Monday, 31 December 2007

Regarding Robert Robinson

I've been reading up on the guy who wrote the hymn I posted the other day, turns out he was born in swaffham! I think its rather cool that the words of a song that I like so much was written by a norfolk lad, got popular in american, was then recorded by the David Crowder Band and then by Sufjan Stevens which I then listened to a few hundred years later.

However, I feel kinda tragically, it doesn't seem to have worked out quite as well for Robert as I would have hoped.

Robinson’s wi­dowed mo­ther sent him at age 14 to Lon­don, to learn the trade of bar­ber and hair dress­er. How­ev­er, his mas­ter found he en­joyed read­ing more than work. Con­vert­ed to Christ at age 17, Ro­bin­son be­came a Meth­od­ist min­is­ter. He lat­er moved to the Bapt­ist church and pas­tored in Cam­bridge, Eng­land. He wrote a num­ber of hymns, as well as on the sub­ject of the­ol­o­gy. His lat­er life was ev­i­dent­ly not an ea­sy one, judg­ing from a well known sto­ry about his hymn “Come, Thou Fount of Ev­ery Bless­ing.” 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.”
Happy new year btw.

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