I Need Thee Every Hour
Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God. 2 Corinthians 3:5
In his book, The Practice of Presence of God, Brother Lawrence claimed to be as close to God while working in the kitchen as when praying the chapel. The Lord, after all, is always near us, thus wherever we are is holy ground. That was the experience of Annie Hawks, a housewife and mother of three in Brooklyn, New York.
As a child, Annie Sherwood had dabbled in poetry, her first verse being published when she was fourteen. In 1857, she married Charles Hawks and they established their home in Brooklyn, joining Dr. Robert Lowry's hanson Place Baptist Church. With the good doctor's encourgaement, she began writing Sunday school songs for children, and he set many of them to music.
"I Need Thee Every Hour" was written on a bright June morning in 1872. Annie later wrote, "One day as a young wife and mother of 37 years of age, I was busy with my regular household tasks. Suddenly, I became so filled with the sense of nearness to the Master that, wondering how one could live without Him, either in joy or pain, these words, 'I Need Thee Every Hour,' were ushered into my mind, the thought at once taking full possession of me."
The next Sunday, Annie handed these words to Dr. Lowry, who wrote the tune and chorus while seated at the little organ in the living room of his Brooklyn parsonage. Later that year, it was sung for the first time at the National Baptist Sunday School Association meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, and published in a hymnbook the following year.
When Annie's husband died sixteen years later, she found that her own hymn was among her greatest comforts. "I did not understand at first why this hymn had touched the great throbbing heart of humanity," Annie wrote. "It was not until long after, when the shadow fell over my way, the shadow of great loss, that I understood something of the comforting power in the words which I had been permitted to give out to others in my hour of sweet serenity and peace."
Some time after Charles' death, Annie moved to Bennington, Vermont, to live with her daughter and son-in-law. All in all, she wrote over four hundred hymns during her eighty-three years, though only this one is still widely sung.
Excerpt from "Then Sings My Soul" by Robert J. Morgan
Thomas Nelson Publishers
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