“There shall be showers of blessing”:
This is the promise of love;
There shall be seasons refreshing,
Sent from the Savior above.
Showers of blessing,
Showers of blessing we need:
Mercy drops round us are falling,
But for the showers we plead.
“There shall be showers of blessing” —
Precious reviving again;
Over the hills and the valleys,
Sound of abundance of rain.
There shall be showers of blessing:
Send them upon us, O Lord;
Grant to us now a refreshing,
Come, and now honor Thy word.
Note: the later verse(s) below have been reconstructed from historical memory and may not be word-for-word identical to the original published text.
Public domain hymn text (published 1883). Words by Daniel W. Whittle.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Daniel W. Whittle served as a Union Army officer throughout much of the American Civil War and lost his right arm in combat at the Battle of Vicksburg in 1863, a serious and permanently disabling injury that marked and shaped the entire remainder of his subsequent life in visible, lasting ways. He later became a prominent full-time evangelist, working actively within the wider circle of preachers and gospel songwriters closely associated with D. L. Moody's broader American revival movement, and he wrote this hymn's text under the deliberately chosen pen name 'El Nathan' in 1883, drawing directly on Ezekiel 34:26, a prophetic Old Testament passage that specifically promises 'showers of blessing' as a visible outward sign of God's restored favor toward His previously wayward people.
James McGranahan separately composed the hymn's accompanying tune. Whittle's own personal life had already been permanently and visibly shaped by the literal, physical violence and lasting bodily loss of war well before his later religious conversion and subsequent full-time evangelistic career began, and his hymns more broadly, including this particular one, consistently carried an unusually direct, almost matter-of-fact, weather-report-like plainness in their overall language and imagery, notably different in tone from the more elaborately poetic or emotionally ornate style found in some other gospel hymns of the same general period.
Rather than requesting some vaguer, more abstractly defined form of general spiritual improvement, the hymn's text asks quite specifically and concretely for a genuinely needed 'shower' of spiritual renewal, phrased throughout in terms that any actual farming or river-dependent community of Whittle's own era would have immediately and directly understood as a matter of urgent, practical, life-or-death seasonal concern — since a season's rainfall, or its absence, could quite literally determine survival, financial ruin, or genuine hardship for an entire agricultural community over the following months — giving the hymn's underlying spiritual plea an unmistakably concrete, physically grounded edge entirely consistent with the direct, plain-spoken style found throughout the rest of Whittle's own hymn-writing career.
