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so good morning I'm Louis Donaldson I've been teaching at this seminary since 1983 and I'm pretty certain that I'm the only person left at the seminary who was here when Cheryl Kirk Dugan first arrived as a student and I admit I was tempted to tell some boring and vaguely patronizing old professor story about one of his students actually I've never had any success resisting temptation so so here it comes the aging professor Cheryl was from the first irrepressible talented not one talent but numerous good at almost everything energetic even exhausting insistent smart beyond smart it was not so much that she crossed proper academic borders it was as if for her there are no borders witness her multi-voiced multifaceted presentation yesterday.

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How many people could do that? She was always like that, gathering and connecting. And now she's even better at it. Her talents are deeper, more secure.

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It is fun to watch. That's probably the patronizing bit. But it's true. It's fun to watch her, to learn from her.

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Plus, who else could walk into the mysterious rooms of grief and dare to speak, to sing, to listen as she is doing? Thank you, Cheryl. Praise the Lord. Good morning, everyone.

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Thanks, Louis, for that kind introduction. I wasn't sure what he was going to say, because he really, I think, is the last of the greats. We gave some of the professors, I'll be honest, a little run for their money, but most of them had been around a bit. But I'm so grateful for what I learned from Louie and from Bob Shelton, for whom this chaplain is now named, and the late Prescott Williams, who is so near and dear to my heart, personal privilege.

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Prescott volunteered to read all of my dissertation before I would submit any chapter to my committee. People don't do that. And so I'm grateful for that, grateful again for the invitation to be here, to be with my other two colleagues who've done just such remarkable, remarkable presentations.

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And what that lets me know that God is alive and well, and the Holy Spirit is true. And the old folks say, test and try the Spirit. And when you keep getting the same message, which I think we got a lot of yesterday, then you know you're on to something. So this moment, this morning for a little while, because I realized I have a little bit less time than I had yesterday, I'm invoking my Presbyterian and my Catholic spirit.

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I need my Baptist and my Methodist Spirit to stay at home. And those of you from those various congregations know because my Catholic friends, you better not preach over 10 minutes or folk will look at you and start on my training Presbyterian 10 minutes. You might get away with 15, but if you get like 30, folks can get antsy. I'm not preaching though today.

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We're going to have a conversation. So I hope to do in about 40 minutes. So there's about 20 minutes for you to ask questions. Today we're looking at equal opportunity, moments that level life's playing fields, grief and chronos and kairos time.

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When the inevitably eschatological becomes a realized incarnational, doesn't have a nice ring to it, everything changes. With life inevitably eschatological, the end of earthly lives is certain death. demise of the corporal self as corporal beings we have many things that separate us that can take us apart but unlike paying taxes which we can circumvent when we have no income or when we have astute accountants and lawyers who can sift out loopholes we cannot circumvent death the trauma of loss and its accompanying grief We cannot get around.

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When our earthly self dies, or when other selves who we love die, that death affects everything, regardless of our awareness or deep desire for it all to disappear. Every loss is a death, and every death involves loss. Some hold tight to delusion or a type of emotional amnesia. Yet with death and its finality, or in the many deaths accrued through various unresolved losses in our lives,

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The pain of that loss, notwithstanding its multiple ways of manifestation, known as grief, will have their way. One expression of this deep loss and sadness in art, scripture, and culture as we spoke about yesterday in the music is lament. Our experiences of lament shape our experience of time.

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As Christians, we experience time in multiple ways, chronos and kairos, expressions about time from the Greek. Chronos refers to chronological or sequential time. Kairos time pertains to right or opportune moments, the supreme moment, a time lapse, a moment of indeterminate time where everything happens. Kronos time is quantitative, kairos qualitative.

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Our experience of time concerns our perception. In the New Testament, kairos means appointed time in God's purpose, the time when God acts. Kairos, used about 81 times in the New Testament, seems to be an indeterminate time, a moment, a season. Whereas chronos, used about 54 times in the New Testament, refers to a specific amount of time, such as a day or an hour.

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This second Loeff-develt lecture explores the impact of loss and the experience of grief and lament via chronos and kairos time. After briefly recapping my methodology and some terms, we then will place lament and dialogue with acts of terrorism in Kronos time, civil war, world trade, and other recent tragedies. We'll also respond to those heinous acts via lament through poetry and scripture. We'll glimpse at the particularity of the crucifixion as Kairos time, as we then embrace a spirituality of grief, knowing the ultimate freedom incarnated in God's love.

