One of the most beloved hymns among the saints on earth is “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus,” with its opening line, “O soul, are you weary and troubled, no light in the darkness you see.” That simple refrain has been a powerful encouragement and has provided timely counsel to many a saint in times of stress. As a pastor, and then as a retirement community chaplain, I have sung that refrain many times as I sat at the bedside of a dying believer in a room where family had gathered for the last moments of the earthly life of their loved one. The song has come to us from two ladies, each remarkable in her own right, but neither of whom every met the other in this life.
Our hymnals rightly attribute the hymn to Helen Howarth Lemmel (1863 – 1961). It was in 1922 that she wrote both the words and the music to which we sing it. It is the best known of the more than 500 hymns that she composed. She was born in England to a Wesleyan/Methodist minister and his wife. Her parents encouraged her musical gifts and provided her with the best vocal teachers of the time. When she was 12 years old, in the mid-1870s, her family immigrated to America in a steamboat for her father to serve a church in Mississippi. She rapidly became known as a gifted singer and traveled throughout the Midwest, performing in churches.
It was when her family moved to Wisconsin that Helen became an active part of the music scene, singing, composing, and giving recitals. In her forties, she moved to Seattle where, in addition to her teaching and performing, she found work as a music critic for the Seattle Intelligencer. One of her interviews was with Madam Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936), a famous diva at the time. She convinced Helen to go to Germany to study, which she did for four years. She took her teen-aged daughter with her, but her son was old enough to be on his own. While she was in Germany she sued for divorce on the grounds that her wealthy husband had deserted her. Some have said that it was because she was going blind and he could not accept the challenge of living with a wife who could not see. While she did eventually go blind at the end of her life, it was long after he had abandoned her.
The divorce was not granted at the time because she was not in the country. She returned to America and began performing for the Chautauqua music circuit. She was greatly in demand across the country, singing for children. Her book for children, “Story of the Bible,” was met with wide acclaim. She also traveled performing her own patriotic compositions for soldiers in military camps and providing programs of her own stories and songs on a wide range of subjects. She then taught vocal music at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, preparing a hymnal for Billy Sunday, the famous revivalist of the day.
An active composer and poet until her death, she wrote this hymn in 1922 after receiving a tract about looking at Jesus’ face. The rest is history, as they say. Despite her travels and other jobs around the country, she called Seattle home from 1904 on and was an active member of University Presbyterian Church in Seattle in her retirement. Living in reduced circumstances, she continued to write from her soul in poems set to music. Totally blind by that time, she would pick out notes on a small keyboard and call upon friends to record them before she forgot them. When asked “How are you?” her frequent reply was, “I am fine in the things that count.” She continued to write until the end of her life. She died shortly before her 98th birthday. She was well known and even celebrated in the first decades of the 20th century.
The song for which she is best remembered, “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus,” was inspired by a gospel tract written by Isabella Lilias Trotter, a missionary to Algeria. When Helen was 55, she read a sentence from that tract titled “Focussed. It said, “So then, turn your eyes upon Him, look full in His face, and you will find that the things of earth will acquire a strange new dimness.” These words deeply impressed Lemmel. She later said, “Suddenly, as if commanded to stop and listen, I stood still, and singing in my soul and spirit was the chorus, with not one conscious moment of putting word to word to make rhyme, or note to note to make melody. The verses were written the same week, after the usual manner of composition, but nonetheless dictated by the Holy Spirit.” And oh, how the Holy Spirit has blessed that composition.
Lilias Trotter (1853–1928) was born into a wealthy family in the privileged surrounding of London’s fashionable West End near Regent’s Park during the Golden Age of Queen Victoria. She was privately tutored by governesses at home. She enjoyed travel in Europe, by coach and rail, during the summer months. Her almost idyllic childhood ended when, at the age of 12, she experienced the death of her father.
In a booklet about the story behind the song, “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus,” the author, Miriam Huffman Rockness, summarizes Lilias’ life as follows.
Her spiritual responsiveness was quickened in her early twenties during the Moody/Sankey revival meetings. She sang in the choir and helped in the Inquiry Room following the services. She also participated in the deeper life conferences held at Broadlands, Oxford and Brighton that developed into the permanent Keswick Convention, a world-wide institution vital to this day. Her freshly kindled faith prompted her to serve in missions work.
She originally had before her a major career path direction, if she chose to take it. Famous art critics like John Ruskin saw her early work and were even willing to invest in her training because of the huge potential they saw in her as an artist. Ruskin believed she could become the premier artist of her generation. While she loved art, she also felt a calling from God to reach the lost. She began engaging in this call while in London by going out into the streets in the late hours of the night by herself to reach and rescue prostitutes from the streets. She also felt a calling to share Jesus with the unreached people groups in Algeria in Northern Africa. Responding to this calling would come at a great cost, as it would require her to lay down her budding career as an artist.
As she responded to this call, no mission agencies would send her there or support her mission. Not deterred, she decided to still follow the call of God to Africa and go by herself. She lived among the nationals in the hiddenness of the desert there for forty years. She continued using her artistic gifts, leaving behind a huge number of marvelous scenes of life in North Africa.
Again, here is a description of her ministry from Rockness’ booklet.
