5. What a Friend We Have in Jesus

The Story Behind the Hymn

Joseph Scriven was born in Ireland in 1819 and educated at Trinity College Dublin, where he seemed set for a conventional, comfortable life. The night before his wedding, his fiancée drowned in a tragic accident.

Not long after that loss, Scriven emigrated to Canada and settled in Ontario, where he would spend the rest of his life, never marrying the woman he was engaged to a second time before she too died young.

Rather than pursue the career his education might have predicted, Scriven spent his time on quiet, mostly unrecorded acts of charity — chopping firewood for neighbors who couldn’t manage it themselves, sitting with the sick, and giving away what little money he had.

Those who knew him described a man who treated ordinary physical service to the poor as its own form of spiritual discipline, living simply and without any apparent concern for his own comfort or reputation.

He wrote this hymn’s words as a private poem, intended only to comfort his mother back in Ireland during a difficult season of her own. He never meant for anyone else to read it.

It was only discovered years later, almost by accident, when a friend visiting him during an illness noticed the poem among his papers and asked who had written it. Scriven reportedly said simply that he and the Lord had written it together.

Scriven’s own life ended in uncertain, tragic circumstances in 1886. He was found drowned near his home, in a manner some accounts suggest may have been intentional, amid declining health and what those close to him described as real depression.

That sober reality sits behind a hymn whose plain, comforting language — offering companionship for ‘all our sins and griefs’ — has since been sung at countless funerals around the world.

What began as a private gift to one grieving mother in Ireland has gone on, in the century and a half since, to comfort millions of strangers who never knew Scriven’s name.