Introduction

Recently my father and I were moved by a YouTube video of the story behind the timeless hymn, "Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus", written by Helen Lemmel (1863-1961) in 1918. Helen’s inspiration came from a short leaflet a friend gave her titled “Focussed: A Story and A Song” written by Lilias Trotter (1853-1928), a gifted artist, who chose to serve the Lord as an Algerian missionary rather than pursue a lucrative art career. Lilias created this leaflet based on a diary entry she made in 1901, when early one morning, while alone in the woods, she was captivated by a single dandelion illuminated by the sun.

This is the story of these two remarkable women-a musician and an artist, and how the Lord merged their talents over time and distance to create this inspiring hymn. Miriam Rockness, who tells the story, concludes, “God is at work in our individual lives and in the family of faith, using our meager gifts and offerings in the ordinary course of daily living. We may never know how and where and when a word, a touch, an action will be transmuted by God into something beyond our intentions.” May this story and song be a blessing to you this day.

The Story Behind the Hymn “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus”

By Miriam Rockness

Have you ever wondered how a song comes into being? Which comes first? The words or the music? How is a song presented to the world?

The story of the song “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus” is about two women – Lilias Trotter, Helen Lemmel – each remarkable in her own right, and how their unique talents merged to create one of the most beloved spiritual songs of the 19th century, enduring to this day.

I have immersed myself in the life of Lilias Trotter for almost thirty years, but I have known little about Helen Lemmel until recently. While they never met each other, Helen, born a decade later, in 1863, had much in common with Lilias. Like Lilias, she was born in England, however of modest means her father being a Wesleyan Methodist pastor. She had a normal childhood which was changed enormously when in 1875, at the age of 12, her family emigrated to the United States eventually settling in Wisconsin. She, like Lilias, was artistically gifted. A great musical talent was identified in young Helen, gaining her a reputation as a brilliant singer. Music was her passion. As a young woman she traveled widely throughout the Midwest giving concerts in many churches.

In 1904, at the age of 40, she moved to Seattle, Washington, where she was able to merge her remarkable literary abilities with her love of music becoming the music critic for the Seattle-Post Intelligencer. She moved to Germany in 1907 where she spent the next four years continuing her study of voice with private lessons. While in Germany, she met and married a wealthy European.

Upon the completion of her studies, she moved back to the Midwest (1911) where she entered an active period of concertizing throughout the United States. She gave concerts in churches and traveled on the Chautauqua circuit, a popular performance venue of that era. She was greatly in demand throughout the United States, performing her own patriotic compositions for soldiers in Military Camps as well as providing programs of her own stories and songs of a wide range of subjects.

Even as she experienced success in secular venues, her first love and loyalty was to her Christian faith. She continued to give concerts in churches and eventually became the vocal music teacher at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Illinois, even leading a woman’s choral group for Billy Sunday during the peak of his career. At the same time she continued her literary pursuits writing hymns as well as stories and poems for children. Her book for children, Story of the Bible, was met with wide acclaim.

Then a tragedy struck that would have a life-altering effect. She was diagnosed with an affliction that would result in blindness. Her husband, unable to cope with that reality, abandoned the marriage, leaving her to cope on her own. What might have been a debilitating experience physically as well as emotionally, only turned her more completely to God and to her most compelling vocation: the composing of hymns from the depths of her heart and life experience. She authored around 500 hymns, lyrics and music, many in circulation to this day.

She moved back to Seattle, Washington upon retirement where, living in reduced circumstances, she continued to write out her soul in poems set to music. Now totally blind, she would pick out the notes on a small keyboard and call upon friends to record them before she forgot them. When asked “How are you?” her frequent reply was, “I am fine in the things that count.” Like Lilias, she continued to write until the end of her life. She died at 97 years of age.

How then did collaboration between Lilias Trotter and Helen Lemmel take place? How did one song merge from two women who never met each other?

In my previous post, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus (October 26, 2012) https://ililiastrotter.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/turn-your-eyes-upon-jesus/, I detailed how Lilias wrote and almost two decades later Helen was introduced to the little leaflet, “Focussed”. Upon reading the leaflet, one phrase stood out to Helen with clarity: “Turn full your soul’s vision to Jesus, and look and look at Him, and a strange dimness will come over all that is apart from Him.” The words seemed to repeat themselves over and over in her mind during the following week. This became her inspiration to write both music and text for the song “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus” an experience she recorded in her memoirs: “Suddenly, as if commanded to stop and listen, I stood still, and singing in my soul and spirit was the chorus, with not one conscious moment of putting word to word to make rhyme, or note to note to make melody. The verses were written the same week, after the usual manner of composition, but nonetheless dictated by the Holy Spirit.” A few years later, it was published in a book of 67 songs written by Helen, Glad Tidings, used as the songbook for the Keswick Convention – where it became their theme song, the summer of 1924, launching its popularity.

I marvel, in reflection, at the Divine collaboration through which God used people and so-called circumstances to further His Purposes. How could Lilias know when she set off for a brief time alone with God that early morning in 1901 that her reflection on a dandelion recorded in her diary – “The word of the Lord came to me this morning through a dandelion.” – would become the inspiration for a leaflet that inspired a song that would withstand the test of time, speaking to one generation after another of the importance of “turning full face to Jesus.”

