Lyrics
We are often tossed and driv'n on the restless sea of time;
Somber skies and howling tempests oft succeed a bright sunshine;
In that land of perfect day, when the mists have rolled away,
We will understand it better by and by.
By and by, when the morning comes,
All the saints of God are gathered home,
We will tell the story how we've overcome;
We will understand it better by and by.
We are often destitute of the things that life demands;
Want of food and want of shelter, thirsty hills and barren lands;
We are trusting in the Lord, and according to His Word,
We will understand it better by and by.
Trials dark on every hand and we cannot understand
All the ways that God would lead us to that blessed Promised Land,
But He guides us with His eye, and we'll follow till we die,
For we'll understand it better by and by.
Temptations, hidden snares often take us unaware,
And our hearts are made to bleed for a thoughtless word or deed,
And we wonder why the test when we try to do our best,
But we'll understand it better by and by.
Public domain hymn text and tune (published 1905). Words and music by Charles Albert Tindley.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Charles Albert Tindley was born in 1851 in Berlin, Maryland, the son of an enslaved father and a free mother; his mother died while he was still young, and his father was later sold away to another household. Tindley taught himself to read, made his way to Philadelphia at seventeen, and worked as a janitor at Bainbridge Street Methodist Episcopal Church while attending night school and completing correspondence courses toward the ministry. In 1902 he returned to that same congregation, no longer as its janitor but as its pastor, and grew it into one of the largest Methodist churches in the country — so large that it was renamed Tindley Temple in his honor in 1924.
Tindley wrote "We'll Understand It Better By and By" in 1905, publishing it in the first edition of his own hymn collection, Soul Echoes. He was not musically trained and could not notate music himself, relying instead on colleagues such as Francis A. Clark to write down the tunes he composed by ear. The hymn was one of eight he wrote during a period of real strain in his ministry, as negotiations dragged on over the purchase of a larger church building for his growing congregation.
Its content reflects the daily reality of the mostly poor, urban, African American congregation Tindley served — want of food and shelter, trials that made no obvious sense, temptations and hidden snares — answered every time not with an explanation but with a deferred one: understanding will come, but not yet, and not here.
Widely regarded as one of the founding figures of American gospel music, Tindley composed more than forty hymns over his career, several of which, including this one, went on to directly shape the freedom songs of the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement — a legacy rooted in a Philadelphia congregation that once employed him to sweep its floors.