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Peering through Method and Terms. I didn't show you this slide, sorry. Chronos time.

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Kairos time. Yesterday we mentioned womanist theory. Many of you were here. For those who are not, just a short recap.

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Women of the African diaspora have for years always done the thing we call lift as we climb, breaking across borders, fighting for justice. And we look at any areas that spawn injustice, whether it's from class issues, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability. It's interdisciplinary. It's complex.

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It's both a discipline and a way of life. Alice Walker coined the term. from words that she heard as a child, womanish, which means, Don't be too grown or act out of your place. And so over the years, after Katie Cannon decided that black theology, which problematized race, and feminist theologies, which problematized gender, wasn't sufficient for her to mind the lives of poor black women-- she used Walker's term-- then to create a discipline methodology for all of the complexities that she needed to unpack to do this work.

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So use this framing, we move to explore grief and notions of time. Grief is natural, multidimensional, a response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or something that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed. Losses incurring grief include death, a separation of a loved one, loss of a job, loss from divorce, loss from a sense of betrayal by a friend. deaths of our beloved pet, or any number of other major changes in our lives where we have a sense of that something is now missing, something is gone, and these are the kinds of moments where our identities also change.

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Anyone can experience grief and loss, but each experience of grief and loss individually is different, and collectively, it's also different. Although we usually focus on the emotional response to loss, sometimes we forget that loss can have a physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, as well as a philosophical dimension. Just listen for some of the synonyms of grief: misery, sadness, anguish, pain, distress, heartache, heartbreak, agony, torment, affliction, suffering, woe, desolation, dejection, despair, mourning, mournfulness, lament, bereavement. While grief is unwanted by most of us, Tim van de Vendijk, a seasoned hospital chaplain and one who had to deal with his mother's death and also with the birth of a child who was born with Down syndrome, says that unwanted grief can actually be a gift.

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And that we can move through grief to transformation by walking or sojourning through one's own losses and by walking with others. Many of you who are pastors have had to sojourn. You've had to go to the hospital at three or four in the morning. Some of those who have served as chaplains in hospitals, military, you've had to baptize babies who were stillborn.

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So you've had to deal with that. My question for you is, did you deal with your grief after that? And whereas we're caregivers, how do you grieve and how do you ask for help when you sustain a loss? We don't have to be supermen and superwomen.

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We all share the trauma of loss. Many people, however, are uncomfortable and they'd rather just disappear. But we can't just feel through it quickly or think through it or just talk through it quickly. We have to sort of ruminate.

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through it, think through it, talk about it, feel it, until we can get the release and no joy again. Having ruminated briefly over grief, let's look to its four aspects of time. Time is what it is. Our experience at time is complex, multidimensional, and based upon our perception-- who we are, our age, where we located, what's important to us at that particular time.

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In the 2008 film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based upon the 1922 short story by the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, you have this infant who, at birth, is an elderly man in New Orleans. His parents are so upset, well, his mother actually dies in childbirth. The dad didn't know what to do, so he's left at a nursing home.

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And so in 2005, then, the elderly Daisy Fuller is on her deathbed in New Orleans Hospital right as Hurricane Katrina is about to approach, and she asks her daughter Caroline to read aloud from the diary of Benjamin Button. We learn that he was born in 1918 and that throughout time he and Daisy keep meeting. As Daisy and everyone else is getting older, Benjamin Button is getting younger.

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And at some point they hope that the two of their lives will collide in a way that they can have a meaningful relationship. One of the things that happens is at some point that they actually do, Because Daisy's had a career in ballet. Daisy then, after spending time with Button, she gets pregnant.

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She has a girl. And Button realizes that because he's getting younger, he couldn't be a fit father for the daughter, so he then leaves. We learn that his dad left, and then they meet later, and his dad wills him his business. Time continues to pass and when-- after Caroline was born, Benjamin left Daisy all of his holdings so that she could take care of Caroline.

