I Can’t Count Them All

Lina Sandell (1832–1903) is to Sweden what Fanny Crosby is to America — her country's most beloved hymn writer. A frail child who preferred her pastor-father's study to the playground, she grew up soaked in scripture and began writing verses young. She would eventually write some 650 hymns, including 'Children of the Heavenly Father' and 'Day by Day,' songs that carried the Swedish revival movement of her century.

Her life held deep sorrow: at twenty-six, traveling by ship across Lake Vättern, she watched her father fall overboard and drown. Legend says her greatest hymns sprang from that tragedy — though in truth some of her most trusting songs were written before it, which may be the more remarkable fact. The grief didn't create her faith; it tested a faith she had already set to music.

In 1880 Sandell was looking at an illustration in a children's picture book — a child working an arithmetic problem on a slate. The image sparked a thought: some things cannot be counted. She began writing 'Jag kan icke räkna dem alla' — 'I cannot count them all' — a hymn about God's mercies, falling new like morning dewdrops, more numerous than anyone could tally.

The organist Albert Lindström gave it its melody in 1889, and the little counting song became one of Sweden's most cherished hymns — still in the Swedish national hymnal today, and among the songs most often sung at Swedish funerals: a whole life's blessings, admitted at last to be uncountable.

Swedish Latter-day Saints have sung it since 1993, when it entered the Church's Swedish hymnbook. Then, on February 13, 2025, it crossed into English for the first time — released as hymn #1029 in Hymns—For Home and Church, among the first hymns ever translated from another language into the Church's English hymnal.

The Church's hymn resource distills its message in one line: 'Because the Lord is loving, He shows mercy and gives countless gifts to us' — blessings as constant, it adds, 'as the stars that fill the night sky.'