Text · full lyrics
My God, my Father, blissful name!
Oh, may I call Thee mine.
May I with sweet assurance claim
A portion so divine?
This only can my fears control,
And bid my sorrows fly.
What harm can ever reach my soul,
Beneath my Father’s eye?
Whate’er Thy providence denies,
I calmly would resign,
For Thou are just, and good, and wise;
O bend my will to Thine.
Whate’er Thy sacred will ordains,
Oh, give me strength to bear;
And let me know my Father reigns,
And trust his tender care.
If pain and sickness rend this frame,
And life almost depart,
Is not Thy mercy still the same,
To cheer my drooping heart?
If cares and sorrows me surround,
Their pow'r why should I fear?
My inward peace they cannot wound,
If Thou, my God, art near.
Thy sov'reign ways are all unknown
To my weak, erring sight;
Yet let my soul, adoring own
That all Thy ways are right.
My God, my Father, be Thy name
My solace and my stay;
Oh, wilt Thou seal my humble claim,
And drive my fears away?
The lyricist
Anne Steele
Steele spent her whole life in the Particular Baptist community where her father — a timber merchant — preached without pay for some sixty years; she lived barely fifteen miles from Isaac Watts. She turned down more than one marriage proposal, including one from the hymn-writer Benjamin Beddome, on the conviction that a household would crowd out her writing, and agreed to let her hymns appear in print only reluctantly, under the name Theodosia. What set her apart was a refusal to look away from suffering: where Watts had passed over the bleakest psalms, finding no Christian joy in them, Steele set them to verse — Psalm 88 and its unbroken darkness among them — and let the grief stand. "My God, My Father, Blissful Name" is one of her gentler pieces, a hymn of resignation that steadies itself, verse by verse, against pain, sickness, and whatever providence denies.
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