David Brainerd
by Colton White
How would you describe a missionary?
A person of zeal? A person of compassion? A person with little world attachment? How about a crazy person? Maybe a person with a purpose outside of themselves?
We all have our definitions, our own opinions for the taglines we include in our own description of the title, “missionary”.
My definition always changes, I am not sure why, maybe because we have made the term so broad in this day an age. Today, my definition would be “David Brainerd”.
Who or what is David Brainerd you may ask? He’s a man who had a story to tell. Brainerd was alive during the time of the Great Awakening, you know, the time of Jonathan Edwards (1700s). Edwards described this time, as a “surprising work of God”. People were experiencing the grace of Jesus and being changed by it. Jonathan Edwards church grew from 400 to 1200 in a month, and God was moving across America in an amazing way. The peak of this movement was when George Whitfield came to town, and he had a message of relationship. That you can have an individual encounter with Jesus. That had never been preached before, and it was noted by Benjerman Franklin that when Whitefield came to town, people showed up from all over. At the time, Boston had a population of 5000, but when Whitefield came to Boston, 10,000 showed up. This was the time of David Brainerd
Brainerd was a student at Yale University during this revival, but his time as a student was cut short. He was expelled for making this comment towards a professor, “(certain professor) has no more grace than a chair” and that he wondered why the Rector ‘did not drop down dead’ for fining students perceived as over-zealous.
Soon after he was diagnosed with Tuberculous, a disease that would take his life seven years later.
Brainerd, with little time to live, and a lot more free time after being expelled went on a journey to share Jesus with the Native Americans of North America. It is amazing as you read through the book published by Jonathan Edwards, “The Life and Diary of David Brainerd”. It is not a book of rainbow and ponies, but a book of struggles, struggles with depression, anxiety, and striving to stir affection for God’s mission.
The book is Brainerd’s journal and one of my favorite journal entries is when Brainerd says, “I was filled with sorrow and confusion in the morning, and could enjoy no sweet sense of the divine things, nor get any relief in prayer. Oh, the honesty! Sad? Yes. But it’s real. It was said that the following 100 years after Brainerd’s death that every missionary carried two books with him: The Bible and the Diary of David Brainerd. It is a story of struggle and success. Success spurned by an affection for Jesus that is undeniable, an affection that comes from looking at our lives, filled with hurt and depression, and looking at it through the lens of scripture.
If you haven’t read this book, you are missing out, it is a picture of the struggles that a missionary goes through.
“Ministry is an overflow of the heart”
