If thou but suffer God to guide thee,
And hope in Him through all thy ways,
He’ll give thee strength, whate’er betide thee,
And bear thee through the evil days;
Who trusts in God’s unchanging love
Builds on the rock that naught can move.
Only be still, and wait His leisure
In cheerful hope, with heart content
To take whate’er thy Father’s pleasure
And all-discerning love hath sent;
Nor doubt our inmost wants are known
To Him who chose us for His own.
Sing, pray, and swerve not from His ways,
But do thine own part faithfully;
Trust His rich promises of grace,
So shall it be fulfilled in thee;
God never yet forsook in need
The soul that trusted Him indeed.
Note: the later verse(s) below have been reconstructed from historical memory and may not be word-for-word identical to the original published text.
Public domain hymn text (1641). Words by Georg Neumark.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Georg Neumark was a German poet who wrote this hymn's words and tune in 1641, during the Thirty Years' War, following a specific and genuinely difficult personal ordeal: traveling as a young man toward a new position, he was robbed of virtually everything he owned by soldiers along the road, leaving him destitute and unable to continue his journey or secure the position he had been traveling toward.
After a considerable period of hardship, Neumark unexpectedly obtained a tutoring position after a chance recommendation, a sudden reversal of fortune he attributed directly to God's providence rather than his own effort, and he wrote this hymn immediately afterward as a direct personal response to that unexpected rescue from destitution, its confident assurance that God 'will give thee strength, whate'er betide thee' emerging from Neumark's own recent, very concrete experience of both real hardship and real, unexpected relief.
The hymn became one of the most beloved and widely used hymns within the German Lutheran chorale tradition, valued particularly for the way its calm, unhurried confidence in providence — 'only be still, and wait His leisure' — offered comfort during the ongoing devastation of the Thirty Years' War still raging across German lands at the time of its writing, a conflict already discussed elsewhere in this collection in connection with Martin Rinkart's 'Now Thank We All Our God' (hymn 50).
Catherine Winkworth, whose translation work already appears elsewhere in this collection connecting several major German chorales to English-speaking congregations, translated Neumark's text into the English version commonly sung today, and the hymn's tune, composed by Neumark himself, was later used by J.S. Bach as the basis for one of his own church cantatas, a further testament to the hymn's lasting musical significance well beyond its own original Lutheran congregational setting.
