It should come as no surprise that many of our most beloved hymns were written as a result of some extremely painful experience. We have examples of that with “It Is Well with My Soul” (four daughters lost in a ship sinking), “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go” (a fiancé who backed out), “Just As I Am” (a bed-ridden invalid), “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” (a drowning just before a wedding), and “Now Thank We All Our God” (millions of deaths during Germany’s 17th century Thirty Years’ War). In moments of our lives that are most emotionally powerful, even devastating, it’s natural that the human heart finds strength in the beauty of poetry wedded to music. That’s probably one of the main attractions to the biblical Psalms, which are, as Calvin called them, “the anatomy of the soul.”
One of those examples of hymns that came from tragedies is the Swedish hymn, “Day by Day and with Each Passing Moment.” Carolina (“Lina,” pronounced Lie-nah) Wilhelmina Sandell Berg (1832-1903) wrote this text in 1865 at the age of 26, several years after she experienced a terrible tragedy. She had been with her father, Jonas, a Lutheran pastor, on board a ship while crossing Lake Vättern in Sweden. Suddenly the ship lurched, and before her eyes her father was thrown overboard and drowned. Lina had written hymns before, but after this calamity, she poured out her broken heart in an on-going stream of beautiful songs. She grew to become Sweden’s most celebrated author of gospel hymns, and wrote so many that she has often been called “the Fanny Crosby of Sweden.” Her more than 600 hymns also included “Children of the Heavenly Father” and had a mighty influence on the revival that swept across Scandinavia after 1850.