Thomas Chisholm was born in a log cabin in Kentucky and never had much formal education. He was ordained a Methodist minister in 1903, but ill health cut his ministry short after one brief appointment. He ended up selling insurance in Vineland, New Jersey. No big pulpit, no fame. Yet he kept writing poems, more than 1,200 of them. He sent some to musician William Runyan, who said one poem appealed to him so much that he prayed earnestly over the tune. That poem was “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” Decades later, George Beverly Shea sang it in Britain in 1954 and it became a favorite. An ordinary life can still sing of an extraordinary God.
