Jesus, lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy bosom fly,
While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high.
Hide me, O my Savior, hide,
Till the storm of life is past;
Safe into the haven guide;
O receive my soul at last.
Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee;
Leave, ah! leave me not alone,
Still support and comfort me.
All my trust on Thee is stayed,
All my help from Thee I bring;
Cover my defenseless head
With the shadow of Thy wing.
Thou, O Christ, art all I want,
More than all in Thee I find;
Raise the fallen, cheer the faint,
Heal the sick, and lead the blind.
Just and holy is Thy name,
I am all unrighteousness;
False and full of sin I am,
Thou art full of truth and grace.
Plenteous grace with Thee is found,
Grace to cover all my sin;
Let the healing streams abound,
Make and keep me pure within.
Thou of life the fountain art,
Freely let me take of Thee;
Spring Thou up within my heart,
Rise to all eternity.
Public domain hymn text (published 1740). Words by Charles Wesley.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Charles Wesley wrote thousands of hymns over the course of his long and extraordinarily productive life, and while many of them draw on vivid, deliberately chosen imagery of refuge, shelter, and rescue from danger, this hymn is counted among the most intensely personal and emotionally exposed of everything he ever wrote, notably lacking the more triumphant, confident tone found in better-known Wesley hymns such as 'O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing' (hymn 16 in this collection).
A well-known but historically unverified tradition, passed down through generations of hymn commentary without ever being firmly documented in Wesley's own writing, holds that he composed it after taking sudden, urgent shelter from a violent storm — in some retellings of the story, fleeing instead from an angry mob hostile to his open-air preaching — inside the dense branches of a roadside hedge, an image some readers connect directly to the hymn's opening plea to let his soul 'fly' for immediate refuge to the shelter of Christ's presence, much as a bird might dart into cover from a sudden storm.
Whatever the precise, unverifiable circumstances behind its actual composition, the hymn's recurring imagery of storm, shipwreck, and desperate, urgent refuge reflects the genuinely turbulent and at times physically dangerous realities of an eighteenth-century open-air preacher's working life. Wesley and his brother John were frequently harassed by hostile crowds during their itinerant preaching tours across England, were on more than one documented occasion physically attacked or pelted with stones and rotten produce by mobs opposed to Methodist preaching, and were regularly exposed for hours at a stretch to harsh weather while preaching outdoors to crowds too large for any available building to hold.
The hymn has remained, across nearly three centuries since its writing, one of the most widely sung and frequently recorded of all Charles Wesley's several thousand hymns, valued in particular for its raw, unguarded emotional honesty — its central line, 'other refuge have I none,' is not framed as a triumphant declaration of victorious faith but as a stark, almost desperate admission of complete dependence and vulnerability, sung across the intervening centuries by generations of believers facing genuinely desperate circumstances of their own, for whom Wesley's uncertain, storm-driven imagery has often felt far more honest than more confidently triumphant hymns.
