(bright piano music)
("Sonata no. 1, III.
Finale - Florence Price")
(upbeat gospel instrumentals)
♪ Come, ye thankful people, come ♪
♪ Raise the song of harvest home ♪
♪ All is safely gathered in ♪
♪ Ere the winter storms begin ♪
♪ God our Maker doth provide ♪
♪ For our wants to be supplied ♪
♪ Come to God's own temple, come ♪
♪ Raise the song of harvest home ♪
♪ All the world is God's own field ♪
♪ Fruit unto God's praise to yield ♪
♪ Wheat and tares together sown ♪
♪ Unto joy or sorrow grown ♪
♪ First the blade and then the ear ♪
♪ Then the full corn shall appear ♪
♪ Lord of harvest, grant that we ♪
♪ wholesome grain and pure may be ♪
♪ Even so, Lord, quickly come ♪
♪ To thy final harvest home ♪
♪ Gather thou thy people in ♪
♪ Free from sorrow, free from sin ♪
♪ There, forever purified ♪
♪ In thy presence to abide ♪
♪ Come, with all thine angels, come ♪
♪ Raise the glorious harvest home ♪
- Yale University acknowledges
that indigenous peoples
and nations, including the
Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot,
Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke,
Golden Hill Paugussett,
Niantic, Quinnipiac, and other
Algonquian-speaking peoples,
have stewarded through generations
the lands and waterways
of what is now the state of Connecticut.
We honor and respect the
enduring relationship that exists
between these peoples and
nations, and this land.
The Divinity School recognizes the role
that Christianity played
in colonization movements,
and repudiates the use of Christianity
or any other religion, for
the purposes of oppression.
We encourage all to work
for justice in the aftermath
of colonization and to reject racism
and anti-indigenous
attitudes in all forms.
- It is my honor, as Dean
of Yale Divinity School,
to welcome you to the 320th
year of Yale University,
and the 199th year of Yale Divinity School
as a distinct unit within the university.
We are a complex school.
Included within Yale Divinity School are:
Andover Newton Seminary,
now in its fifth year here,
and 214th year in its existence,
led by Dean Sarah Drummond;
Berkeley Divinity School,
in its 49th year here,
and 167th year independent existence,
led by Dean Andrew McGowan;
and the Institute of Sacred
Music, in its 48th year here,
and 93rd year of existence,
led by Director Martin Jean.
On behalf of my colleagues,
of all of the faculty and the staff,
We welcome you to the beginning
of this new academic year.
This will be an unusual year.
We are all too keenly
aware of the pandemic
that has engulfed our world,
of the economic fallout
that has taken place in an effort
to slow down that pandemic,
and of the horrific events
that reminded us of the
centuries-old problem that we
in this country face with systemic racism.
We are also aware of the
trends of global warming
that are threatening our environment,
and our way of life as
we know it on this globe.
How will we face these crises this year?
There is a popular, but
technically incorrect etymology
of a Chinese word that I want
to use as an illustration.
The story is that the two
characters for the Chinese word
for crisis represent
danger and opportunity.
The first is correct, but
the second is technically
not correct because this
character is only one
of the characters for
the word for opportunity.
So with that caveat in mind,
let's use the longstanding
tradition and think just
for a moment about danger and opportunity.
The pandemic is real.
It has claimed the
lives of people we know.
The economic crisis is not made up.
Most of us, or at least
many of us have members
of our families who've lost
their jobs or been furloughed.
The racial crisis is
unfortunately all too true.
And the threat of global warming
can be seen in the violence
of the storms that we
experienced right here.
At the same time, the
fact that all of these
are working together at one
time, has made us more open
to change than we
otherwise would have been.
We have opportunities to make changes.
And I invite you as Yale
Divinity School seeks
to make changes this year
to address these crises,
to join us in positive ways in thinking
about how we can make
changes and move forward.
Do not forget the dangers,
but look at the
opportunities that we have.
The reason I'm optimistic about changes
and the fact that we can make changes,
is because of the people who are here.
Great people, very talented people.
We were joined this summer by three more,
exceptionally talented staff;
Awet Andemicael will later this fall,
join us as the Associate
Dean of Marquand Chapel.
She will be with us in the fall,
but she's in the process of
finishing her dissertation,
and we want her to
finish her dissertation.
She'll be around, but
on a more limited basis.
Joanne Jennings has agreed to serve
as the Director of Black Church Studies.
We're very grateful Joanne is joining us.