Likewise, as I view the years between Lilias’s death and the present, I marvel how God has chosen to keep Lilias’s legacy alive – first through the colleagues of Lilias who recorded her story and various writings in published works. . . the devoted missionary (Eva Longley) who remained in Algeria until she had seen the passage of Lilias’s archives – journals, diaries, papers, paintings – to safety in Europe. . . the generosity of the staff at the Arab World Ministries Headquarters in the UK who gave me full access to those archives for research . . . the individuals who underwrote the costs of publishing a biography and contributed to a compilation of her writings and watercolors. . . and the couple who came alongside with their vision of translating this story into the medium of film . . .

As we stand on the brink of the release of the film, Many Beautiful Things, I am in awe that God is now “resurrecting” her legacy through this visual medium – and the ways and means by which He “used” countless individuals to accomplish His ongoing purposes. John Stott wrote, “God invites us to share in his work. Indeed, our work becomes a privilege when we see it as a collaboration with God.”

And that, for me, it the bigger story. God is at work in our individual lives and in the family of faith, using our meager gifts and offerings in the ordinary course of daily living. We may never know how and where and when a word, a touch, an action will be transmuted by God into something beyond our intentions. Lilias didn’t. But we carry on. Who knows when our prose will become a song?

By Lilias Trotter

It was in a little wood in early morning. The sun was climbing behind a steep cliff in the east, and its light was flooding nearer and nearer and then making pools among the trees. Suddenly, from a dark corner of purple brown stems and tawny moss, there shone out a great golden star. It was just a dandelion, and half withered - but it was full face to the sun, and had caught into its heart all the glory it could hold, and was shining so radiantly that the dew that lay on it still made a perfect aureole round its head. And it seemed to talk, standing there - to talk about the possibility of making the very best of these lives of ours.

For if the Sun of Righteousness has risen upon our hearts, there is an ocean of grace and love and power lying all around us, an ocean to which all earthly light is but a drop, and it is ready to transfigure us, as the sunshine transfigured the dandelion, and on the same condition - that we stand full face to God.

Gathered up, focussed lives, intent on one aim - Christ - these are the lives on which God can concentrate blessedness. It is "all for all" by a law as unvarying as any law that governs the material universe.

We see the principle shadowed in the trend of science; the telephone and the wireless in the realm of sound, the use of radium and the ultra violet rays in the realm of light. All these work by gathering into focus currents and waves that, dispersed, cannot serve us. In every branch of learning and workmanship the tendency of these days is to specialize - to take up one point and follow it to the uttermost.

And Satan knows well the power of concentration, if a soul is likely to get under the sway of the inspiration, "this one thing I do," he will turn all his energies to bring in side-interests that will shatter the gathering intensity.

And they lie all around, these interests. Never has it been so easy to live in half a dozen good harmless worlds at once - art, music, social science, games, motoring, the following of some profession, and so on. And between them we run the risk of drifting about, the "good" hiding the "best" even more effectually than it could be hidden by downright frivolity with its smothered heart-ache at its own emptiness.

It is easy to find out whether our lives are focused, and if so, where the focus lies. Where do our thoughts settle when consciousness comes back in the morning? Where do they swing back when the pressure is off during the day? Does this test not give the clue? Then dare to have it out with God - and after all, that is the shortest way. Dare to lay bare your whole life and being before Him, and ask Him to show you whether or not all is focussed on Christ and His glory. Dare to face the fact that unfocussed good and useful as it may seem, it will prove to have failed of its purpose.

What does this focussing mean? Study the matter and you will see that it means two things - gathering in all that can be gathered, and letting the rest drop. The working of any lens - microscope, telescope, camera - will show you this. The lens of your own eye, in the room where you are sitting, as clearly as any other. Look at the window bars, and the beyond is only a shadow; look through at the distance, and it is the bars that turn into ghosts. You have to choose which you will fix your gaze upon and let the other go.

Are we ready for a cleavage to be wrought through the whole range of our lives, like the division long ago at the taking of Jericho, the division between things that could be passed through the fire of consecration into "the treasury of the Lord," and the things that, unable to "bide the fire," must be destroyed? All aims, all ambitions, all desires, all pursuits - shall we dare to drop them if they cannot be gathered sharply and clearly into the focus of "this one thing I do"?

Will it not make life narrow, this focusing? In a sense, it will - just as the mountain path grows narrower, for it matters more and more, the higher we go, where we set our feet - but there is always, as it narrows, a wider and wider outlook and purer, clearer air. Narrow as Christ's life was narrow, this is our aim; narrow as regards self-seeking, broad as the love of God to all around. Is there anything to fear in that?

Lilias Trotter Watercolor - Excerpt from Journal

And in the narrowing and focussing, the channel will be prepared for God's power - like the stream hemmed between the rockbeds, that wells up in a spring - like the burning glass that gathers the rays into an intensity that will kindle fire. It is worthwhile to let God see what He can do with these lives of ours, when "to live is Christ."

How do we bring things to a focus in the world of optics? Not by looking at the things to be dropped, but by looking at the one point that is to be brought out.

Turn full your soul's vision to Jesus, and look and look at Him, and a strange dimness will come over all that is apart from Him, and the Divine "attrait" by which God's saints are made, even in this 20th century, will lay hold of you. For "He is worthy" to have all there is to be had in the heart that He has died to win.

Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus - Song Lyrics

1. O soul, are you weary and troubled?
No light in the darkness you see?
There’s light for a look at the Savior,
And life more abundant and free!

Refrain:
Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.

2. Thro' death into life everlasting,
He passed, and we follow Him there;
O’er us sin no more hath dominion-
For more than conqu’rors we are!

3. His Word shall not fail you--He promised;
Believe Him, and all will be well:
Then go to a world that is dying,
His perfect salvation to tell!

A Story and A Song

Introduction

By Lilias Trotter

Between Faith and Doubt