The Song That Should Never Have Been Written

In 1873, Horatio Spafford put his four daughters and wife on a steamship bound for England. He planned to join them after settling some business in Chicago — a city where he had already lost nearly everything in the Great Fire two years earlier. Nine days later, he received a telegram from his wife containing just two words: "Saved alone." The ship had collided with another vessel in the Atlantic. All four of his daughters had drowned.

Spafford boarded the next available ship to join his grieving wife. Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, the captain notified him they were passing over the spot where his daughters had perished. That night, in a cabin soaked with grief, Spafford sat down and wrote words that by every human measure should have been impossible: "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."

He did not write those words because the pain had passed. He wrote them while the pain was at its deepest. His perseverance was not the absence of suffering but the stubborn, holy refusal to let go of the God who held him.

Some of you are in your own Atlantic crossing right now. The Almighty is not asking you to feel fine. He is asking you to hold on — and sometimes holding on sounds like a hymn sung through tears.