Joseph Scriven wrote What a Friend We Have in Jesus in 1855 for his mother, who was ill in Ireland while he was in Canada. The hymn was never meant for publication. It was a private letter in verse form, a son's attempt to comfort a mother he couldn't reach.
The hymn opens with a proposition both simple and staggering: Jesus is a friend. Not a judge, not a distant God, but a friend. Scriven had learned this in his own trials. He had come to Canada to escape scandal, he had lost the woman he loved, he had endured hardship and loss. Yet in all of it, he had found Jesus not as an impersonal force but as a friend who knows him and bears his sorrows.
The hymn's genius is its permission to struggle. What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer. Yet we carry other things instead, worrying where we should be praying, sulking where we should be finding refuge. The hymn invites honesty: Is there a single thing we carry that Jesus doesn't want to carry with us? The answer is no. Bring it all.