'Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus

In God I have put my trust; I will not be afraid.

Psalm 56:11

How fitting that a missionary should write this hymn about faith and trust. Louisa M. R. Stead was born about 1850 in Dover, England. She felt a burden to become a missionary in her teenage years. When she was 21 or so, she immigrated to the United States and attended a gospel meeting in Urbana, Ohio. There, she decided that she would become a missionary.

She made plans to go to China, but her hopes were dashed when her health proved too frail for the climate there. Shortly afterward, she married a man named Stead. But sometime around 1879 or 1880, Mr. Stead drowned off the coast of Long Island. Some accounts say that he saved a boy who was drowning, and other accounts say both Mr. Stead and the boy perished. Other records suggest it was his own four-year-old daughter, Lily, that he saved. In any event, the family's beach-side picnic ended in tragedy for Louisa.

Shortly afterward, taking little Lily, Louisa went to South Africa as a missionary, and it was there during those days she wrote, "Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus."

Louisa served in South Africa for fifteen years, and while there she married Robert Wodehouse. When her health forced a return to America, Robert preached at a local church. In 1900, her health restored, Robert and Louisa attended a large missionary conference in New York, and were so enthused by the experience they again offered themselves as missionary candidates.

They arrived as missionaries in Rhodesia on April 4, 1901, "In connection with this whole mission there are glorious possibilities," she wrote, "One cannot in the face of the peculiar difficulties help saying, 'Who is sufficient for these things?' but with simple confidence and trust we may and do say, 'Our sufficiency is of God.'"

Louisa retired in 1911, and passed away in 1917; but her daughter Lily, married missionary D. A. Carson and continued the work for many years at the church's mission station in southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).

Taken from the book: Then Sings My Soul

Note: You need to scroll to the bottom of the blog and pause the playlist before beginning the clip. :)