And Father Ryan Lerner will
be the inaugural director
of our new program for
Catholic Lay Ministry.
I hope you'll find a way
to join me in welcoming
all three of these
people to our community.
We also want to say a most special welcome
to the 135 new degree-seeking students,
and one non-degree-seeking student,
who are joining us this fall.
74 of you are coming as M.A.R students,
54 as M.Div. students, and
seven as STM students.
You come from a wide background.
A few little salient hints;
53% of you identify as female,
45% of you identify as male,
and 2% of you self-identify
as other, or non-binary.
24% of you identify as coming
from an underrepresented group.
10% of you are coming from
beyond the United States.
And these include countries
like Canada, China,
Germany, Ghana, Hong Kong, Indonesia,
Jamaica, South Korea, and Zimbabwe.
Your ages run a great range.
The youngest is 16 and the oldest is 66.
21% of you already have advanced degrees.
You are joining a very talented
and dedicated group of returning students.
Most of you are here in New Haven
or in the surrounding areas,
but about 25% or a little more
are scattered around the United States
or in different parts of the world.
Whether you are here in New Haven,
or whether you are
elsewhere, we welcome you
to Yale Divinity School,
and hope that this year
will challenge you intellectually,
that it will feed your soul spiritually,
and that you will become
part of this community,
whether virtually or personally.
We will be both, and we'll
probably be both for most of you.
We want to recognize all of the students
who helped to welcome
you to this community.
There were three in particular,
who gave of themselves
this summer to make the
eight-week First Year Experience
a possibility and a very positive reality.
Essence Ellis, Coordinator;
Molli Mitchell, Chief of Staff;
and Dawn Jefferson, the Moderator
for Diving into Divinity.
These three young women
have made a real difference,
and we are deeply grateful.
There are gift cards for
each of you in the bookstore
that we hope will relieve some
of your financial expenditures this fall.
There were also five students
who worked with small groups,
whom we want to recognize.
These were; Tori Crook,
Josh Huber, David Potter,
Jessica Yu and Jalen Ware.
You also have gift cards in the bookstore.
Thank you for all you've done.
And let me add, I want
to thank three faculty
who voluntarily served the
students who were coming in;
Michal Beth Dinkler, Laura
Nasrallah, and Tisa Wenger,
generously gave up their time this summer
to help with First Year Experience.
And there were three staff
who worked incredibly hard.
Senior Associate Dean, Jennifer Herdt,
always does a great job helping
with not just the academic
background and work,
but across the board.
Lynn Sullivan, spearheaded
the entire effort this year,
and ran it as the forewoman for this event.
And last, but in this
case, most importantly,
Jeanne Peloso, who took a very intensive
in-person experience known as BTFO,
and made it an eight-week
online experience,
known as First Year Experience.
We thank you.
We are fortunate this year
that we will be opening our
ceremonies with a good number
of student leaders and
some faculty leaders.
I'd like to recognize
each of them briefly,
Wyatt Reynolds, the Chair
of Native Crossroads,
read our land statement,
and you might've noticed,
that there was a second paragraph.
The first paragraph is the
university's official statement.
The second paragraph is
a distinctive addition,
which is a YDS paragraph,
approved this summer
by the university, and
there are two women I want
to say a special word of thanks to;
Madeleine Hutchins and Molli Mitchell,
who both urged us to add this paragraph,
and helped craft the language for it.
Madeleine and Molli, thank you.
Our service will now be led by all women.
And this is appropriate given that
we're finishing the 50-150
Year of Women at Yale, this fall.
50 years of women at Yale College
and 150 years of women at
Yale University, more broadly.
Awet Andemicael will lead us
in our opening cum invocation,
Gabby Thomas, a lecturer
in Ancient Christianity
will read the Scriptures, Essence Ellis,
President of Student Council,
will lead us in our benediction.
And our featured speaker this
year is Professor Chloe Starr.
Chloe was promoted with very good reason
to full professor last year.
She earned it.
Her first monograph was
about Chinese literature.
Her second monograph was a
book that many people said
could not be written.
It was on Chinese theology.
No one had written an
account in which they set out
the contours of Chinese
theology before this book.
You may be thinking, "Well,
that seems strange, why not?"
In China, there are no appointments
in Systematic Theology in universities.
The work is done by
people writing literature,
by people in other academic
fields or by people in churches.
Chloe helped to create a discipline
by giving it a framework.
And her third book, which
she's working on now,
uses both literature
and theology together.
