The Wanderer

O to grace how great a debtor

Daily I’m constrained to be!

Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,

Bind my wandering heart to Thee.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,

Prone to leave the God I love;

Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,

Seal it for Thy courts above.

Surely one of the reasons this hymn is so loved is the pure honesty of it.  The author admits what we know to be true of ourselves. “I love you, Lord, but I’ve blown it before, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to blow it again.  Save me! Keep me close to you.”

I referred in the last post to the poem “The Hound of Heaven”. Though I had heard the phrase, I wasn’t at all familiar with the poem of that name. When I read its opening lines, I couldn’t help think of this stanza and wonder whether its author, Francis Thompson, had become acquainted with this hymn. He wrote:

I fled Him down the nights and down the days

I fled Him down the arches of the years

I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind, and in the midst of tears

I hid from him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes I sped and shot precipitated

Adown titanic glooms of chasmed fears

From those strong feet that followed, followed after.


The author of "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing", Robert Robinson, evidently was well-acquainted with wandering.  The biographical information I've found about him indicated he had a fairly rough and misspent youth, but was converted through the preaching of George Whitefield and the influences of Methodism.  He became a minister himself, but some speculate that perhaps life continued to be rocky.  A story told on Cyberhymnal suggests rough times in the faith:

One day, he encountered a woman who was studying a hymnal, and she asked how he liked the hymn she was humming. In tears, he replied, “Madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then.

Lord, rather than fleeing you down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind, let your goodness bind my wandering heart to you until I see you face to face.