How Great Thou Art

Some hymns are gentle companions. This one is not. How Great Thou Art will rip your heart out of your chest in the best possible way — not because it is loud or showy, but because it carries the weight of storms, mountains, refugees, revivals, and ordinary believers whose souls sing to God in all of it.

It’s one of history’s best “reverse mission” stories. While missionaries are usually sent to export the gospel and culture, Stuart Hine went to Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 30s and ended up importing a masterpiece that would eventually define English‑speaking worship.

Here is how a Swedish poem took a detour through Russia and became a global anthem (and my favorite lullaby for my firstborn).

The Swedish Seed

In 1885, Carl Boberg — editor, lay minister, and witness to a storm that felt like the sky splitting open — found himself standing in the sudden stillness that follows terror. Thunder had shaken the bay; then, just as abruptly, the world went quiet and the church bells began to ring.

That whiplash of fear and beauty moved him to write O Store Gud (“O Great God”). It was a poem born from awe — the kind that leaves you breathless, the kind that makes you feel very small and very held at the same time.

The poem traveled: first through Sweden, then into German, then into Russian. And it was this Russian version, Veliky Bog, that would eventually find its way into the ears of a British missionary.

The Missionary’s Discovery

In the 1930s, Stuart Hine and his wife, Edith, were ministering in the Carpathian Mountains. Hine wasn’t searching for a hymn; he was searching for souls. But he kept hearing villagers sing a melody so full of longing and majesty that it stopped him in his tracks.

The mountains around him echoed the lyrics. The people’s voices carried a kind of reverence that felt ancient. Hine began translating the Russian text into English, and as he did, God kept placing him in moments that felt like living footnotes to the hymn — sweeping vistas, transformed hearts, and the trembling awe of new believers encountering Scripture for the first time.

Verse 3 was born from one such moment: a village receiving Bibles they had never held before. Their shock at forgiveness — their tears, their trembling gratitude — moved Hine to write the lines that still undo us today.

Bringing It Home

When WWII erupted, Hine was forced back to Britain. He carried with him a half‑finished translation and a heart full of stories.

In 1948, he wrote the final verse — not from a mountaintop, but from the grief of Eastern European refugees who had lost everything. Their longing for home, for safety, for a world made right again, shaped the hymn’s eschatological hope. Hine wrote of the true homecoming — Christ’s return — because he needed to give them something no war could take.

There’s a holy irony here: Hine went to give, and God sent him home carrying a gift that would outlive him by centuries.

The hymn simmered quietly in small British evangelical circles until 1954, when a copy of Hine’s sheet music reached George Beverly Shea. And when Shea sang it at the 1957 Billy Graham Crusade in New York, the response was so overwhelming they sang it ninety‑nine times.

Because people didn’t just like it, they felt it. It cracked something open in them.

The Story Reaches Us

And now the hymn has reached us — you and me, standing in our kitchens or our churches or our cars, singing words shaped by storms and refugees and revival tents and mountain villages.

We are the next link in the chain.

When we sing How Great Thou Art, we’re not just remembering a Swedish poet or a Russian village or a British missionary. We’re stepping into the same awe that moved them. We’re letting our own lives become part of the hymn’s long journey of praise.

Because this hymn doesn’t just tell a story. It pulls one out of you — the story of your own smallness, your own wonder, your own longing for home, your own gasp of recognition when you realize God is far greater than you dared to hope.

The story didn’t end in the Carpathians or in London or at Madison Square Garden. It continues every time an ordinary believer lifts their voice and lets their soul sing.

The Song That Carried Me

For me, this hymn became more than history — it became a lullaby.

It was the song I sang over my firstborn when he was just a wee little baby. I had felt the Holy Spirit powerfully while I was pregnant with him, prayed something like Hannah’s prayer, making a covenant to raise my son and dedicate him to the Lord.

Having him was another leap of faith in my walk with Christ. I suffered major physical complications in giving birth, and it took a full year to recover and regain mobility. For that first year, I couldn’t always go to him, couldn’t always hold him the way I longed to.

Sometimes all I had was my song for him to know I was there and I loved him so much — and this was the song my soul was singing.

When I think back on that year, I don’t remember the pain. I remember the peaceful and the stormy nights, singing over the child for whom I prayed, a hymn of awe, gratitude, and communion.

He is a blessed child. And every time I sing How Great Thou Art, I remember that the same God who carried Boberg through the storm and Hine through the mountains carried me through mine — and still carries my son.