What ‘It Is Well’ Taught Me About Anchored Peace

If you’ve ever sung “It Is Well with My Soul” and quietly wondered whether a person can really mean it, whether it’s a line for Sunday morning or something you could say standing at a grave, the man who wrote it is about the best answer I know of. And the way he got there looks, to me, a lot like what God OS is trying to build in all of us.

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Everything, Lost in Waves

Horatio Spafford was a Chicago lawyer, a friend of D.L. Moody, and by every account a man of real faith and real comfort, which makes what came next hard to write about. His young son died in 1871. Not long after, the Great Chicago Fire swallowed much of the real estate he’d invested in, and he kept walking with God through both (I don’t think it was easy, and I doubt he did either).

In late 1873 he planned a trip to England, hoping some rest would help his family heal. At the last minute business kept him in Chicago, so he sent his wife, Anna, and their four daughters ahead on the steamship Ville du Havre, planning to follow in a few days.

On November 22, in the middle of the Atlantic, the ship collided with another vessel and sank in about twelve minutes. Among the 226 who died were all four of his daughters. Anna was pulled from the water unconscious, and when the survivors reached Cardiff she sent him a telegram that began with two words:

“Saved alone.”

Spafford took the next ship. As the story goes (it comes to us largely through his daughter Bertha, born after the tragedy, so it’s family tradition more than documentation), the captain told him when they were passing near the place where the Ville du Havre went down, and somewhere on that crossing he wrote:

What the Verse Says

Read it again, slowly, knowing where it may have been written. “Sorrows like sea billows roll” is a man describing exactly what he sees over the railing, and in the same breath he says “it is well.” Feelings ride the waves, and they’re meant to (God built us to grieve, and I can’t imagine Spafford skipped it), but an anchor holds underneath, in water the storm never reaches. Notice the verb, too: “Thou hast taught me to say.” Taught. That’s learned, over years, well before the day it was needed, which is why I’d say peace like his isn’t found in the storm, it’s carried into it.

Where the Anchor Was Tied

The third verse is the one I keep coming back to, because it doesn’t mention the shipwreck at all.

In the middle of the ocean that took his daughters, his mind went to the cross. His money had burned, his children had drowned, and his sin was still nailed there, finished, the one fact in his life the waves had no say over. The writer of Hebrews uses the same picture:

“We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.”

Hebrews 6:19, NIV

There’s a kind of relay in this hymn that I noticed while writing this. God gave Spafford something to hold onto in the worst hour of his life, and that same truth, set to music, has been turning up in other people’s worst hours for a century and a half (in mine too). In addition to glorifying Him, that’s one of the quiet jobs God gives our songs: He uses them to come alongside us at just the right moment, with a reminder of His love, a promise from His Word, some comfort when we’re sorrowing, a nudge when we’ve gotten forgetful or distracted. God is with us.

The God OS Connection

Seen through God OS, it’s almost all there. The Gospel is the foundation, and the third verse is Spafford standing on it. Daily Worship is the “Thou hast taught me” part, the ordinary days when he said it in the calm so he could say it in the storm. Time in the Word gave him words to lean on (I’d guess he’d been living in them for years), and the Walk is what all of that looks like on the days when nothing dramatic happens.

Nobody builds an anchor during the shipwreck. The quiet, forgettable ten minutes you spend with God tomorrow morning is where it gets forged, and it won’t feel dramatic, it never does, and then one day the billows roll and you find out what was built.

Try It This Week

The hymn is long out of copyright, so it belongs to all of us. Say it slowly, or sing it if you’re brave (badly is fine, meant is better), and when you reach “it is well with my soul,” stop and ask yourself whether it is. If the honest answer is “not today,” say it anyway, the way Spafford did, as a declaration of where your anchor is tied, since the feeling can catch up later. Then tell God about the billows, in whatever words you have left.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash