245. My God and Father, while I stray
Charlotte Elliott, 1789-1871
A hymn written by one who had disciplined herself to accept with patience and resignation the bitter cross of ill health which was laid upon her.
She writes of her experience:
Oh, many struggles and apparently fruitless ones it has cost me to become resigned to the appointments of my Heavenly Father. But the struggle is now over. He knows, and he alone, what it is, day after day, hour after hour, to fight against bodily feelings of almost overpowering weakness, languor, and exhaustion; to resolve not to yield to slothfulness, depression, and instability, such as the body causes me to long to indulge, but to rise every morning determined to take for my motto: “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow Me.”
The hymn is based on Matt. 26:42: “O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.” It is a hymn of humble resignation. Another hymn, setting forth the will of God as demanding active co-operation, is found at [No. 342]. Some fine stanzas have been omitted here:
Though Thou hast called me to resign
What most I prized, it ne’er was mine;
I have but yielded what was Thine—
“Thy will be done.”
Should grief or sickness waste away
My life in premature decay,
My Father, still I strive to say,
“Thy will be done.”
Let but my fainting heart be blest
With Thy sweet Spirit for its Guest;
My God, to Thee I leave the rest—
“Thy will be done.”
For comments on Charlotte Elliott see [Hymn 233].
MUSIC. HANFORD was written for “Jesus, my Saviour, look on me,” another of Miss Elliott’s hymns. The composer, who often stayed in the home of Mrs. Gertrude Clay-Ker-Seymer at Hanford, in Dorsetshire, wrote the tune there, hence its name.
For comments on the composer, Arthur Sullivan, see [Hymn 113].