It's entitled,
"A Life of Christ in
Chinese Christian Fiction."
She has many other publications,
including the completion
of a reader in Chinese theology
that I hope a good number
of you will have the benefit of using.
We are grateful to Chloe
for bringing the acuity
of her mind, and her good
judgment and keen wit
to this occasion in
opening our academic year.
And now we turn to the
God who gives us our life,
and on whom we depend for our
future, in a word of prayer.
Awet, would you please lead us.
- Please join me in prayer.
Oh God, Oh God, Oh God,
Triune and glorious.
We thank you for bringing
us to this moment,
at the beginning of a new academic season.
You know how bizarre this
year has been so far,
and only you know what
more there is to come.
You see how we've been
humbled by our circumstances,
undermined by our
divisions, and roused anew
by the injustices we
recognize all around us.
You hear us when we call out to you,
for the grace of your presence,
for the renewal of the
strength we need each day,
for the power to be
able to discern clearly
and act courageously now, and
over the long horizon ahead.
As you care for each one of us personally
with your tender, lovingkindness, and your compassion
for our fragility, we ask
that you would knit us
all together in a new way with our complex
and partially overlapping communities
of learning and faith.
Please grant us the grace to
perceive as well as to see,
to understand as well as
to hear what is at stake
in the deep questions with
which we will be grappling
over the coming year.
Inspire and guide us in
our virtual classrooms,
our online worship spaces,
and whatever informal
conversations we are able
to sustain during this time
of physical separation.
Liberate us to be gracious to one another,
to open our hearts to one another,
to walk with one another
in mutual support,
as intellectual partners,
and spiritual companions.
Grant to all of us,
students, faculty and staff,
eyes to see and ears to
hear our siblings at YDS,
as precious and beloved,
even as you yourself,
see and hear us.
Oh God, you are our God.
You have drawn us to
this place to equip us
for different forms of leadership
in our faith communities
and our broader societies.
There are edifices to build,
and strongholds to tear down,
and you yourself have
called us to this task.
You have sown in and among
us, so many seeds of hope
and possibility, of charisms and skills,
of faith and the capacity
for the critical examination
of the good news you have
for us in this very moment.
Fire us up to grow in wisdom
as we grow in learning.
Unleash our fruitfulness
for your glory, for our joy,
and for the good of our
siblings and communities
here at YDS and wherever
your spirit calls us.
You know that we all
pray in different ways.
But I lift up to you this
prayer and entrust to you,
oh, faithful one, this whole
extraordinary community.
By the empowerment of the
Holy Spirit, in Jesus' name,
(speaks in foreign language), Amen.
- The scripture reading is
taken from Matthew 13:1-17.
"That same day Jesus
went out of the house
and sat beside the sea.
Such great crowds gathered around him,
that he got into a boat and sat there,
while the whole crowd stood on the beach.
And he told them many
things in parables saying:
'Listen! A sower went out to sow.
And as he sowed, some
seeds fell on the path,
and the birds came and ate them up.
Other seeds fell on rocky ground,
where they did not have much soil,
and they sprang up quickly,
since they had no depth of soil.
But when the sun rose, they were scorched;
and since they had no
root, they withered away.
Other seeds fell among thorns,
and the thorns grew up and choked them.
Other seeds fell on good
soil and brought forth grain,
some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
Let anyone with ears listen!'
Then the disciples came and asked him,
'Why do you speak to them in parables?'
He answered, 'To you it has
been given to know the secrets
of the kingdom of heaven, but
to them it has not been given.
For to those who have, more will be given,
and they will have an abundance;
but from those who have nothing,
even what they have will be taken away.
The reason I speak to them
in parables is that "seeing,
they do not perceive, and
hearing they do not listen,
nor do they understand."
With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy
of Isaiah that says,
"you will indeed listen,
but never understand,
You will indeed look, but never perceive.
For this people's heart has
grown dull, and their ears
are hard of hearing, and
they have shut their eyes;
so that they might not
look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and understand with their heart
and turn-- and I would heal them."
But blessed are your eyes, for they see,
and your ears, for they hear.
Truly I tell you, many prophets,
and righteous people longed
to see what you see, but didn't see it,
and to hear what you hear,
but did not hear it.'"
- Good afternoon.
And thank you to Dean
Sterling for the invitation
to speak at the 199th convocation.
It's an honor to be the warm up
for next year's bicentenary.
