When the Sea Took Everything

In November of 1873, Horatio Spafford stood at the railing of a ship crossing the Atlantic and stared down at cold, dark water. Somewhere beneath those waves, his four daughters had drowned just days earlier when the steamship Ville du Havre collided with another vessel and sank in twelve minutes. His wife Anna had survived and cabled him two words from Wales: "Saved alone."

Spafford had already buried a son to scarlet fever. He had already watched much of his wealth vanish in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Now the ocean had swallowed nearly everything he had left.

And yet, as the captain notified him they were passing over the place where his daughters perished, Spafford sat down and wrote words that Christians have sung for over a hundred and fifty years: "When sorrows like sea billows roll... 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 sharpest. His pen moved not from a place of resolution but from a place of relentless, almost defiant trust in the goodness of the Almighty.

Perseverance is not the absence of grief. It is worship that refuses to let go of God even when everything else has been taken. The Apostle Paul wrote, "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed" (2 Corinthians 4:8). Spafford lived that verse on the open sea. And the hymn he left behind still carries the rest of us when our own waters rise.