Lord of our growing years

Lord of our growing years. David Mowbray* (1938- ). A favourite of the author’s among his own texts, this distinctive and genuinely ‘all-age’ hymn was written ca. 1977 at Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, and included in his first collection Kingdom Come: Fifty Hymns for Parish Services. This actually contained 53 texts, and was the first of three such locally produced collections, which had a wider acceptance without being formally published. Mowbray has reduced Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages of man’ to a more manageable five; his work has some similarity to Jan Struther*’s ‘all-day hymn’ (which encompasses hours rather than years), ‘Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy’*. The third stanza, he...