In heavenly love abiding,
No change my heart shall fear;
And safe is such confiding,
For nothing changes here.
The storm may roar without me,
My heart may low be laid;
But God is round about me,
And can I be dismayed?
Public domain hymn text (1850). Words by Anna L. Waring.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Anna L. Waring was a Welsh poet who came from a Quaker family before later joining the Church of England as an adult, and she wrote this hymn's text in 1850, part of a comparatively small published body of hymn writing — she wrote and published far fewer hymns over her lifetime than many of the more prolific writers represented elsewhere in this collection, yet several of her hymns, including this one, achieved lasting and widespread popularity despite her modest overall output.
Waring was known among those who knew her personally for actively visiting prisons and working directly with incarcerated women, a practical charitable commitment she maintained over many years alongside her writing, and several of her hymns, including this one, reflect a consistent theme of finding settled inward peace specifically amid outward circumstances that remain difficult or unchanged — language that carried particular resonance given her own direct, ongoing exposure to the genuinely difficult circumstances of the imprisoned women she regularly visited.
The hymn's central claim, that inward security can remain entirely undisturbed even while 'the storm may roar without,' reflects a theological emphasis on the believer's inward relationship with God as fundamentally independent of, rather than reliant upon, favorable external circumstances — a message Waring appears to have tested directly against her own repeated encounters with genuine hardship and confinement through her prison visiting work, rather than developing the idea only as an abstract devotional theme.
The hymn has remained a favored choice specifically for funerals and other occasions calling for quiet reassurance amid difficult circumstances, its author's own comparatively small published output — a handful of widely loved hymns rather than the thousands produced by writers like Fanny Crosby or Charles Wesley elsewhere in this collection — standing as a reminder that lasting influence in hymnody has never depended strictly on sheer volume of output.