Welcome to you all, and a special welcome
to the historic virtual
class joining YDS in 2020.
Today is convocation.
Convocation means an assembly,
a calling together of people.
We are con vocare, called together.
Which feels ironic, given
that we're almost all apart,
but it does force us to ask
what it means practically
and theologically, for
us to be called to learn
and to be together.
Those of you into dystopian novels
have suddenly found
yourself ahead of the curve.
The Christian church has
always been a transnational
and trans-realm community,
that cloud of witnesses.
But it's the first time
in most of our lives
that we've had to inhabit
virtual realms as the everyday.
Incidentally, if 
inhabiting a world removed
from the tangible, the haptic, is hard,
what does that do to our vision
of the kingdom of heaven?
Those of you who attended
the first year orientation,
have already been pondering community,
especially in relation
to power and privilege.
And I've seen some of
the beautiful word trees
or word clouds that illustrate
your collective aims
and joys and your hopes,
for the time at YDS,
as well as some of the social
concerns that fire you.
We're all greatly indebted
to Essence, Molli,
and to Lynne Sullivan and Jeanne Peloso,
for their work and vision that went
into your orientation this year.
A huge collective thank you.
Convocation is usually a
day of pomp and pageant.
I'm sorry that you don't
get to see the wooden mace,
and some of the magnificent
gowns of my colleagues,
removed from the cupboard
for the new semester,
the crumbs from past summer's
graduation lunch brushed off
hastily for the procession.
Coronavirus has upended
life for all of us.
And indeed there are some who
won't be joining us this year
because of visas and travel
restrictions or other distress.
The world has expanded again.
But some international
students from last year,
haven't made it home yet,
with their flights canceled several times.
Coming together is already an act
of overcoming, of resistance.
So thank you for joining us today.
Coronavirus is laying bare
the fractures of society.
The magnitude of our
failings as societies,
can be seen in the death rates,
and in which sectors of
the population are dying.
You don't need me to tell
you about the economic
and racial disparities in the US,
that the virus has exploited and manifest.
I was just reading about Central Valley,
whose agricultural workers, overwhelmingly
Latinx,
have been going down with
COVID at astonishing rates,
after many were lied to about
their coworkers' illnesses.
The Fresno City Council President,
where infection rates are
over 2,000 per 100,000, said,
"The best way I can describe this is,
one side is fighting for
dining out without masks,
while the other side is picking the crops,
putting food on your table,
while begging for protective
gear, just asking to survive."
As Michelle Obama said in her assessment
of "a nation that's underperforming,"
"If we want to survive,
we've got to find a way to live together,
and work together across our difference."
Today I want to think about
learning in a time of division.
In my own field, we see
the dangers of divisions
and the potential disasters
from not understanding the other.
Last year when I was in Beijing teaching
my usual summer course on
Chinese Christian literature,
I traveled afterwards to
give a couple of lectures
and climb a sacred mountain or two.
Meeting informally with
academic colleagues
and church friends and
leaders, I asked two questions;
"Why weren't Christians
standing up for Muslim Uighurs
and their religious rights?"
And what they thought about
the Hong Kong situation.
What was really noticeable last year
was the comprehension gap
between even well-educated
and well-placed Chinese
and Hong Kong citizens.
Most mainlanders I spoke
to, Christians included,
were quick to condemn
the predominantly peaceful
Hong Kong protests,
as chaotic, lawless, or misguided.
And this was long before
the new security laws.
Their own limited experience in a society
with any civic space,
meant that they have no way
of comprehending, why it was
so important to Hong Kong youth
to protect civil society, to
advocate for voting rights,
to safeguard religious
freedoms and to protest.
We've seen the outcome of this
comprehension gap this year,
in the political responses
that have been implemented.
We can see it in the lives of individuals.
Benny Tai, a Hong Kong law
professor and Christian leader
of the Umbrella movement,
gave the Bartlett lecture at YDS in 2015,
Benny was dismissed from his job
at Hong Kong University
earlier this summer,
while awaiting the outcome of his appeal
against a prison sentence for his part
in the Umbrella movement.
Benny is now crowdsourcing
a salary for himself
to carry on his work
on constitutional law.
My last act as Director
of Graduate Studies
in East Asian in summer, was to
sign the petition request
for Nathan Law to come back
and complete his degree early.
Nathan, and this is all public knowledge,
was the youngest ever legislator
in the Hong Kong Legislative Council,
and is the leader of a political party.
He left Hong Kong a few weeks ago
when the new security law came in.
