It Is Well With My Soul

This is possibly the most moving of all hymns for me, and I can tell you that, as he father of 3 girls, I break down nearly every time I sing this.  No other song illustrates how a simple man can have earth shattering faith in the face of unbelievable adversity.

Horatio Spafford was born in 1828 in New York. He married Anna Larssen, fourteen years his junior in 1861. He was a successful lawyer in Chicago, and was quite rich with many properties and investments. He was closely associated with Dwight L. Moody and other evangelists of the time, and was an active member of the Fullerton Presbyterian Church, which he helped build.

As a devout Christian businessman, he seemed to have it all. He was rich and successful, and had a wife, 4 daughters and a son.  If he was in your church, you would have thought him the luckiest guy on earth, but there was a difficult future ahead for him.

At the height of his success, his son died of a disease and he lost all his investments in the great Chicago fire of 1871. So, in 1873, he decided to join D.L. Moody and Ira Sankey in their evangelistic Crusades in England, sending his wife and daughters ahead by ship while he wrapped up some business.

However, their ship, the S.S. Ville du Havre, collided with another ship in the middle of the Atlantic, sinking in 12 minutes with the loss of 226 lives, including all 4 of his daughters. His wife survive, and when she arrived finally in England she sent a telegram of only 2 words… “Saved alone.”

Horatio caught the next ship to be with his grieving wife, and he asked the Captain to stop where his daughters had drowned. It was there, looking across the sea which had claimed the lives of his three little girls, that he wrote this incredible song which has brought comfort and hope to millions in the wake of his incredible suffering…