Born June 8, 1915, at Melville, Saskatchewan, Canada, Edith Clarkson Toronto. She spent 38 years as an elementary school teacher; two of these were spent in a lumber camp, and five years in a gold mining camp in northern Ontario. Then she taught in the Toronto public schools until retirement in 1973. A member of the Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto, she has been very active in the work of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship since it began in Canada. Her published writings include textbooks (Let’s Listen to Music, 1944, and The Creative Classroom, 1958) and several books of devotional prose and poetry. She worked with Donald Hustad in writing lyrics for the cantata Celebration of Discipleship, 1974, and has authored more than 20 hymns, some of which were published by The Hymn Society of America.

Here are her words about the writing of “So Send I You”: “I grew up in an atmosphere where ‘laying all on the altar’ was preached to the nth degree, and the full-orbed glory of the great commission was not declared. Conse- quently, my song was all on one vein, and not really true to the gospel, although I was not aware of this. It was written in 1937 merely as a poem, not a song, and appeared in a religious magazine in 1938 or so. After that, I heard nothing of it for 16 years. Meanwhile, I had moved to another church and grown up spiritually. While I like my little poem, I was by then well aware of its deficiencies. Then suddenly it appeared in John W. Peterson’s (1921- see SDAH 111) setting. He had been sent the words with no name attached. In time I saw it and got in touch with him.”

From his home in Paradise Valley, Arizona, Peterson sent this story of how he set her poem to music: “In the summer of 1954, I was on the staff of Moody Bible Institute radio station WMBI, Chicago. One of the girls in the office handed me a poem one day that had impressed her. She thought I could possibly read it on one of the programs I conducted called The Shut-in Hour. The poem was ‘So Send I You.’ I did use it and was deeply moved by the verses, so much so that I tucked them away in my briefcase that I would be carrying to Kansas a few weeks later for a summer vacation. One morning in Wichita, Kansas, while improvising at the piano at the home of my mother, with the lines of this poem before me, the melody came. As I sang it through, I was again deeply moved by the power of the lyrics. I called some of my family who were present to come to the piano and hear the new song. Their reaction was the same as mine. Somehow I sensed in my heart that God s going to use this song. It was first published in Low Voice, one of a group of books called Melody-Aire Series that I produced for Moody Press in 1954.”

After this tune was written, Clarkson wrote a second set of words that in a more mature way gave expression to the challenge she found in John 20:21: “Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. “This new text was published by Singspiration in 1963 and included in the Baptist Hymnal, 1975, the same version SDAH uses. She adapted SDAH 244, “My Song Shall Be of Jesus.”

📖 Reference: Companion to the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal by Wayne Hooper and Edward E. White. Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1988.