good outside” and was trying hard to earn God’s favour. What is the difference between doing good things to earn God’s love and doing them because you already have it?
2. One careless sentence got Brainerd expelled, and his apology did not undo the consequences. Was it still worth making? What makes an apology a real one?
3. Brainerd lived with deep sadness and mostly carried it alone. Why do you think people find it hard to tell anyone when they feel low? Who could you talk to?
4. Brainerd loved the Lenape people but also misunderstood much of their way of life. What can we learn from both sides of that when we go to serve people who are different from us?

Read More on Ochorus

The Life and Diary of David Brainerd is in the library: his own account of his conversion, his journals from Kaunaumeek to Crossweeksung, and Edwards’s record of his last weeks. For something shorter, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd (For Teens) tells his story in thirteen short chapters, with his own words throughout and a careful chapter on his depression. His full biography is on his author page.