Sing the wondrous love of Jesus,
Sing His mercy and His grace;
In the mansions bright and blessed
He’ll prepare for us a place.
When we all get to heaven,
What a day of rejoicing that will be!
When we all see Jesus,
We’ll sing and shout the victory!
While we walk the pilgrim pathway,
Clouds will overspread the sky;
But when trav’ling days are over,
Not a shadow, not a sigh.
Let us then be true and faithful,
Trusting, serving every day;
Just one glimpse of Him in glory
Will the toils of life repay.
Onward to the prize before us!
Soon His beauty we’ll behold;
Soon the pearly gates will open;
We shall tread the streets of gold.
Public domain hymn text (published 1898). Words by Eliza E. Hewitt.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Eliza E. Hewitt, the Philadelphia schoolteacher whose promising teaching career had ended abruptly after a serious spinal injury left her bedridden for an extended period of recovery (discussed more fully elsewhere in this collection under hymn 66, 'Sunshine in My Soul'), wrote this hymn's text in 1898 during the same general extended span of ongoing physical suffering and limitation that had already substantially redirected her entire working life away from classroom teaching and toward hymn writing as her primary remaining creative outlet. Emily D. Wilson separately composed the hymn's accompanying tune.
The hymn's vividly detailed, almost outright celebratory picture of a future heavenly reunion with departed loved ones — 'what a day of rejoicing that will be' — once again clearly reflects Hewitt's own characteristic, consistently maintained refusal to allow her ongoing physical confinement and daily pain to dictate or limit the emotional register of her creative writing; rather than dwelling at length on her own present physical limitations, as many might understandably have done in her circumstances, she instead wrote some of her entire era's most genuinely exuberant, forward-looking, celebration-focused hymns from directly within a physical body that, on any given day, actually gave her comparatively little immediate outward cause for celebration.
Hewitt continued to serve faithfully for many years afterward as the official Sunday school superintendent of her own Philadelphia congregation despite her ongoing significant physical limitations, and hymns very much like this one, built around simple, immediately joyful, easily learned congregational choruses, were written quite specifically and deliberately with exactly that particular Sunday school setting already firmly in mind — songs consciously intended to be sung enthusiastically together by children and adults alike within that setting, entirely regardless of whatever the individual writer's own daily physical circumstances happened to actually be at the moment of composition.
