The Secret Place of David Brainerd

David Brainerd was born on April 20, 1718, in Haddam, Connecticut, into a respectable Puritan family. He was the sixth of nine children. His father, Hezekiah Brainerd, was a legislator, and his mother, Dorothy, was devout. Yet tragedy marked his early years. His father died when David was only nine, and his mother followed five years later, leaving him an orphan at fourteen. This deep loss marked him permanently, feeding both his melancholy temperament and his yearning for God.

As a teenager he wrestled with seasons of despair, feeling the weight of sin and the futility of life without Christ. By his early twenties he was searching intensely for salvation, passing through waves of conviction, tears, and self-condemnation. In July 1739 he experienced a profound conversion, later recording in his diary that he felt "as if the weight of the world was lifted" and his soul flooded with the love of God (Diary, July 12, 1739).

Brainerd enrolled at Yale in 1740, just as the First Great Awakening shook New England through the preaching of George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. The revival stirred students, but it also provoked tension among faculty who distrusted the emotional fervor. In 1742 Brainerd, in a moment of frustration, remarked that one of the tutors "had no more grace than a chair." For this he was expelled, permanently barred from returning. This was a devastating blow, for ordination at the time required a Yale degree. Brainerd wrote in his diary that he felt "cast down as one unworthy of the vineyard" (Diary, September 1742).

Instead of crushing his calling, this wound deepened it. Supported by sympathetic ministers, Brainerd was commissioned by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge to serve as a missionary to Native Americans. Beginning in 1743 he rode on horseback through the forests of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, often in severe weather while already weakened by tuberculosis. He endured hunger, loneliness, and hostility, but his heart burned with zeal.

At Kaunameek, near Albany, he labored among the Mohicans. Later he moved to the Delaware Indians at Crossweeksung, New Jersey, where in the summer of 1745 revival broke out. He recorded scenes of Native Americans weeping, confessing sins, and crying aloud for mercy. Brainerd himself often spent hours in the woods before preaching, sometimes in snow up to his knees, pleading with God until his heart burned like fire. His journal entry of February 12, 1744, reads: "Spent the day in secret fasting and prayer, entreating God to show Himself strong in behalf of the poor Indians. In the evening I lay on the frozen ground, yet felt my soul warm with love to Christ" (Diary, February 1744).

For four years he poured out his strength, riding hundreds of miles between villages, translating catechisms, preaching through interpreters, and above all, praying. His health collapsed under the strain. In 1747 he was invited to Jonathan Edwards' home in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Edwards' daughter Jerusha cared for him tenderly. Brainerd died there on October 9, 1747, at only twenty-nine years old, whispering of his longing to be with Christ.