317. I Am Trusting Thee, Lord Jesus

The Story Behind the Hymn

Frances Ridley Havergal wrote "I Am Trusting Thee, Lord Jesus" in September 1874 while staying at Ormont Dessous in Switzerland. It was later published in her collections Loyal Responses (1878) and Life Chords (1880). Havergal, known among her contemporaries as "the consecration poet" for the way her hymns consistently turned toward complete surrender to Christ, wrote prolifically throughout a life cut short by illness at age forty-two.

Of everything she wrote, this hymn held a singular place in her own life. By later accounts, it was her personal favorite among all her compositions — and after her death, a copy of it was found tucked inside her pocket Bible, evidence of how closely she kept its words with her to the end.

The hymn's structure is built almost entirely on a single repeated phrase — "I am trusting Thee" — applied in turn to pardon, cleansing, guidance, power, and finally to the whole of life, "forever, and for all." It reads less like an argument for trust than a demonstration of it: six short stanzas, each naming one more thing handed over, without embellishment or extended reflection.

Havergal originally composed her own tune for the hymn, called Urbane, though it has since been set most often to Ethelbert W. Bullinger's tune from the same year. Given how plainly the hymn states its case — trust, repeated and specified, stanza after stanza — it is easy to see why a woman known throughout her short life for exactly that kind of unadorned surrender would have kept it closest of all.