Going Home to Asbury

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Organ, and Orchestra can put out some great music. As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel lobby near Lexington, Kentucky, listening to a breathtaking hymn played on the Mormon Tabernacle pipe organ. Next, the choir sang “Softly, and Tenderly Jesus is calling” – calling for you and for me to come home.

I came home May 2nd, home to Asbury University for the commencement activities. I came home for the last time - perhaps. Home to Hughes Auditorium, where I have heard so many great chapel messages and saw so many lives changed – mine among them, because of those messages. But the thing I remember the most was the wonderful music, especially the majestic pipe organ. When the chapel is full of students singing the great hymns, it always brings tears to my eyes. With Friday night’s Baccalaureate, the pipe organ playing, the people singing with energy and emotion, and the pomp and circumstance of it all, I was home, if only for the weekend.

I went Asbury to see my granddaughter graduate, 54 years after I arrived as a first-year student. Finally, another Yost graduated from Asbury.

She was a member of the Restored Class. Their Class Verse was Psalm 51:12 “Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.” The Restored Class Hymn was Revive Us Again. As freshmen, my class wanted our class hymn to be “Wonderful Grace of Jesus.” Colonel Olson, one of our class sponsors, thought that was ridiculous. “You cannot march in singing that. You will practically be running; besides, when you graduate, it will be the Bicentennial year of the United States. So, God of Our Fathers became the class hymn of the Pioneers – the class of 1976.

Little did the class of 2026 know that their class hymn, Revive Us Again, would be the hymn that would help usher in the Asbury Revival of 2023. Once again, students would experience the movement of the Holy Spirit and the cleansing of the heart as they prayed, “Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.”

Asbury University is a lot like a symphony. I read once somewhere that, “if you have ever seen or listened to the beauty of a symphony, it is a harmonious complexity of varying symphonic compositions from various instruments.” All of this comes together as a “symphony of flavors.” Different instruments with varied musical tones, keys, and notes, all carrying out the same task: a beautiful sound. Each instrument and its unique sounds woven together into a beautiful tapestry by the conductor.

That is what graduation at Asbury is about. Each student, each faculty member, each major, and each degree woven together in a wonderful tapestry called Asbury University. I think, perhaps, I will go home one more time to Asbury.