When the Deep Ran Dark

In November of 1873, Horatio Spafford stood on the deck of a ship crossing the Atlantic, staring at the cold water passing beneath him. Two weeks earlier, his four daughters — Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and little Tanetta — had drowned when the SS Ville du Havre sank after a collision at sea. His wife Anna had been rescued, barely alive. She cabled him two words: "Saved alone."

He sailed immediately to meet her. As the ship passed over the approximate location where his daughters died, Spafford went below and began to write. What emerged was not a lament, though it carried all the weight of one. It was a declaration: "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 had already lost a son to scarlet fever. He had watched the Chicago Fire consume his investments. And now the sea had taken his children. The peace he wrote about was not the absence of grief — it was something growing inside the grief, something planted there by a God who had known loss too.

The Almighty does not always still the storm. Sometimes He stills the soul standing in the middle of it.