The Song That Rose from the Deep

In November 1873, Horatio Spafford stood on the deck of a ship crossing the Atlantic. Days earlier, he had received a telegram from his wife Anna — just two words: "Saved alone." The SS Ville du Havre had collided with another vessel and sunk in twelve minutes. All four of his daughters — Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta — were gone.

This was not Spafford's first devastation. Two years before, the Great Chicago Fire had wiped out his real estate holdings. Before that, his young son had died of scarlet fever. The fig tree had not budded. The vines bore no fruit. The fields lay barren.

When the captain notified Spafford that they were passing over the very spot where the Ville du Havre had gone down, he gazed into the cold Atlantic waters that held the bodies of his children. And from that impossible moment, he wrote: "When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll — whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul."

Habakkuk knew this kind of faith. Not the faith that comes easy when the harvest is plentiful and the flocks are healthy, but the defiant, gut-level trust that declares "yet I will rejoice in the Lord" when everything has been stripped away. Spafford's hymn and Habakkuk's prayer share the same holy stubbornness — a refusal to let circumstances dictate the soul's posture before God. The Sovereign Lord remains our strength, even over the deepest waters.