When the Music Rises from the Deep

In November 1873, Horatio Spafford stood on the deck of a ship crossing the Atlantic, staring down at cold, dark water. Somewhere beneath those waves, his four daughters had drowned when the SS Ville du Havre collided with another vessel and sank. His wife Anna survived and sent him a two-word telegram that still pierces the heart: "Saved alone."

Spafford had already buried a son to scarlet fever. He had watched the Great Chicago Fire consume his real estate investments. Now this. The man had every reason to rage, to go silent, to let bitterness calcify around his wounded heart.

Instead, he wrote a hymn.

"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."

Notice he did not write, "It is fixed." He did not write, "It no longer hurts." He wrote, "It is well." That is a different kind of healing — not the absence of pain, but the presence of God so real that the pain no longer has the final word.

Some of you are waiting for the Almighty to remove your suffering. And sometimes He does. But sometimes the deeper healing is the one Spafford found — a wholeness that exists not because the storm has passed, but because the One who calms the sea is standing with you in the middle of it.

That is the healing no wave can take from you.