245. God Will Take Care of You

The Story Behind the Hymn

Civilla and Walter Stillman Martin wrote "God Will Take Care of You" out of an ordinary domestic moment in 1904 rather than any dramatic event. Walter, a Baptist minister, was scheduled to preach at a church some distance from home, but Civilla was unwell and could not travel with him. As he prepared to leave anyway, their nine-year-old son asked a simple question: "Don't you think God will take care of her?"

Walter went on to preach as planned. When he returned home, he found that Civilla, moved by their son's unshaken confidence, had written out a poem built on exactly that phrase. Walter sat down at their small Bilhorn organ and set it to music that same day, and the hymn appeared in print the following year, 1905, in Songs of Redemption and Praise.

The hymn went on to have an impact well beyond typical hymnal use. Among those it is credited with influencing was James Cash Penney, the future founder of the J. C. Penney department store chain, who heard it sung in the chapel of the Kellogg Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, during a period of personal crisis, and later described the hymn as a turning point.

Its structure is plain almost to the point of being a child's answer to a child's question — each verse names a different worry (toil, danger, need, testing), and each is met by the identical, unadorned assurance repeated four times over: God will take care of you.