Wealth & Money Quote by David Brainerd

Brainerd’s sentence is a spiritual gut-check disguised as a work ethic. It takes the ordinary human urge to “make something of yourself” and flips it into a different narrative: you are not an author of your own life, you’re staff. The verb choices do the heavy lifting. “Placed” strips away the romance of self-invention; it implies assignment, not adventure. “Labour faithfully” sanctifies persistence, but the real target is motive: “not with a design to grow rich and great.” That phrase isn’t anti-ambition so much as anti-self. It’s a preemptive strike against the early modern version of hustle culture, where visible success can masquerade as virtue.

The subtext is both theological and psychological. Theologically, it’s classic Protestant piety: vocation as service, glory directed upward, not inward. Psychologically, it’s a method for disciplining desire. Brainerd is trying to re-train the inner ledger where people tally status, comfort, and praise. He replaces it with a different currency: faithfulness and “all the good we possibly can,” a line that smuggles in urgency and breadth. Not minimal compliance. Maximal beneficence.

Context matters because Brainerd wasn’t a complacent parish professional. As an 18th-century missionary associated with the Great Awakening, chronically ill and dying young, he wrote from a life where “growing rich and great” wasn’t just suspect, it was irrelevant. The quote reads like a personal antidote to despair: if your body is failing and your results are uncertain, you can still claim meaning through intention. It’s a bracing redefinition of success: not outcomes, not acclaim, but the alignment of work, motive, and God.