Singing Through the Storm

In January 1736, the ship Simmonds pitched violently in the North Atlantic as a winter gale tore its mainsail to shreds. Seawater poured across the deck and flooded below. The young Anglican minister John Wesley, bound for Georgia, gripped whatever he could hold and felt certain he was about to die. He later confessed in his journal that he was utterly unwilling to face death — his faith, for all its discipline, had not conquered his terror.

But in the belly of that same lurching ship, a small company of Moravian missionaries did something Wesley could not comprehend. They sang. Men, women, and children lifted their voices in German hymns of praise while the ocean roared around them. Not one of them flinched. When Wesley asked afterward whether they had been afraid, they answered simply: they were not, because they trusted God with their lives.

That moment shattered Wesley's assumptions about what faith could look like. He had theology and rigor, but these Moravians possessed something deeper — a joy rooted in absolute trust. Their singing was not performance; it was the overflow of hearts anchored in the God of their salvation.

Isaiah declares, "Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid." The Moravians aboard the Simmonds lived that verse in real time — drawing water from the wells of salvation and letting it pour out as song, even when the waves said otherwise. True trust does not wait for calm seas to sing.