The Hymn Born on the Atlantic

In 1873, Horatio Spafford put his wife and four daughters on the SS Ville du Havre, bound for England. A successful Chicago lawyer, he planned to follow once business concluded. He never saw his daughters again. The ship collided with an iron vessel in the North Atlantic and sank in twelve minutes. All four girls — Annie, Maggie, Tanetta, and Bessie — were lost. His wife Anna survived and cabled him two words that still cut across the centuries: "Saved alone."

Spafford boarded the next ship to join her. When the captain told him they were passing over the place where his daughters had drowned, he went to his cabin and wrote the words that Christians have sung for over a hundred and fifty years: "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 hymn was not written from comfort. It was written from the deepest sacrifice a parent can know — surrendering not just his children, but his right to bitterness, his demand for answers, his grip on a future that would never come.

Sacrifice is not always something we choose. Sometimes it is what remains after everything has been taken, and we must decide whether to offer even our grief to the Almighty. Spafford opened his hands over the Atlantic and gave God the only thing he had left — his trust.

That is the sacrifice El Shaddai honors most.