Songfacts®:

• "Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus" is a classic hymn that holds out a promise of Christ's help for troubled souls. The song has been included in most evangelical hymnals since the words were first written by Helen Howarth Lemmel in 1918 and has been translated into many languages around the world.
• The inspiration for the hymn came from a tract given to Lemmel by a missionary friend of hers, Lilias Trotter, entitled "Focused." The pamphlet contained these words: "So then, turn your eyes upon Him, look full into His face and you will find that the things of earth will acquire a strange new dimness."
• Lemmel originally published "Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus" in England in 1918, and then included it four years later in a collection called Glad Songs. The hymn first achieved popularity that same year at the Keswick Bible Conference in northern England. Its debut appearance in the United States was in 1924, in an American song collection called Gospel Truth in Song, published by Harry Clarke.
• Helen Howarth Lemmel was a gifted singer who had a successful concert career in the Midwest as a young woman and also was the vocal music teacher for a number of years at the Moody Bible Institute. She wrote more than 500 hymns and poems, of which "Turn your Eyes Upon Jesus" is best known, and continued to write until the end of her life. Lemmel died in 1961 at 97 years of age.
• Some websites state that Lemmel wrote the words to "Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus" following many heartaches, including adult blindness and the abandonment of her husband, who walked out on her when she lost her sight. It certainly is a moving story if this is true but we suspect it may be an urban myth.
• The Christian singer Lauren Daigle recorded "Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus" for her 2018 Look Up Child album.