Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way!
Thou art the Potter, I am the clay.
Mold me and make me after Thy will,
While I am waiting, yielded and still.
Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way!
Search me and try me, Master, today!
Whiter than snow, Lord, wash me just now,
As in Thy presence humbly I bow.
Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way!
Wounded and weary, help me, I pray!
Power, all power, surely is Thine!
Touch me and heal me, Savior divine!
Public domain hymn text (published 1902). Words by Adelaide A. Pollard.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Adelaide A. Pollard, an American missionary and Bible teacher who had already spent considerable time earlier in her working life directly serving among the urban poor and who later went on to serve for a period in African mission fields, wrote this hymn's text in 1902 during a genuinely difficult period of deep personal discouragement, occurring specifically after a planned and already partially arranged missionary trip to Africa fell through entirely for simple lack of adequate financial funding, an unexpected setback that left her personally uncertain about both her own specific sense of calling and her broader future direction in ministry.
During this same discouraging period, she attended a small prayer meeting at which an elderly woman present prayed aloud, quite simply and without elaboration, 'It's all right, Lord. It doesn't matter what you bring into our lives. Just have your own way with us.' Struck forcefully and immediately by this simple, unadorned phrase, Pollard reportedly went directly home that same night and wrote out this hymn's entire text in one sustained sitting, deliberately building it around Jeremiah 18:1-6, the Old Testament prophet's own extended vision of a potter actively reshaping a marred, imperfectly formed piece of clay on his spinning wheel into something new and useful. George C. Stebbins, already discussed elsewhere in this collection as the composer responsible for the tune of 'Ye Must Be Born Again' (hymn 75), separately composed the accompanying music.
The hymn's now-central, repeated plea to be actively reshaped according entirely to God's own will rather than according to one's own carefully laid personal plans directly and quite precisely mirrors the specific, dateable personal uncertainty and disappointment Pollard herself was actively working through in her own life at the exact moment she sat down to write it; she did, notably, go on to serve successfully as an actual missionary in Africa in later years, meaning the very hymn she wrote out of a canceled missionary trip eventually preceded her own successful missionary service by several more years of continued waiting, uncertainty, and further patient reshaping of her own original plans.
