5. What a Friend We Have in Jesus

The Story Behind the Hymn

Joseph Scriven was born in Ireland in 1819 and educated at Trinity College Dublin, and his early adult life was marked by a devastating loss that appears to have permanently reshaped the course of everything that followed: the night before his planned wedding, his fiancee drowned in an accident. Not long afterward, Scriven emigrated to Canada, settling in Ontario, where he lived out the rest of his life in a manner strikingly different from the comfortable, educated path his upbringing might have predicted.

Rather than pursuing a conventional career, Scriven devoted much of his time in Canada to quiet, largely unrecorded acts of practical charity — chopping and delivering firewood for elderly or disabled neighbors who could not do it themselves, sitting with the sick, giving away most of what little money he had, and reportedly working at times as a manual laborer himself despite his university education, apparently by deliberate choice rather than necessity. Locals who knew him described a man who seemed to regard ordinary physical service to the poor as a spiritual discipline in itself.

He wrote this hymn's text not for publication or public use but as a private poem meant only to comfort his own mother, still living back in Ireland, who was passing through a difficult season of her own. Scriven apparently never intended for anyone beyond her to read it, and by most accounts gave the matter no further thought once it was sent. It was only discovered years later, almost by accident, when a friend visiting him during a period of illness noticed the poem among his papers and asked whether he had written it; Scriven reportedly answered simply that he and the Lord had written it together, and seemed reluctant to take much personal credit for it.

Scriven's own life ended in tragic and uncertain circumstances in 1886: he was found drowned near his Ontario home, in a manner some contemporary and later accounts have suggested may have been intentional, amid a period of declining health and what appears to have been serious depression. That sober, largely undocumented reality sits behind a hymn whose plain, unadorned language of comfort — offering companionship for 'all our sins and griefs' — has since been sung at countless funerals and in countless private seasons of grief around the world, its origins as a quiet gift to one grieving mother now dwarfed by the scale of comfort it has since offered to millions of strangers.