Singing All the Time

Words by E. P. Hammond Music by George C. Stebbins

“I feel like singing all the time,
My tears are wiped away.”

“One day in a children's meeting in Utica, New York, ”the Rev. E. P. Hammond writes me,”while I was explaining how Jesus loved us and gave himself for us, I noticed a bright-looking girl bursting into tears. She remained at the inquiry-meeting, and with others was soon happy in the love of Christ. The next day she handed me a letter of which this is a part: ' I think I have found the dear Jesus, and I do not see how I could have rejected him so long. I think I can sing with the rest of those who have found him, Jesus is mine. The first time I came to the meetings I cried, but now I feel like singing all the time.' This prompted me to write the hymn, but I had no thought of its ever being sung, although it almost seemed as if I could hear her singing:

' I feel like singing all the time,
My tears are wiped away,
For Jesus is a friend of mine,
I'll serve him every day.'

“Mr. Spurgeon was very fond of this hymn. At the first meeting in his building one of his deacons said to me, ' This Tabernacle will seat six thousand grown people, but there are eight thousand crowded into it to-day.' Three thousand could hot get in on account of the crowd. Every child had one of our hymn-books, and all united in singing this hymn which they loved so much. It has been sung in our meetings in nearly every state in the Union, and translated into many languages. We sang it in our daily meetings in Jerusalem, near where Christ was crucified, and away in Alaska, two thousand miles north of San Francisco. Thousands of children sang it in Norway and Sweden, day after day.

“A little boy, who felt himself a great sinner in not having loved Jesus, was led by God's spirit to believe, and his burden was gone. Bright smiles took the place of tears, and with the happy throng he was soon joining in the song, ' I feel like singing all the time.' Little did I then think that years afterward I would find that same boy the pastor of a large church in Minneapolis, rejoicing that so many of his own Sunday-school were able to join in the same hymn which he sang when his heart was filled with a newfound love for Christ. It was largely through his influence that during one week of our meetings in Minneapolis, last spring, about seven hundred confessed conversion. I received in one day at Newark, New Jersey, more than two hundred letters from those who had just professed to have found Christ in our meetings. Many of those young converts, in giving what they believed to be the story of their conversion, often put in the words, ' Now I feel like singing all the time.'"