The Diary of a Man Who Would Not Stop Asking

In the autumn of 1745, missionary David Brainerd knelt on the frozen ground of the Delaware River Valley, his tuberculosis-racked body shaking with fever and prayer. His journal entry from that season reads like a man wrestling with the Almighty Himself: "I hardly ever so longed to live to God and to be altogether devoted to Him."

For months, Brainerd had preached to the Lenape people with almost no visible result. His congregations wandered away. His interpreter mangled his words. His own body was failing him at twenty-seven. Yet night after night, he dragged himself into the woods and poured out the kind of raw, unvarnished prayer that Isaiah knew — the cry of a man who had nothing left to offer but his own inadequacy.

"We are the clay," Isaiah confessed to the Almighty. Brainerd understood that posture. He never claimed to bring anything worthy. He simply would not stop asking God to show up.

And then, in the summer of 1745, something broke open. The Lenape began weeping under his preaching. Entire families came to faith. Brainerd wrote with astonishment of what he could only call the sovereign movement of God — something no technique or eloquence of his had produced.

Isaiah 64 is the prayer of people who know they cannot manufacture God's presence. They can only position themselves as clay and wait for the Potter's hands. Sometimes the waiting is long. But the Potter has never abandoned His wheel.