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Daisy later remarries. But then in 1990, social workers contact Daisy because they found her name in the pocket of Benjamin. Benjamin now is a preteen and has dementia. So, Daisy takes care of him for the rest of his life and he dies in the spring of 2003

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Whereas he appears physically to be an infant in chronological years, he's 84 years old. Having finally revealed the story of her father to Caroline, Daisy dies as Hurricane Katunia approaches. Now how different their lives might have been and how much less grief they might have experienced had Benjamin been born without a reversed aging process. While this case reverses time, we want to move briefly to look at a novel that travels through time.

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And that's a novel entitled Kindred by Octavia Butler. Some of you may know of her work. She also did several novels using parable theory, just as the perils of the New Testament. This best-selling novel was first published in 1979, and many people use it in community programs to help people understand the differences in how people approach it.

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This book is a first-person account of a young African-American woman, writer Diana-- rather, Dana, who finds herself shuttled between her California home in 1976 and pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. There she meets her ancestors, a spoiled, self-destructive white slave owner and a proud black free woman he was forced-- he has forced into slavery and concubinage. When the novel opens, it's June 1976. It's Dana's 26th birthday.

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She and Kevin Franklin, her white husband, move into their new apartment in Southern California. She does mostly unpacking. Kevin goes to do work. But at that moment, she gets dizzy and fades away.

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And when she wakes up, she's in the 1800s. And so throughout the novel, she goes back and forth in time, meeting her relatives on both sides. And through the two interracial couples that form the emotional core of the story, the novel also explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues, and speculates on the prospects of a future egalitarianism. So I invite you, during your time this summer, to take a look at Octavia Butler's Kindred.

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And in the case, then, of the film Benjamin Button, and in Kindred, time is a vehicle that renders amazing journeys, some wonderful, some harsh, riddled with grief. Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese-American artist, poet, and writer of New York Pen League, speaks about time in his poem Time 21, which I will read a few excerpts. He says, And an astronomer said, 'Master, what of time?' And he answered, 'You would measure time, the measureless the immeasurable. You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and seasons.

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Yet the timeless in you is aware of timelessness. And is not time even as love undivided and paceless? And let today embrace the pace with remembrance and the future with longing.

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Many of us are aware of time because of that great scripture, Ecclesiastes 3, that tells us for every time there is what? A season. There's a season for everything to be born, die, plant, pluck up, kill, heal, break down, build up, weep, laugh, et cetera. So that everything has a season, even for a time for love, a time to hate, a time for war, a time of peace.

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The poetry of Ecclesiastes III beautifully describes the different seasons and facets of life, yet also casts a dark shadow because it reminds us of the inevitability of trouble and evil, and of the relentless monotony of life. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, teacher, author, poet, and peace activist, also talks about time. Speaking eloquently, he notes that the past and future are illusions, ideas, and only the present is real. Now is the only time when we can see what we're looking for.

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The secret to finding anything, to finding God, is to be in the time of now. Time itself, that which we see or experience, is now. In the moment, it's time itself. In the now, we get to see ourselves further.

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When we live life fully, deeply in the now and present time, we can liberate ourselves from time and be outside of time. Experiencing Thich Nhat Hanh's notion of outside time may be one way of speaking about Kairo's time. Kairos time is God's time, time when God shows up and actively engages us and performs miracles, speaks words of wisdom, provides new direction, works with us, loves us, transforms us. We've had Kairos time since we've been here.

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Only through Kairos time could the synchronicity of the three lectures work so well. The three of us had not met. We had not had the conversation. But Kairos time was active because every time, including the preacher who would preach,

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or others would speak a theme that one had already mentioned came up again and again. What God does with and for us astounds us. God's awesomeness unfolds in Kairos moments, moments when the angel of the Lord comes and stir up waters, times when Jesus says we must know when Kairos time comes, where we are told to not become weary when doing good, For the Kairos time occurs when we will reap harvest if we can persist and not give up.

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In this Kronos and Kairos time, we review several tragedies. One, the Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, the War of Rebellion, or the War of Southern Independence. Just depends upon what side of the track you're on and where your sensibilities are. The primary cause of the war was economics, not slavery or states' rights.

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People were getting rich using free slave labor, and they did not want things to change. 30 AM, April 12, 1861, when the Confederate artillery in Charleston, South Carolina, opened fire on Fort Sumter, held by the United States Army. The South fought for independence, and the North fought to safeguard the Union. President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, which raised their stakes on slavery.

