Lyrics
Day by day, and with each passing moment,
Strength I find, to meet my trials here;
Trusting in my Father's wise bestowment,
I've no cause for worry or for fear.
He Whose heart is kind beyond all measure
Gives unto each day what He deems best —
Lovingly, its part of pain and pleasure,
Mingling toil with peace and rest.
Every day, the Lord Himself is near me
With a special mercy for each hour;
All my cares He fain would bear, and cheer me,
He Whose Name is Counselor and Pow'r.
The protection of His child and treasure
Is a charge that on Himself He laid;
"As thy days, thy strength shall be in measure,"
This the pledge to me He made.
Help me then in every tribulation
So to trust Thy promises, O Lord,
That I lose not faith's sweet consolation
Offered me within Thy holy Word.
Help me, Lord, when toil and trouble meeting,
E'er to take, as from a father's hand,
One by one, the days, the moments fleeting,
Till I reach the promised land.
Public domain hymn text (Swedish, 1865; English translation by Andrew L. Skoog), based on 2 Corinthians 4:15-16.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Karolina Wilhelmina Sandell-Berg wrote "Blott en Dag" ("Day by Day") in Swedish in 1865. Sandell, born in 1832 as the daughter of a Lutheran minister in the parish of Fröderyd in Småland, Sweden, had by then already lived through the tragedy most closely associated with her hymn writing: at age twenty-six, she watched her father drown after being thrown from a boat during a crossing of Lake Vättern. Though this hymn is often connected to that loss, some scholars believe she wrote it several years afterward, out of a settled reflection on trust rather than the raw grief of the immediate aftermath.
The tune, composed in 1872 by the Swedish evangelist and musician Oskar Ahnfelt, paired with Sandell's words to create one of the two hymns for which she remains best known internationally, alongside "Children of the Heavenly Father." Sandell went on to write more than six hundred hymns over her lifetime, becoming one of the most significant hymn writers in Swedish Lutheran history.
The English translation used today comes from Andrew L. Skoog, a Swedish immigrant to the United States, whose rendering carried the hymn into American hymnals in the years following its introduction, where its popularity has only grown since.
The hymn's central image — strength given not all at once but "day by day, and with each passing moment" — draws on 2 Corinthians 4:16, where Paul describes being renewed day by day even as the outer self wastes away. Sandell's text turns that renewal into something intimate and immediate: not a general promise of future strength, but a Father's daily, hour-by-hour attention to exactly what each moment requires.
