Faith & Spirit Quote by David Brainerd

Death is usually the scene-stealer; Brainerd demotes it to a scheduled appointment. The line opens in the register of bodily reportage - "disorder", "symptoms", "consumption" (the era's slow, prestigious killer, tuberculosis). That clinical plainness matters: it denies romance and denies panic. Then comes the hinge phrase, "my great change", a euphemism that does double work. It softens death into process, and it signals a theology where the self is not finally anchored in health, reputation, or even time, but in the afterlife promised by God.

The sentence turns on a rhetorical surprise: not merely "never been affrighted" but "at times much delighted". Brainerd isn't trying to sound brave; he's trying to sound properly oriented. For an 18th-century evangelical clergyman, the scandal isn't fear of death; it's fear of being spiritually unprepared for it. The subtext is a kind of audit: he is recording evidence of grace operating in his emotions. "Blessed be God" functions less as pious garnish than as attribution - the calm isn't his achievement, it's God's gift, which protects him from the sin of self-congratulation.

Context sharpens the intent. Brainerd, a missionary celebrated for austere devotion, wrote diaries that later shaped Protestant ideas of "holy dying". Here, the private journal voice performs for an imagined future reader: a template for how to feel when the body collapses. The delight isn't morbidity; it's desire disciplined into doctrine, death reframed as arrival rather than loss.