Amazing Grace

🔥✨🕊 Amazing Grace 🕊✨🔥
Song History~
Amazing Grace has become the best-known ageless Christian hymn in the World. Many prominent people, including Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash, have recorded the song.
It's estimated that the beloved spiritual is performed over 10 million times annually and has appeared on over 11000 albums worldwide. ('That makes me 1 in 10,000 to sing it this year 😉)
John Newton, an English poet, and Clergyman wrote Amazing Grace's words in 1772 and later published them in 1779. Newton was born in 1725 in London, a son to John Newton Sir, a shipping merchant, and Elizabeth Newton, an instrument maker.
On a return trip to England, his ship was hit by a violent storm and almost capsized. The crew member who had replaced him on the deck was rushed into the waves and drowned. This prompted Newton to pray, and by God's Grace, the cargo shifted to fill the hole in the ship.
Although he operated the vessel for the rest of the storm, he later commented that throughout the event, he realized it was not by his strength and doing, but only the Grace of God could save them. Newton took this as his first step to convert to Christianity. In the very words of his hymn, this occurrence marked "the hour I first believed."
Later in 1750, Newton married his longtime sweetheart Mary, a daughter of the Cattle's, and three years after, he suffered a stroke that stopped him from going back to the sea. He then studied theology and became an ordained Anglican priest in 1764. He wrote 280 hymns to accompany his ministry and wrote the words of "Amazing Grace" in 1772, which first appeared in the Olney Hymns, and later set to the famous tune "New Britain," in 1835 by William Walker.