There's now an arrest warrant out for him.
We can see the outcome
of this comprehension gap
at a national level.
The divisions in Hong Kong are
threatening its very future.
Both for political and economic reasons
as the US gets involved,
and as many prepare
to leave the territory on
passports the UK has offered.
The divides in China are not racial
or economic, but ideological.
But the knowledge gap, the
understanding gap in Hong Kong
is emblematic of the US situation,
a metaphor for its divisions.
Let's turn to the Bible
passage we heard read today.
And I'm drawing on my friend,
the screenwriter and priest,
Colin Heber-Percy in this.
You're probably familiar with our reading,
parts one and two of the
parable of the sower.
Usually, you get parts one and three,
Jesus telling the parable to the crowds,
and explaining it to the disciples.
What we have here is
commentary, the reflection.
The bit that's often excised
in church lectionaries.
It's an in-between meta-narrative,
bit like your time here at YDS.
The parable tells us two things;
knowledge matters, and
how we learn matters.
As Snoop Dogg said recently,
"The more you know,
the further you go."
He also said, "Read the syllabus."
Advice, I commend highly to you.
"Then the disciples came and asked him,
'Why do you speak to them in parables?'
He answered, 'To you it has
been given to know the secrets
of the kingdom of heaven, but to them
it has not been given.
For to those who have, more will be given,
and they will have an abundance;
but from those who have nothing,
even what they have will be taken away.
The reason I speak to them in parables
is that "seeing they do not perceive,
and hearing, they do not listen,
nor do they understand."'"
Later in the explanation, Jesus says,
"When anyone hears the word of the kingdom
and does not understand
it, the evil one comes
and snatches away what
is sown in the heart."
These verses are some of
Jesus' most difficult
and most salient words,
as Heber-Percy remarks,
"If we miss them out,
we might feel fairly safe
in our discipleship."
We usually think of ourselves as insiders,
privy to Jesus's words and thoughts.
But the words jolt.
What if we are them,
those to whom the secrets are not given?
Whoever hears and does not understand.
There's an uncomfortable
claim in this passage,
the entrance to the kingdom of
heaven might be conditional.
And that the admission
conditions relate not so much
to faith and hope or
love, but to knowledge.
In contemporary Christianity,
we stress belief,
faith, or right praxis,
loving God and others.
It matters much less what you know.
To earlier generations of Christians,
this sort of seemed odd.
Back in the 13th century, after
your convocation equivalent
in Paris or Bologna, your
program of training for theology
would have begun with preparation
in astronomy, geometry, logic.
You came to theology last, the
most arduous course of all,
the queen of sciences.
Theology required knowledge of stuff.
As Heber-Percy notes, the Sower
is "the parable of parables,"
a key to unlock them all.
It's not about knowing how to forgive,
or how to be a good neighbor,
"it's about knowing how to know."
Quote, "the parable is
a picture of knowledge.
"If we wish the Word of God
to bear fruit in our lives,
Jesus tells us, we cannot
afford to stop listening,
perceiving, by being open to the Word,
allowing it to take root in our lives.
The key to Jesus' theory of
knowledge is a radical openness.
Open ears, open eyes,
open minds, open hearts.
This is the purpose of the parable.
The purpose of all true science
and art: to wedge us open." Quote.
The Russian filmmaker,
Andrei Tarkovsky says,
"The function of art is
not as is often assumed,
to propagate thoughts,
to serve as an example.
The aim of art is to
prepare a person for death,
to plow and harrow his soul,
rendering it capable of turning to good."
We're not the grain as we often imagine,
we're the ground, the soil,
to understand is to be plowed
and harrowed, to be broken
apart and raked over,
ready for the seed.
Knowledge, as it turns out
in Jesus' interpretation,
isn't quite what we think it is.
We come to YDS
with our preconceived
notions, our understandings.
We often come to find the language
and more technical articulation
with which to fight our cause,
or to progress to our PhD program.
You will gain that at YDS in your studies,
whether your concern is
feminism, trans-activism,
race equality, or medieval canon law.
But to learn anything,
to understand anything,
we need to be open.
We will need to unlearn,
to learn to listen,
to hear the other, to
be open to challenges,
open with the things we
don't want to confront,
our own part in racial inequalities,
our patronizing and sinful dismissal
of the political views we don't hold.
Because these are keeping us
from truly understanding, truly knowing.
If we only take courses
or think about things
that reinforce our beliefs,
the divisions will continue.
