Meditations

In 1885, Carl Boberg, a Swedish editor and future politician, was walking home in the bayside town located on the south-eastern coast of Sweden when a thunderhead appeared on the horizon. The lightning flashed and thunderclaps shook the air. Boberg ran for shelter. When the storm began to relent, he rushed home.

When he opened his windows to let the fresh bay air in, he saw the vision of tranquility that he says stirred something deep in his soul. The sky was clear. had cleared. As the thrushes sang, he could hear in the distance, the resonant knell of church bells sounded. Recalling the roaring thunderstorm and now the calm of the atmosphere, Boberg sat down and wrote “O Store Gud”—the poem that, through a winding series of events would become “How Great Thou Art.”

The lyrics were published in a local newspaper, and an unknown Swede put “O Store Gud” to the tune of a Swedish folk song. In the late 1800s several versions were published, but it wasn’t until the early 1900s that “O Store Gud,” which translates literally to “O Mighty God,” hopped the Swedish border. In the first decade of the 20th century the song was translated into German, later a Russian version appeared. It was not until 1925, that the first English language version was penned. However, the English iteration, translated by the Swedish-American E. Gustav Johnson, is not the song we know today. It would be another quarter century, with the help of a British missionary, that the song would become what we know it as today.