The Pity and Power of a Short Life: Reflections by the Grave of David Brainerd

I found David Brainerd’s grave today with the help of a friend who knew where to look. Something about the simplicity and obscurity of this spot suits this unlikely hero quite well. The stonecutter didn’t give his work proper attention — he misspelled Brainerd’s name and got both his death date and his age wrong — but perhaps the amateur work was considered good enough for a poor man’s grave. Yet the etched marble still reads with surprising force:

Sacred to the Memory of
the Rev. David Brainard
A faithful and laborious
Missionary to the
Stockbridge, Delaware
and Susquehanna
Tribes of Indians.
Who died in this town
Oct 10 1747 [age] 32

This “faithful and laborious missionary” died of tuberculosis at age 29. The first indication of his terminal disease was when he started spitting up blood in college. He wrote in his diary of this shocking trial that he “looked death in the face” (The Diary and Journal of David Brainerd, 27). Over the next seven years, Brainerd would look into death’s hideous face many times in his sufferings. In the end, his was a slow, retching, suffocating death without the quieting comforts of hospice care. Jonathan Edwards wrote from Brainerd’s bedside,

He was in great distress and agonies of body. . . .

He told me it was impossible for any to conceive of the distress he felt in his breast. He manifested much concern lest he should dishonour God by impatience, under his extreme agony; which was such, that he said, the thought of enduring it one minute longer was almost insupportable. He desired that others would be much in lifting up their hearts continually to God for him, that God would support him, and give him patience. He signified, that he expected to die that night. (Diary and Journal, 255–56)

A few hours later, Brainerd’s tattered lungs and great heart finally gave out.

The Pity

Next to Brainerd is the grave of Jonathan Edwards’s daughter Jerusha, who died just shy of her eighteenth birthday. She served as David’s caregiver in his last months, which were spent in the Edwards’s home; she likely contracted tuberculosis from Brainerd and followed him in death four months later. Just days before David succumbed, they exchanged promises to meet each other in heaven, although they had no idea how soon that rendezvous would be.

The side-by-side gravestones keep the secrets of David and Jerusha’s affection and anguish, of their sorrow and certain hope, as we have only glimpses of their relationship from Brainerd’s posthumously published diary. Theirs was a short but sweet friendship, built on their shared and fervent love for Christ and his glory.

As I tug at the weeds and crabgrass that have crept around the old stones, I imagine Jonathan Edwards standing here. But I don’t picture him like the stiff old portrait of a New England divine. Instead, I see Edwards as friend and father, because the broken ground over Brainerd had barely settled before a fresh grave was dug next to it for his precious teenage daughter. His grief upon grief was assuaged by the hope upon hope of the gospel, but the grief was still real. The empty places and missing voices of lives cut short must have pierced his heart deeply.

In our haste for satisfying conclusions, Christians should not make too little of the pity of this story or any similar story today. Often, dying — not so much death — is too painful a prospect for us, so we tend to repackage it with sugar-sweet songs about suddenly finding ourselves walking around heaven and breathing celestial air. But this just hopscotches right over car wrecks and ventilators and cancer and open graves. For believers, “it is not death to die” is only half true. On the farther shore of the last river, faith becomes sight, and there the glory and grace of the Lamb is beyond imagining. But on this side, there is still a raging river to cross.

The Power

Brainerd, who had first “looked death in the face” as a college student, did not look away. Ever mindful of his Lord and of our vapor-like lives, he pointed to his pending grave as a witness:

When you see my grave, then remember what I said to you while I was alive . . . how the man who lies in that grave counselled and warned me to prepare for death. (Diary and Journal, 247)

Two years after Brainerd’s death, Edwards published the young missionary’s diaries and journals in The Life of David Brainerd. In God’s sovereign plan, the pity of Brainerd’s death would become power, the first drop before a downpour of a worldwide missions movement: Carey to India, Martyn to Persia, Judson to Burma, Morrison and Taylor to China, Moffatt to Africa. All of these were deeply impacted by the life of David Brainerd. But these are only the household names of missions history. The faith, endurance, and sufferings of Brainerd’s short ministry challenged untold thousands more to go to the ends of the earth with the glorious gospel.

The Life of David Brainerd is no breezy account of successful strategies and big breakthroughs. Maybe that’s why it appeals to so many missionaries and pastors. John Piper explains,

Why has this life had such a remarkable influence? . . .

The answer is that Brainerd’s life is a vivid, powerful testimony to the truth that God can and does use weak, sick, discouraged, beaten-down, lonely, struggling saints who cry to him day and night to accomplish amazing things for his glory. (The Hidden Smile of God, 132)

Sweet Comfort

For David Brainerd — and much later Jim Elliot — God chose that their stories would long outlive them. But what about believers who die young, for whom no book is written? What is the power of their short lives? This is a hard and painful question, especially for those, like Edwards, who stand nearest to the grave. I write not to minimize their lingering grief but to brighten their hope.

The power of Brainerd’s life was not his published diary. The power was that Brainerd lived a life given day by difficult day to pursuing Christ and pointing others to him. He was as good as his epitaph — “a faithful and laborious” servant. And Christ invites all to enter into that worthy fellowship — whether we are given five talents or two, many years or few. No matter how short the life, every faithful servant will hear the Master’s “Well done!” when faith becomes sight.

But if there’s power in a faithful life that spreads the fame of Christ to a dying world, then wouldn’t more influence, more witness, more years make more sense? Here, God’s sovereignty and goodness meet, and we are left to trust him. The number of our days is no cold, cosmic calculation that God assigns like an actuary. No. There’s a wise and eager love in the timing of our call home, and that’s a sweet comfort as I stand here where David, Jerusha, and many other saints sleep, who were “sown in weakness” but will be “raised in power” (1 Corinthians 15:43).