Have Thine Own Way, Lord Adelaide A. Pollard, 1907

Adelaide Pollard wrote the words in 1902, according to Ernest Emurian's 1959 account cited by the Hymnology Archive. They first appeared in the Northfield Hymnal with Alexander's Supplement in 1907, in four stanzas. George C. Stebbins wrote the tune ADELAIDE, also dated 1907. It is sometimes called HOLY DESIRE.

The best known story says Pollard heard an elderly woman pray at a prayer meeting and wrote the hymn that night after thinking about the potter in Jeremiah 18. The Hymnology Archive traces that version to the Salvation Army writer Gordon Avery in 1961, more than 25 years after Pollard died in 1934. A 1964 account by Reynolds ties the hymn to her time with the evangelist Frank Sandford. Stebbins wrote a book of gospel hymn stories in 1924 and never mentions this hymn. The sources that tell the prayer meeting story are all later than the events.

Pollard was born in Bloomfield, Iowa, in 1862. Stebbins directed music at First Baptist Church in Chicago, Clarendon Street Baptist Church in Boston and Tremont Temple, and he worked in campaigns with Dwight L. Moody. Baptist Hymnal 1991 prints the tune in E flat major and lists Psalm 86:11. The Hymnology Archive also links the words to Isaiah 64:8, Psalm 139:23 and 24, and Galatians 2:20.