Love Quote by David Brainerd

Ardent love, here, is being disciplined into a kind of holy ambition. Brainerd isn’t describing a warm, private affection for God so much as a consuming drive with a direction: to please, to glorify, to conform. The verbs read like a ladder of escalating surrender. Desire is not something to be indulged; it’s something to be recruited. In Brainerd’s Puritan-inflected world, the self is always a suspect narrator, and “love” only becomes trustworthy when it stops circling the ego and starts moving outward, upward, and into obedience.

The subtext is both aspirational and anxious. “Passionately longing” acknowledges an interior intensity that might look, from the outside, like ordinary romantic yearning. Brainerd gives that intensity a safe object and a strict purpose. He’s trying to prevent religious emotion from collapsing into mere spiritual thrill-seeking. Notice the architecture: pleasure is allowed, even promised, but only after conformity. “Enjoy him” comes last, almost as a guarded reward for a life bent into alignment. That sequencing tells you what’s at stake: not just belief, but legitimacy. Feelings can’t be the proof; transformation must be.

Context sharpens the urgency. Brainerd’s short life, rigorous diary piety, and missionary work among Native Americans sit inside the 18th-century revivalist climate where conversion narratives and intense inward scrutiny were common currency. The line functions like a corrective to enthusiasm and a script for it at once: yes, burn with desire, but let it burn away the self you most want to preserve.