Time & Perspective Quote by David Brainerd

Brainerd’s line reads like a private journal entry that accidentally exposes a whole theology of anxiety. Time isn’t just a neutral resource here; it’s a moral substance, “precious” because it’s on loan from God and immediately convertible into either faithfulness or failure. The ache in the sentence comes from its double motion: time “slide[s] away” with the soft inevitability of gravity, while the speaker is stuck in self-accusation, watching. That verb choice matters. Sliding implies no villain, no dramatic catastrophe, just the quiet theft of days through inertia.

The intent is devotional but also disciplinary. Brainerd isn’t merely confessing; he’s trying to manufacture urgency in himself, to turn feeling into behavior. The phrase “so little to any good purpose” is tellingly vague. He doesn’t specify which duties he’s neglecting, because the real target is the self’s chronic insufficiency. This is Puritan-inflected introspection at full volume: the fear that even sincere effort may still be spiritually inadequate, that wasted hours aren’t just inefficient but condemnable.

Context sharpens the pressure. Brainerd lived fast and sick, dying at 29, and his diaries became a template for Protestant piety precisely because they dramatize the inner life as a battleground. Read now, the line also sounds like an early, religious version of productivity guilt: the sense that time’s value must be proved through “good purpose.” It works because it doesn’t resolve the tension; it stages it, making the reader feel time’s steady exit and the sting of not having earned it.