A Telegram, a Sea, and a Peace the World Cannot Give

In early December 1873, Horatio Spafford — a Chicago lawyer who had already lost his young son and much of his fortune in the Great Fire of 1871 — received a nine-word telegram from his wife Anna in Cardiff, Wales: "Saved alone. What shall I do." On November 22, the French steamship SS Ville du Havre had collided with the iron vessel Loch Earn in the North Atlantic and sank in twelve minutes. All four of their daughters — Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta — were gone.

Spafford boarded the next available ship to join Anna. When the captain notified him they were passing over the approximate spot where the Ville du Havre went down, Spafford opened a notebook and wrote the words that would become one of the most enduring hymns in Christian history: "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."

That phrase — "whatever my lot" — is the key. Spafford did not write from a place of emotional comfort. He wrote from the ocean above his children's grave. Yet he testified to a peace that did not depend on his circumstances.

Jesus told His disciples, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives" (John 14:27). The world's peace requires everything to be fine. The peace Christ offers holds when nothing is. It is not the absence of sorrow — it is the presence of God in the middle of it. That is the peace available to every believer today: not a promise that the storm will stop, but that He will be enough within it.