343. There Shall Be Showers of Blessing

The Story Behind the Hymn

Daniel W. Whittle wrote "There Shall Be Showers of Blessing" in 1883, with James McGranahan composing the tune the same year. It became one of several hymns the two men produced together during an eleven-year partnership that began, poignantly, at the scene of tragedy — McGranahan and Whittle first grew close in the aftermath of the 1876 Ashtabula train disaster that killed Philip P. Bliss, McGranahan's predecessor as Whittle's song leader.

Whittle himself carried the marks of an earlier tragedy: wounded and captured at the Battle of Vicksburg during the Civil War, he lost his right arm and was held as a Confederate prisoner. It was during that captivity that he became a Christian, reading a New Testament his mother had given him. He went on to write lyrics for nearly two hundred hymns, most of them under the pen name El Nathan, while working alongside Dwight L. Moody in evangelistic campaigns across America.

The hymn's text draws its central image from Ezekiel 34:26, where God promises "showers of blessing" on His people — a promise Whittle turns into direct petition rather than simple recitation, each stanza asking plainly for what the verse describes. The refrain distinguishes between the "mercy-drops" already falling and the fuller "showers" still being sought, a small but deliberate distinction between blessings already received and those still prayed for.

The hymn's final verse ties the promised refreshing directly to obedience — "if we but trust and obey" — a line that later gave its phrase to an entirely separate, equally well-known hymn of the same era, evidence of how thoroughly that particular pairing of words had settled into the vocabulary of American gospel song by the 1880s.