During your time at YDS, you
will be plowed and harrowed.
It will be difficult, you will
need good support systems.
Seed needs to fall to
the right depth to grow,
the heavy clogs in our
lives need breaking apart,
and the soil radically worked through
to produce any harvest in
understanding or knowledge.
At convocation we're called together,
you are our shared
learning, our togetherness.
You're not asked to like
your fellow students here
or their opinions, but to respect them,
to love their interests, to
stand up for the oppressed
in our community, in
visible and invisible ways,
to learn what motivates others,
to withhold judgment on others,
to listen and be plowed again and again,
until the soil is fine crumbles
and finally, the seed can take root.
At the moment, the US
resembles nothing so much
as a kingdom divided against itself.
And we know that such
a kingdom can't stand.
Only by radical openness to
perceiving and understanding
the views of others, and to
giving them fair consideration
and our full and generous understanding,
can we learn together.
Can we even begin to hope
to overcome the divisions
that are tearing the nations apart.
But we need to learn from
those in freighted communities,
those bearing societal
burdens most heavily,
how we can learn from them.
These are difficult days.
They're not unprecedentedly difficult,
as some are claiming, there have
always been pandemics.
And the early Christians
became known precisely
for staying behind in the cities.
Julian of Norwich lost a third
of her town to the plague,
although she was enclosed.
But certainly it's a time of
great need and great challenge.
And that's yours to live up to.
You'll need skills and knowledge
from all of the subject
areas to do the work ahead.
You'll need accurate linguistically
and contextually competent
biblical knowledge
from Area I.
You'll need theological acuity.
Even to question, for
example, why both authoritarian
and female-led governments
have done so much better on COVID?
You'll need pastoral nous and
skills more than ever,
for a grieving population
and a fearful church.
You'll need a historic frame to grasp
what the present means,
and what questions to ask.
And you'll need the joy, the
elan and the concinnity
of Area V subjects;
philosophy, and literature,
and ethics, and world Christianity
to keep you sane and enthused.
And you need to be open so
that seeing you perceive,
and hearing you listen,
and you understand.
Good luck.
- Please pray with me.
God, we give thanks for the Carpenter.
Our comrade who puts mud on our
eyes and commands us to see,
who demands the opening of our ears,
who frees our tongues and
tells us to speak clearly.
Though this year is an
uncharted wilderness,
we give thanks.
Thanksgiving based not in callow faith
or extemporaneous
belief, but thanksgiving,
grounded upon a rock.
Through unexpected illness and grief,
you have been our rock.
Through vapid leadership
and ceaseless brutality,
you have been our rock.
So God, grant us the strength
to continue returning
to you and teach us to
turn to one another.
Whether near or far,
we know that your breath
binds us to each other,
and that our own choices have
called us to this community.
As we learn from home,
give us the capacity to continue asking
the demanding questions,
call us curious and grant us comfort
even when answers are slow to come.
Hold us accountable, gracious Creator,
invite us into bold spaces,
grant us the patience
to be fully present and the tenacity
to build intentional community.
We give thanks for these
things as they are already so.
Amen.
(upbeat music)
- As we close out this
opening convocation,
this is my prayer that the words
of this song minister to you,
and carry you through
this academic year
(upbeat instrumentals)
God says ♪ I will be with you, I will be with you ♪
♪ I will be with you, if
you would only trust Me ♪
♪ Trust Me, trust Me ♪
♪ I'll never leave you ♪
That's a promise.
♪ I'll never leave you ♪
♪ I'll never leave you, If
you would only trust Me ♪
♪ Trust Me, trust Me ♪
and when it gets a little too heavy, God says
♪ I'll fight your battles,
I'll fight your battles ♪
♪ I'll fight your battles, If
you would only trust in Me ♪
♪ Trust Me, trust Me, because I am that I am ♪
♪ I have all power, and I will deliver ♪
♪ If you would only trust
Me, Trust Me, oh trust Me ♪
♪ Because the I am that I am, I
have all power in my hands ♪
♪ And I, I will deliver, If
you would only trust Me ♪
♪ Trust Me, oh trust Me ♪
♪ If you would only trust Me ♪
♪ Trust Me, trust Me ♪
♪ Oh, your weeping may endure for a night ♪
♪ But remember joy
is coming in the morning ♪
♪ Oh Trust Me, trust Me ♪
♪ If you would only trust Me ♪
♪ Trust Me, trust Me ♪
