233. Love Lifted Me

The Story Behind the Hymn

James Rowe, the English-born writer who gave "Love Lifted Me" its words, emigrated to the United States in 1889 and went on to become one of the most prolific hymn writers of his era, credited over his lifetime with thousands of song texts. In 1912, while living in Connecticut, he collaborated with organist Howard E. Smith on this hymn, its imagery drawn from Matthew 14 — Peter stepping out onto the storm-tossed water toward Jesus, beginning to sink, and being caught by an outstretched hand.

Smith, who composed the tune, worked despite hands badly twisted by arthritis, a detail that has struck many who later learned it — a man who could barely play the instrument writing one of the more buoyant, easily singable gospel tunes of the era. The pairing of Rowe's vivid rescue narrative with Smith's rolling, wave-like melody gave congregations a hymn that felt less like a statement of doctrine and more like a story being lived out in real time.

The hymn found its widest early audience through the evangelistic campaigns of Billy Sunday, the former professional baseball player turned revivalist, whose crusades in the 1910s helped carry "Love Lifted Me" into hymnals and congregations across the country.

More than a century later, its central image — not a slow, gradual improvement but a sudden, decisive rescue from drowning — still gives the hymn its distinctive urgency among gospel songs of personal testimony, its bright refrain circling back again and again to the same simple claim: love lifted me.