{"id":91156,"date":"2026-07-19T16:11:46","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T20:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=91156"},"modified":"2026-07-19T16:11:46","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T20:11:46","slug":"story-behind-it-is-well-with-my-soul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/spiritual-devotional\/story-behind-it-is-well-with-my-soul\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story Behind “It Is Well With My Soul” Is Darker Than You’ve Been Told"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>8 Minute, 44 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

You’ve probably sung “It Is Well With My Soul” without knowing where it came from. Maybe at a funeral, where it always seems to get requested. Maybe on a Sunday when nothing in your life felt “well” at all, and you sang it anyway because that’s what you do. The song feels like comfort \u2014 the kind of hymn that sounds like it was written from a porch swing, in a season of settled faith.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t. The story behind “It Is Well With My Soul” starts with a man who had already lost almost everything, and it ends with him writing those words on a ship, crossing the exact stretch of ocean where his four daughters had drowned days earlier.<\/p>\n

The Lawyer Who Kept Losing<\/h2>\n

Horatio Spafford was a Chicago attorney, a devoted Presbyterian, and a close friend and financial backer of the evangelist D.L. Moody. By any measure, his life had already been marked by grief before 1873. He and his wife, Anna, had buried their young son to illness a few years earlier. Then the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 tore through the city and, with it, most of the real estate investments Spafford had built his family’s future on.<\/p>\n

He kept his faith through both losses. That matters, because it means the peace he’d later write about wasn’t theoretical to him. He’d already been tested once.<\/p>\n

Four Daughters, One Ship, One Collision<\/h2>\n

In November 1873, the Spaffords planned a trip to Europe \u2014 partly to support Moody’s revival meetings in England, partly as a family reprieve after years of hardship. A last-minute business matter held Horatio back in Chicago. So he sent Anna and their four daughters ahead on the French steamship Ville du Havre<\/em>, planning to follow just days later.<\/p>\n

He never got the chance to sail with them. On November 22, 1873, in the middle of the Atlantic, the Ville du Havre<\/em> collided with an iron-hulled sailing ship. It sank in about twelve minutes. Two hundred and twenty-six people died that night, including all four of Spafford’s daughters. Anna was found unconscious, alive, clinging to wreckage.<\/p>\n

“Saved Alone”<\/h2>\n

When Anna reached land in Wales, she sent her husband a telegram. It was short \u2014 the way telegrams have to be \u2014 but two words in it have outlived everything else written that year: “Saved alone.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Horatio boarded a ship immediately to cross the Atlantic and reach his grieving wife. There was no way around it. To get to her, he had to sail directly over the waters where his daughters had died.<\/p>\n

The Words He Wrote Over Their Grave<\/h2>\n

Partway through the crossing, the ship’s captain came to Spafford and told him they were now passing near the spot where the Ville du Havre<\/em> had gone down. It was there \u2014 not afterward, not once he’d had time to process it, but in that exact moment, on that exact water \u2014 that Horatio Spafford wrote the words that would become one of the most sung hymns in Christian history:<\/p>\n

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When peace like a river attendeth my way,
\nWhen sorrows like sea billows roll \u2014
\nWhatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
\nIt is well, it is well with my soul.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read that again knowing where he was standing. He didn’t write “it will be well someday.” He didn’t write it from a safe distance, months later, once the wound had scarred over. He wrote it on the water. In the middle of it. That’s the story behind “It Is Well With My Soul” that most people singing it on a Sunday morning never learn \u2014 and it changes what the song is actually saying.<\/p>\n

What Isaiah 43:2 Says About Passing Through Water<\/h2>\n

Long before Spafford ever boarded that ship, God had already made a promise about water like this. Isaiah 43:2 says:<\/p>\n

“When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Notice what the verse does not promise. It doesn’t promise you’ll avoid the water. It doesn’t promise the crossing will be easy, or short, or that you’ll understand why it’s happening while you’re in it. It promises something much more specific: I will be with thee.<\/em> Not instead of the water. Inside it.<\/p>\n

That’s the Turn in Spafford’s story, and it’s the Turn Isaiah was pointing to eight centuries before Christ. Peace, in the Bible, was never marketed as the absence of the storm. It’s a Person, present in the middle of the storm, when every circumstance says He shouldn’t be. Spafford didn’t find peace because his grief resolved. He found it because God didn’t leave him alone in the water \u2014 and he could feel that, even there, even then.<\/p>\n

That’s a very different definition of “well” than the one most of us are working with. We tend to think we’ll be well once the diagnosis clears, once the marriage heals, once the job comes through, once the grief lifts. Spafford is proof that’s not actually where “well” comes from. It comes from Presence, not resolution.<\/p>\n

Your Water Doesn’t Have to Be an Ocean<\/h2>\n

Almost no one reading this has lost four children in a shipwreck. But nearly everyone reading this knows what it is to be forced back over water you didn’t choose to cross \u2014 the follow-up appointment at the same hospital, the empty chair at the same holiday table every year, the anniversary of the diagnosis, the drive past the house you used to share. You don’t get to skip the water. You just get to choose whether you believe you’re crossing it alone.<\/p>\n

If you’ve ever wondered whether God actually shows up in ordinary, unremarkable moments \u2014 not just the dramatic ones \u2014 this look at Psalm 88, the one psalm that never resolves<\/a>, is worth reading next; it says something most devotionals are afraid to say about grief that doesn’t wrap up neatly.<\/p>\n

Spafford’s peace wasn’t a personality trait. It was a decision to keep believing God’s mercy was still new that morning, even though nothing else was. If that’s a truth you want to sit with longer, the Hebrew word behind “his mercies are new every morning”<\/a> goes deeper into exactly what that promise is actually claiming.<\/p>\n

Three Things You Can Do With This Today<\/h2>\n
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  1. Name your water \u2014 out loud or on paper, right now.<\/strong> Spafford’s peace wasn’t vague. It was specific to an exact grief. Don’t pray in generalities. Say the actual thing: the diagnosis, the empty seat, the fear you haven’t told anyone. Naming it is the first honest step toward believing God is in it with you.<\/li>\n
  2. Open a physical Bible and underline Isaiah 43:2.<\/strong> Not a screenshot, not an app \u2014 a page you can find again on a hard day six months from now. Write today’s date in the margin.<\/li>\n
  3. Text one person who’s currently in their own water.<\/strong> Not advice. Not a Bible verse. Just: “I’m thinking about you today.” Anna Spafford survived because someone reached her in the ocean. You can be that for someone else in the next ten minutes.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    For a longer look at what it means to keep walking through a season that hasn’t resolved yet, this piece on finding calm through life’s tempests<\/a> picks up right where Spafford’s story leaves off.<\/p>\n

    Peace isn’t the absence of the storm. It’s who is in it with you.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    A Prayer for the Water You’re In<\/h2>\n

    God, I don’t know how to make sense of what I’m carrying right now, and I’m tired of pretending I do. I’m not asking You to make it make sense today. I’m asking You to be as real in this water as You were for Horatio Spafford in his. I don’t need the storm to stop to believe You’re here \u2014 I just need to actually believe it. Help me feel Your presence in the middle of this, not just on the other side of it. It is well, because You are here. Amen.<\/p>\n

    A Question Worth Sitting With<\/h2>\n

    Do you think it’s possible to genuinely mean “it is well with my soul” while you’re still in the middle of the worst thing that’s ever happened to you \u2014 or does peace like that only come afterward, once you can look back? What do you think made the difference for Spafford?<\/p>\n