Still Enough to Say "It Is Well

On November 22, 1873, the French steamship SS Ville du Havre collided with the iron vessel Loch Earn in the North Atlantic and sank in twelve minutes. Among the 226 who perished were Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta Spafford — ages eleven, nine, five, and two. Their mother, Anna, survived clinging to floating wreckage and was pulled from the sea by rescuers. From Cardiff, Wales, she cabled her husband Horatio two words that would shatter any father: "Saved alone."

Spafford, a Chicago lawyer and Presbyterian elder who had already buried a son and lost nearly everything in the Great Chicago Fire two years earlier, boarded the next available ship to join his wife. During that Atlantic crossing, the captain notified him when they passed near the coordinates where his daughters had drowned. Spafford stood at the rail, staring into gray, indifferent waves — and somewhere in that stillness, he began composing the words: "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."

Psalm 46:10 commands, "Be still, and know that I am God." That stillness is not passivity. It is what Spafford chose over that dark water — a deliberate surrender of grief into the hands of the Almighty. Faith does not demand the absence of sorrow. It asks only that we hold still long enough to remember who holds us.