Time & Perspective Quote by David Brainerd

The line lands like a private diary entry that accidentally reveals the whole nervous system of early evangelical Protestantism: a mind trained to treat its own feelings as evidence in a cosmic trial. Brainerd isn’t bragging about skepticism. He’s accusing himself of spiritual stubbornness, of having “withstood” convictions the way a sinner might resist a knock on the door. The drama is inward, but the stakes are absolute.

The phrasing matters. “Power of convictions” isn’t gentle persuasion; it’s force, something that bears down on the conscience. Brainerd assumes conviction is not self-generated insight but a pressure applied by God, a kind of divine gravity. That makes his resistance feel less like a psychological quirk and more like treason. The second half pivots on “therefore,” a bleak, Calvinist logic: persistent resistance may signal not merely backsliding but abandonment. “Finally left of God” evokes the terrifying Puritan category of being given over - not punished with lightning, but punished with silence.

Context sharpens the edge. Brainerd, a young New England minister and missionary, lived in the revivalist atmosphere that prized conversion narratives, scrutinized inner states, and distrusted complacency. His journals are famous for their relentless self-auditing, and this sentence shows why they resonated: it’s a theology of grace experienced as suspense. The subtext is exhaustion. If conviction is the invitation, and he keeps refusing, what happens when the invitations stop? That’s not melodrama; it’s the emotional cost of a faith that measures authenticity by how much you can’t rest.