Trusting Jesus

March 7, 2019 (Thursday)
Edgar Page Stites was a Civil War veteran who became a river boat captain and later a missionary to churches in South Dakota. This poem of his first appeared in the newspaper. The poem came into the possession of the great evangelistic singer, Ira Sankey, who set it to music. In his 1906 autobiography, Sankey recalled the following about the comfort of the song:
About two years ago, writes a minister, “I visited a woman who was suffering from an incurable disease. She said: ‘The future is so dark, I dare not look forward at all.’ The minister asked, ‘Can’t you trust yourself in God’s hands?’ She replied: ‘No, I can’t leave myself there.’
He repeated the words of the hymn, “Simply trusting every day,” and especially dwelt on the refrain, “Trusting as the moments fly, trusting as the days go by.” “Ah,” she said, “I can trust him this moment; is it like that? I then sang the hymn to her, and the change that came over her was wonderful. She never lost this trust, and she had the page in her hymn-book turned down, that she might have the hymn read to her. After many months of intense suffering she passed away, simply trusting, to the land where there shall be no more pain.”