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A Northern victory would ultimately free the slaves. A Southern victory would protect slavery in all the Confederate states. Politically, the South did not need and actually was afraid of a strong central government, whereas the North needed a strong central government to build an infrastructure of roads and railways to protect its complex trading and financial interests and to control natural currency. Then we had in 1857, Chief Justice Taney twisted logic with the Dred Scott case.

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In 1859, we had the raid of John Brown. At Harper's Ferry, which is now in West Virginia, Brown was arrested, tried, convicted, and hung, deemed a martyr by naubness and the cause of great fear in the South. The war ended May 26, 1865, with the surrender of the last Confederate army. The Civil War exacted the cost of more than 600,000 lives, $5 billion in property damages.

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The war also claimed freedom, alleged freedom, for four million black slaves. The only issue was when you free a people who it was against the law for them to learn how to read and write and own property, it's a different form of enslavement. So then you ended up with sharecropping. And with Reconstruction and beyond, white upper class elites supported and ethos were lynching,

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Cross burnings, rape, and other types of white supremacist terrorism were perpetrated. The reaction to the threat they sensed to their authority and power via populism even through the 1890s. The World Trade Center tragedy and lynchings in the United States. Osama bin Laden's aim on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the US Capitol targets was not to destroy everyday people, but was to destroy symbols of the United States.

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Just as the United States is no stranger to participating in wars and skirmishes across the seas, it is no stranger to domestic acts of war and terrorism, particularly during the Civil War, the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and the World Trade Center. Interestingly enough, the United States' reciprocal response after world trade was that of state governmental terrorist acts against the Taliban. In a situation where we already have the intelligence to know, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, but the then President Bush decided that he wanted to get back because they tried to put a hit on his dad.

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So we have to be careful in public office making things personal. I'm sure most of us remember where we were the day of the World Trade Center. And we cannot also miss the irony that 911 is a universal SOS in the United States. The emergency, you dial 911, and it was on 911, September the 11th, that this debacle happened.

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We have to be careful in the United States, as often we swap sides, and we do not understand the long-term consequences. We must let go of our insular, provincial, parochial mindset when it comes to who has the power. We cannot have an empire. Empires do not last.

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The Ottoman, the Roman, the Papal empires, all what died. And in one sense, that's what we're experiencing now, the collapse of the so-called U.S. empire. As horrific as the bombings were, and with over 3,000 lives lost, over 25,000 people were able to escape from the massive funerary cauldron of stone and steel.

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The Civil War battle at Antium cost a total of 12,500 Union lives and about 10,500 Confederate casualties. In 1955, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrow Federal Building in Oklahoma cost the lives of 168 people, 19 of whom were children under the age of six. Lynchings of men, excuse me, men, women, and children of African descent have taken the lives of thousands.

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Lynchings was a major event before the emergence of professional sports. In the 1890s, for example, it was common practice for people to get on a train from Atlanta to go to other places in Georgia to see a lynching. There's a book entitled Without Sanctuary. It's a book, complete postcards.

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People would send postcards of pictures of lynching, and the scholar got monies to collect these postcards. So it was what people did before they had the Super Bowl. And lynchings didn't only happen in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, they happened all over the nation. from California to New York.

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We've had several modern day lynchings. James Byrd was an African-American who was murdered by three men in Jasper, Texas when they sprung along. Matthew Shepard was a gay white male who was tortured and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming on the night of October 6, 1998, and died six days later. Gwen Amber Rose Araujo, who died October 4, 2002, is an American teenager whose legal name while living was Edward.

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She was murdered in Newark, California, killed by four men, two of whom she'd been sexually intimate with, who beat and strangled her after discovering she was transgender. James Craig Anderson was a 49-year-old African-American male who was murdered in Jackson, Mississippi on June 26, 2011 by 18-year-old Darrell Dedman and his friends who robbed him, repeatedly beat him, then ran over him with a truck. And the only reason why they didn't escape was because a local hotel had a video camera running. The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children between the ages of six and seven.

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Prior to driving to school, he murdered his wife and later committed suicide. December 2, 2015, 14 people were killed and 22 seriously injured in a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. And I'll just mention a few of the acts of terrorism that have occurred on United States soil.

