Be Still My Soul / What A Friend We Have In Jesus

Selah pairs two separate nineteenth-century hymns rather than singing either one in full, opening with Katharina von Schlegel's instruction repeated as its own title: "be still, my soul, the Lord is on your side, bear patiently the cross of grief or pain."

"Leave to thy God to order and provide, in every change He faithful will remain" keeps the hymn's focus on waiting rather than resolving — not an answer to the grief, just a reason to keep still inside it, the same instruction the Psalms give when they say to be still and know that God is God.

"The waves and winds still know His voice who ruled them while He dwelt below" points at Christ calming a literal storm before the hymn shifts without transition into Joseph Scriven's separate hymn: "oh what peace we often forfeit, oh what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer." Two different centuries' worth of hymn-writing arrive at the same instruction from two different directions — stillness and prayer, both aimed at the same needless pain.