From her base in Algiers, over the next four decades, as others came alongside her, she set up stations along the coast of North Africa and deeper down into the Sahara. In the early decades she scouted by camel areas rarely visited by Europeans – much less a European woman – developing a profound and rare relationship with the Sufi Mystic Brotherhood. She even wrote a treasured book for them: “The Sevenfold Secret.” She died in 1918 – at age 75 – leaving a team of workers united under the name Algiers Mission Band, which merged forty-some years later with North Africa Mission – later to be re-named Arab World Ministries as their mission broadened beyond North Africa.
There, in the desert, Trotter knew what it was like to be stripped from every distraction to focus upon the face of Jesus. She had laid down her life for that one purpose. While there, she wrote the poem that later inspired the song “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus.” Here is her account, as she recorded it in that tract that found its way to Helen Lemmel, “Focussed: A Story and a Song.”
It was in a little wood in early morning. The sun was climbing behind a steep cliff in the east, and its light was flooding nearer and nearer and then making pools among the trees. Suddenly, from a dark corner of purple brown stems and tawny moss, there shone out a great golden star. It was just a dandelion, and half withered—but it was full face to the sun, and had caught into its heart all the glory it could hold, and was shining so radiantly that the dew that lay on it still made a perfect aureole round its head. And it seemed to talk, standing there—to talk about the possibility of making the very best of these lives of ours. For if the Sun of Righteousness has risen upon our hearts, there is an ocean of grace and love and power lying all around us, an ocean to which all earthly light is but a drop, and it is ready to transfigure us, as the sunshine transfigured the dandelion, and on the same condition—that we stand full face to God. Gathered up, focussed lives, intent on one aim—Christ—these are the lives on which God can concentrate blessedness. It is “all for all” by a law as unvarying as any law that governs the material universe. How do we bring things to a focus in the world of optics? Not by looking at the things to be dropped, but by looking at the one point that is to be brought out. Turn full your soul’s vision to Jesus, and look and look at Him, and a strange dimness will come over all that is apart from Him, and the Divine “attrait” (French for” attraction”) by which God’s saints are made, even in this 20th century, will lay hold of you. For “He is worthy” to have all there is to be had in the heart that He has died to win.
Though these two women never met, God’s amazing providence is clearly evident in the way He connected these two ladies’ ministries to produce the song “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus.” How could Lilias know when she set off for a brief time alone with God in 1901 that her reflection on a dandelion recorded in her diary – “The word of the Lord came to me this morning through a dandelion” – would become the inspiration for a song that would withstand the test of time, speaking to one generation after another of the importance of “turning full face to Jesus.”
The refrain is probably the best-known part of this hymn. As we sing it, we can’t help but think of the phrase in Hebrews 1 about looking to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. How impressive to realize that the phrase about looking at the Savior was written by a woman who was progressively losing her sight. Like blind Fanny Crosby (“Blessed Assurance”) who wrote that “visions of rapture now burst on my sight,” Helen Lemmel could write about having “light for a look at the Savior,” even when losing her physical vision. Obviously, spiritual vision of the soul is far more powerful than we might otherwise realize.
Stanza 1 certainly connects with us today. There are many circumstances we experience when difficulties press in on us, leaving us feeling “weary and troubled.” It might be serious health complications, or broken relationships, or job pressures, or tensions from threats from hostile nations. Whatever it might be, if we focus (as Lilias Trotter wrote) on Jesus, looking at Him may not cause those other things to disappear, but it will surely enable us to see things from a radically different perspective.
O soul, are you weary and troubled? No light in the darkness you see?
There’s light for a look at the Savior, And life more abundant and free!
The Refrain is where we find the central thought of the song. Like Peter who should have kept looking at Jesus rather than at the stormy sea, we need to focus our attention on Jesus. How do we do that? By remembering who He is, the sovereign lover of our soul … and what He has done, given His life as a ransom to purchase us … and what He has promised, to never leave us or forsake us … and what He has guaranteed, that we will live with Him in glory forever … that we will realize afresh what an abundant life is ours!
Turn your eyes upon Jesus, Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim, In the light of His glory and grace.
Stanza 2 gives us the words to profess our faith in the face of these dangers and anxieties. It is based on the Bible’s teaching about Jesus’ resurrection (1 Corinthians 15) and how He has passed through death into life everlasting. Since we are united to Him by faith, “we follow Him there,” confident that since death could not hold Him, it will not be able to hold us. Sin no longer has dominion over us; Jesus has broken its power. The final phrase of the stanza is obviously drawn from the great assurance passage in Romans 8, that we are now more than conquerors.
Thro’ death into life everlasting, He passed, and we follow Him there;
O’er us sin no more hath dominion – For more than conqu’rors we are!
Stanza 3 leads us to sing to one another, encouraging the weaker saints among us that they can be confident that “His Word shall not fail you – He promised.” Our troubles may continue for a time, but only briefly, and then “all will be well.” As we believe that, we must then “go to a world that is dying,” as Lilias Trotter did in Algeria, and tell them of the Savior’s salvation.
His Word shall not fail you – He promised; Believe Him, and all will be well:
Then go to a world that is dying, His perfect salvation to tell!
Here you can watch and hear the singing of the hymn.
Here is a brief video about Lilias Trotter and Helen Lemmel.