Thirst in the Wilderness

In the autumn of 1743, David Brainerd rode his horse through the forests of eastern Pennsylvania, feverish with tuberculosis, utterly alone. The twenty-five-year-old missionary had been expelled from Yale, rejected by the woman he loved, and sent to preach among the Delaware people in conditions so harsh that he sometimes slept on boards in an open lean-to. His diary from those months reads like a man drowning on dry land.

Yet between entries of crushing loneliness, Brainerd wrote sentences that could have come straight from David's pen in the Judean desert: "My soul longed for God, for the living God. I wanted to give myself entirely to Him." On a November evening, shivering beside a dying fire, he recorded that the presence of the Almighty swept over him with such force that all his suffering fell away. "I cared not where I lived or what hardships I endured," he wrote, "so that I could but gain souls for Christ."

Brainerd died at twenty-nine, having spent himself completely. Jonathan Edwards published his diary, and it ignited a missions movement that spanned two centuries.

The psalmist knew what Brainerd discovered — that there is a thirst no river can satisfy and a clinging that outlasts every wilderness. "Your love is better than life," David sang, and he meant it the way only a man in a wasteland can. The soul that grips God in the driest season finds itself held by a hand that will not let go.