When the Waters Are Deep

On November 22, 1873, a ship called the Ville du Havre collided with an iron sailing vessel in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and sank in twelve minutes. Among the passengers were four young girls — Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta Spafford, daughters of Chicago attorney Horatio Spafford. All four drowned. Their mother, Anna, was pulled unconscious from the wreckage, the sole family survivor. She sent her husband a telegram that read simply: "Saved alone."

Spafford immediately booked passage to be with his grieving wife. When his ship passed near the place where his daughters had perished, he sat down and wrote the words to what would become It Is Well With My Soul: "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 was not denial. Spafford was not pretending the grief was small. He had lost his children, his investments, much of his world. But he had staked his life on a God he believed was still sovereign, still good, still present in the wreckage.

Trust is not the absence of grief. It is the decision to plant your feet on something solid when the ground beneath you gives way. Spafford found that solid ground in the character of God — and he discovered, as many of us must discover in our own dark crossings, that it holds.