Well With My Soul

In November 1873, Horatio Spafford sent his wife Anna and their four daughters ahead to France aboard the Ville du Havre, intending to follow once he finished pressing business in Chicago. The ship never arrived. After a collision in the Atlantic, all four girls — Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and little Tanetta — were lost beneath the waves. Anna survived, sending her husband a single, devastating telegram: "Saved alone."

Spafford boarded the next ship to France. As his vessel passed near the waters where his daughters had drowned, he went below and wrote words that would outlast his grief by more than a century:

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."

This is not a man in denial. This is a man who had wrestled with God and discovered a mercy deeper than his sorrow. Redemption, in the Scriptures, is rarely about circumstances reversing. It is about God redeeming the circumstances themselves — turning the very worst chapters of our story into testimonies of His faithfulness.

Spafford's hymn has been sung at gravesides, in hospital rooms, and in the quiet dark of three o'clock in the morning. Millions have found, through Christ, that it is possible to say — and mean — those four words: it is well.