65. Anywhere with Jesus

The Story Behind the Hymn

Jessie Brown Pounds was an American hymn writer from Ohio who, despite suffering from chronic poor health that significantly limited her ability to travel widely or hold any conventional form of outside employment for much of her adult life, nonetheless managed to write roughly four hundred separate hymn texts over the course of her working life, along with several published novels and additional Sunday school instructional books, essentially all of it composed while working largely or entirely from within her own home due to her ongoing physical limitations.

She wrote this particular hymn's text specifically to fit an already-existing tune previously composed by Daniel B. Towner, who at the time served as director of music at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, following the generally common working practice of the era in which composers and lyricists frequently worked entirely independently of one another and were subsequently paired together after the fact by publishers seeking a workable combination, rather than the two collaborators working side by side together in direct, ongoing personal consultation throughout the writing process, as some other hymn-writing partnerships in this collection did.

The hymn's core governing idea — that a genuine believer can go forward confidently 'anywhere' life might lead them, including directly into hardship, deep uncertainty, or an entirely unfamiliar and unpredictable future, provided only that Jesus Himself remains genuinely present alongside them throughout — resonated with particular force during the era's rapidly growing organized missionary movement, a period during which large numbers of young American Christians were actively and deliberately leaving comfortable, familiar homes behind for uncertain, physically demanding, and often genuinely dangerous missionary postings in unfamiliar foreign mission fields around the world.

Those departing young missionaries were, in effect, trusting quite literally and directly in exactly the theological claim at the center of Pounds's hymn: that God's continued presence with them, wherever their calling specifically led, would ultimately matter far more for their wellbeing and sense of security than any amount of their own careful advance preparation, worldly resources, or physical safety could ever provide on its own.