It is Well

As you can tell by my past posts, I love music. Music and I started back when I was about
5, my parents have a picture of me with a hat and sunglasses on holding a microphone, and
I have been told that I was singing some song with the radio. So even today, music is
something dear to my heart. I like all kinds of music, and from time to time I find myself
going down a rabbit hole looking into music and how it became a song, what was the story
behind the song as it were.

This past weekend I was reading in Psalm 107:29 where it says, “He calms the storm, So
that its waves are still.” And that got me thinking of songs that were written about water and
then I was reminded of a classic hymn that was written in 1873, 98 years before I was
welcomed into the world. And yet when this song gets played or I get the chance to sing to
it, it is as if it were written in the past week. The song I am referring to is, “It Is Well with My
Soul”. A song that was penned after a tragedy, after great loss, both financially and
personally.

The story goes that Horatio Spafford had lost his four year old son and the great Chicago
fire of 1871, he had invested in property and the fire had damaged it. Two years later, he
had planned to travel to Europe with his wife and their four daughters, but because of work,
Spafford sent them on without him. On their way across the Atlantic Ocean, the ship was in
a collision and sank, his daughters all perished, while his wife survived.
On his way to meet her, as the shipped passed near where his daughters had died, he
wrote this song. As I pressed play and sang along to this song, it was when I got to the
second line, I began to weep. The power of this song overwhelmed me – when sorrows like
sea billows roll; whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to know, it is well, it is well, with my
soul.

In the midst of such loss, he got it, he ran into the arms of the creator. When nothing made
sense, he wrote those powerful words, it is well with my soul. Psalm 107:29 - “He calms the
storm, So that its waves are still.” This is where I want to be in my life, regardless of what
storm is going on around me, I want to be able to say – it is well with my soul.

Pastor Jesse