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So one of my questions for you is, where is the church? What are we doing? How do we create a world where people have permission to take the lives of others made in the image of God? And the sounds of the NRA and their lobbyists speak much louder than the voices of the church.

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Shame on us. So how do we respond to this, all this grief? I want to suggest a theological aesthetics of beauty. My theological aesthetics then, grounded in the notion of beauty of God in dialogue with the beautiful, that he has human expression, appreciates all of creation and the phenomenal art which radiates that beauty, as communal and individual lived reality.

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Such an aesthetic is participatory, sacred, and essential for healing and holistic health. Poetry, music, and music making are not only accessible, but offer places of vitality and strength for coping with loss and grief. Part of the power that radiates through music comes through its connection with and reflection of our own spirituality. Just as we reflected yesterday on music, today we want to look at other genres.

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First, I offer a poem as lament, and then we'll look at certain scriptures as lenses through which we can deal with and wrestle with our grief. A sound touched the portals of your heart, rocking you, holding you, as once suspended between time, realized a cavernous emptiness. More notes rang out, crossing over and through the web of dead and pain, then cloaked your sensibilities, shielding you from the inevitability of profound loss.

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In the music of those moments, vulnerability emerges, a gasp, a sigh of infinitesimal resolution, torrential tears flowing, like a mighty river, in itself exquisite, regal, beautiful. A turn toward eventual hope, a graced moment before memory, in an instant, sound healed, You left your protective shell to greet the loss and embrace the grief. As a working definition, then let's think of grief, a grief of spirituality as that dance, that process of empowerment where one connects with the divine, with self, nature, and the world to allow us to know those depths of pain and then to go through it, go through that existential angst that permeates every fire of our being.

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This process can be formal and informal. You can study, you can wail, you can scream, you can paint, you can dance. As we experience and open ourselves to fully feel that grief, to let God be intimately with us, We have an opportunity to experience the mystery, to experience the beautiful.

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A spirituality of grief allows for the manifestation of beautiful all around us in culture as acts of praise, as sacred movement, not idolatry. But all of these expressions are rooted in freedom. And when we allow this for ourselves, it gives us a chance to have more hope and to heal. From a Christian perspective, the biblical text often provides helpful resources for further exegeting a spirituality of grief.

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With Genesis 1 and the prologue of the Gospel of John as bookends, we sense the awesomeness of the Spirit of God, the God with us in good times and bad. In the beginning, God is pronouncement and proclamation, as ruach, spirit, wind, or air in motion, breath, mind, moves over the faces of us, over the faces of the deep. Amid this spirit, one can know vulnerability and brokenness. We can know jealousy and wisdom.

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We can be willful. We can be faithful, hasty, wounded, or no excellence. The character of Ruach is multifaceted, including judgment and understanding and grief. It signals movement, being poured upon us, being taken up.

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Ruach's other emotional factors include being new, being troubled, being stirred up. the queen of Sheba has no more Ruach her breath she was so overwhelmed or breathless Ruach the spirit makes one full of grace holy and excellent Ruach the spirit pertains to Angelic Supernatural messengers sent by God when was the last time you stopped to listen for the angel God sent to minister to you In the New Testament, pneuma denotes air, breath, rational soul, vital principle, and Holy Spirit, life, spirit, mind, ghost. Some spirits are unclean, poor, or strong.

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Some spirits give forth messages. engaging us in rejoicing. Some of our meek, some foster unity, some foster renewal. Ruach, the Spirit, also affords humanity the possibility of engaging in particular practices for the sake of spiritual disciplines and survival.

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As one prays in the Spirit, as we stand fast in the Spirit, as we embrace the sword of the Spirit, the Spirit brings forth glory and enables us to confess. In the gospels, in Paul, there are calls for us to experience the spirit and community as we exalt Jesus the Christ. Regarding the return of Christ with the believer's resurrection, the spirit existence indicates what will come. Paul also sees pneuma in the power of faith, pistis, the antithesis of flesh, as a mode of intercession.

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A caveat here, but let us not see our bodies as bad and wrong, our bodies are wonderful instruments, our temples. For John, spirit does not manifest in the same way as the Lucan text. John sees encounter with the Creator, the Parent, the Father, and the Son. The Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, represents reality as opposed to appearance.

