A Son's Tribute - In Heavenly Love Abiding

This hymn has figured in our family's life events over the years and my Dad's Thanksgiving Service begins with it.

 

It is tempting to think of this as an old person's hymn -

 

In heavenly love abiding,
No change my heart shall fear;
And safe is such confiding,
For nothing changes here.
The storm may roar without me,
My heart may low be laid;
But God is round about me,
And can I be dismayed?

 

When Anna Waring wrote it she was, in fact, 27 years old.

 

What awful circumstances had led her to write this poetry of devotion?  What hurts and harms had given her such depth of consciousness about God's providential love?  None actually.  Or at least as far as we can know from her story.  She learned what she learned not by the University of Experience but by the glory of Scripture.

 

Our family - and not least my Dad who spent but four weeks in hospital (his last four weeks) - has not been visited by the unending tragedies that afflict some.  To get depth we must get it from our knowledge of God.  Yet in this way, my Dad was able to enter on his last days as if a veteran of hospitalisation, for although he was unfamiliar with the environment he was very familiar with the abiding love of God.  And he found that there.