Story Behind the Hymn “Another Year is Dawning”

My favorite New Year’s hymn is Frances Ridley Havergal’s “Another Year Is Dawning.” Like many of Frances’s hymns, this one is a wonderful declaration of Christian consecration to living for the Lord.

Frances Havergal (1836-1879) was an English poet and hymn writer. Many of her poems and hymns emphasized devotional closeness to Christ and dedicated service to Him. Those were primary emphases Frances sought to cultivate in her own life and to promote to other believers.

Such consecration is clearly seen in her best-known hymn, “Take My Life and Let It Be,” as well as in some of her other well-known songs: “Lord, Speak to Me,” “I Gave My Life for Thee” and “Who Is on the Lord’s Side?”

Each New Year’s Day Frances reconsecrated herself to living for Jesus. As a result, she wrote several New Year’s hymns, “Another Year Is Dawning” being the most popular of those. She composed this particular poem near the end of 1873 as a prayer for New Year’s 1874. She had it printed on a greeting card to be sent to friends. The card’s caption read, “A Happy New Year! Ever Such May It Be!”

As circumstances turned out, Frances herself ended up needing this prayer, for just a few days later she experienced a stunning setback. She was looking forward to being launched as an author in America, and her agent in New York had made reassuring promises. Then a letter came which she thought would bring a royalty check, perhaps the first of many. It instead brought the intelligence that her publisher had gone bankrupt in the Stock Market crash of 1873.

Frances had only recently entrusted all her affairs to the Lord. As a result, she was able to bear this sudden reversal of her prospects with peace. She wrote of this to a friend:

“I have just had such a blessing in the shape of what would have been only two months ago a really bitter blow to me. … I was expecting a letter from America, enclosing thirty-five pounds now due me, and possibly news that [my book] was going on like steam. The letter has come and, instead of all this, my publisher has failed in the universal crash. He holds my written promise to publish only with him as the condition of his launching me, so this is not simply a little loss, but an end of all my American prospects. …

“I really had not expected that He [God] would do for me so much above all I asked [Ephesians 3:20], as not merely to help me to acquiesce in this, but positively not to feel it at all, and only to rejoice in it as a clear test of the reality of victorious faith which I do find brightening almost daily. Two months ago this would have been a real trial to me, for I had built a good deal on my American prospects; now ‘Thy will be done’ is not a sigh but only a song.”

By God’s grace working in her life, on this occasion, Frances certainly lived up to the sincere consecrated sentiments she had not long before penned in “Another Year Is Dawning.”

Whether or not you are familiar with this hymn, I would encourage you to spend a few minutes contemplating and perhaps even singing it. (It is set to the tune of another well-known hymn, “The Church’s One Foundation.”) May the Lord help all of us to live lives that are deeply devoted to Him in the coming year.