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Like Jesus, the Paraclete teaches, witnesses, and preaches about sin. In Hebrews, the meaning of spirit is complex. The Spirit speaks through scripture, works in miracles, and signals God's eschatological grace. Thus, a spirituality of grief takes seriously Pentecost, where the Spirit came upon them as a power from on high, anointing the apostles, miraculously changing them and equipping them for ministry.

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We are empowered with that same Spirit for the tough, grueling, difficult work that lays before us. We know the abyss of Kierkegaard's sickness unto death, which describes our existential dilemma, our splitting, our imbalance, our fragmentation, our lopsidedness, our disintegrity, our lack of unity and wholeness, a disregard for the beautiful and inappropriate relationships within our own selves. Yet, this is not the last word. We transcend these other categories of Kierkegaard to get to the one he calls religious, where we believe that we can live in truth as we stand in God's presence, the presence of the eternal one, where we belong.

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Such is the experience of resurrection. We step into that mysterious space that transcends death, that fears no evil that loves with an intimacy so profound that Cairo's time is resurrection. N.T.

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Wright notes that Jesus' resurrection is the beginning of God's new project, not to snatch people away from earth to heaven, but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. that after all is what the Lord's Prayer is about when Jesus says I am the resurrection and the life and whoever believes in me though we die yet shall we live and everyone lives and believes in in Jesus shall never die therefore we have hope and thus grief cannot destroy us Paul reminds us that we were buried therefore with Jesus by baptism unto death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by divine glory, we too might walk in newness of life. That union in Good Friday means that we are with Christ in resurrection.

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And with that resurrection in Cairo's time, we never ultimately die as death has no dominion. Josh McDowell reminds us that while the resurrection promises us a new and perfect life in the future, God loves us too much to leave us alone to contend with the pain, guilt, and loneliness of our present life. And as I close, empowered by Ruach and Numa, we can go through grief and become whole.

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In the spiritual, social, and political communities of the United States, however, we often tend to hold on to notions of manifest destiny and being lone rangers, being independent mentalities. Such attitudes give us credence to be overly concerned with our own interest and forget the gift of being a neighbor. Such minds often embrace the spirit of frontier sensibilities and a Darwinian survival of the fittest ethos. Yet,

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If we do not listen to or for personal and communal pain, we fall into a great abyss. We forfeit our accountability and quest for immediate gratification and omit the stewardship of a peaceful, balanced life. A healthy, balanced spirituality of grief requires our lived connectedness to God. As we honor God in ourselves, we can anticipate a hopeful life with thanksgiving.

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Such a spirituality calls for personal and communal investment in beauty, the glory, and the praise of God toward health, and full embodiment of a sacred, that we might let our light shine and also experience God's amazing grace, not as wretches. That was Newton's experience. I'm not a wretch. You are not a wretch.

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You are a child of God. And if you are a wretch, then go to your prayer closet and have a new conversion. We're children of God. This grace allows us to see systemic and personal sin that oppress and create impediments toward our institutional and personal salvation, rejecting the ultimate freedom incarnated in God's love without drowning in the quagmire.

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So beloveds, when we fully experience the spirituality of grief, we forego being trapped into a sickness unto death. Sickness unto death is to be without a relationship, to have false gods of physique, prestige, wealth, fame, status. Sickness unto death means we have tremendous loss without any hope.

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We are persecuted unjustly. We feel unlovable. We have no one to pray for us. We feel forsaken by God.

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We're abused. We live in fear. We hate. We cause harm to others.

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Conversely, an aesthetic of spirituality of grief allows us to move between Chronos and Kairos time, to know authentic love and peace amid intimacy with God, ourselves, our neighbors. We know resurrection time now. And this, I think, aesthetic is best summed up from the gospel song by Dennis Miller, from which I will quote some of the words. The song is entitled, My Soul Has Been Anchored in the Lord.

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But the storms keep on raging in my life, and sometimes it's hard to tell my night from day. Still that hope that lies within is reassured as I keep my eyes upon the distant shore. I know God will lead me safely to that blessed place that God has prepared. But if the storms don't cease, and if the wind keeps on blowing, my soul has been anchored.

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and the Lord. Thank you.