Written after a drowning: the story of “‘Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus”

A family day by the sea turned into tragedy. A boy was drowning, and a man jumped into the water to save him. Both died, while the man’s wife and small daughter watched from the shore. From that loss came one of the gentlest hymns in the English language.

Louisa Stead's family

Louisa M. Stead was born in Dover, England, in 1850. She became a Christian at the age of nine and, as a teenager, felt called to missionary work. Stead moved to the United States. At a camp meeting in Urbana, Ohio, she again felt called to be a missionary, this time to China, a call she had felt in her teenage years.

In 1875, she married and moved to New York City, where her daughter, Lily, was born.

The drowning and the hymn

When Lily was four, the family visited Long Island Sound. They heard the cries of a drowning boy. Stead’s husband jumped in to save him, but both drowned, in front of Stead and her daughter. Left a widow with a young child and little money, Stead faced great hardship. The hymn she wrote in the years after reflects a hard-won trust rather than easy cheerfulness.

The lyrics were written in 1882 and appeared in Stead’s Songs of Triumph. The music was composed by William J. Kirkpatrick, a prolific American gospel composer.

The words

“‘Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus, just to take Him at His word, just to rest upon His promise, just to know, ‘Thus saith the Lord.'” The chorus repeats: “Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him! How I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er!” The line in the chorus takes on new meaning when you know her story. Stead did not write about trust in theory. She wrote about testing it in grief and poverty and finding it held.

Southern Africa

Stead eventually fulfilled her missionary calling, serving for many years in southern Africa with her daughter, who also became a missionary. The hymn is sung widely in Ghana, Nigeria and across Africa, often at funerals and prayer meetings, where its simple words comfort people in loss. The word “sweet” can sound sentimental. Coming from a woman who watched her husband drown, it becomes something much stronger: a decision to trust when every reason to despair was in front of her.