It Is Well With My Soul

I first heard the story behind It Is Well With My Soul at the funeral of my beloved pastor — the man who married my husband and me, who shepherded my early transformation, who quietly shaped the contours of my faith. In the small group he led, I once prayed for God to rewire my brain and teach me how to trust Him and let go of what had me bound. He carried that prayer with me.

At first glance, he seemed like a simple country pastor. In truth, he had lived an extraordinary life. Before answering a late calling to ministry, he was a remarkably successful businessman in the Oklahoma oil industry. Because he was financially secure, he had no hesitation in taking on a tiny, aging church tucked away in the middle of nowhere. He loved that congregation fiercely. He ordained my husband as a deacon. And in his short, luminous tenure as a pastor, ours was the only wedding he ever performed.

His death — a sudden stroke in his mid‑50s — felt like a rug pulled out from under our lives. I was very pregnant with our first child, and at his funeral I was nearly inconsolable. The service was filled with old pictures from his mustache years (that should’ve been funnier than they were at the time), and his favorite hymns. Before this one, the worship leader paused to tell its story. I didn’t know then how deeply it would lodge itself in me.

The story of this hymn begins with Horatio Spafford, a successful lawyer and real estate investor in Chicago in the late 19th century. He and his wife, Anna, were deeply rooted in their faith and close friends with the evangelist Dwight L. Moody. Their life, at least from the outside, looked stable and blessed.

Then, in the span of only a few years, everything collapsed.

In 1871, their four‑year‑old son died suddenly of scarlet fever. Just months later, the Great Chicago Fire tore through the city, destroying nearly all of Spafford’s real estate holdings and leaving him financially devastated. Loss seemed to arrive in waves, each one heavier than the last.

Hoping for rest and eager to support Moody’s evangelistic work in Europe, Spafford planned a family trip to the UK in 1873. But at the last moment, urgent business kept him in Chicago. Rather than cancel the trip, he sent Anna and their four daughters — Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta, all under eleven — ahead on an ocean liner, the SS Ville du Havre. He planned to follow a few days later.

On November 22, in the cold dark of the Atlantic, the Ville du Havre collided with a massive iron sailing vessel. The ship broke apart and sank in twelve minutes. Of the 313 passengers, 226 died — including all four Spafford daughters.

Anna was found unconscious, clinging to a piece of wreckage. When she reached Cardiff, Wales, she sent her husband a telegram that carried the weight of the world in two words: Saved alone.

Horatio Spafford boarded the next ship he could find, carrying nothing but the urgency of a husband racing toward his grieving wife. Days into the voyage, the captain summoned him to the bridge and quietly told him they were passing over the very stretch of ocean where the Ville du Havre had gone down and his beautiful little girls perished in the deep. Horatio stood on the deck, staring out over the endless gray water, knowing his daughters rested somewhere beneath those waves. 

In that quiet, grief‑stricken moment, Horatio did not collapse under the weight of what he had lost. Instead, he returned to his cabin and began to write. The words that came to him did not deny sorrow or soften its edges; they rose from a faith that had learned to breathe even in the darkest waters. What he penned became the first lines of a hymn that would steady generations of believers. 

The lines he wrote have become so familiar that we sometimes forget the place they were born. Standing over the grave of his children, he reached for the language of peace — not a peace that ignores sorrow, but one that can coexist with it. His words held both truths at once: the sea billows of grief, and the steadying presence of God that teaches the heart to say, even here, it is well with my soul.

Spafford continued shaping the poem as he and Anna learned how to live inside their grief. Eventually he handed the words to Philip Bliss, a gifted composer who worked closely with Dwight L. Moody. Bliss immediately recognized the strange, holy tension in the lyrics — sorrow and hope intertwined — and wrote a melody that could carry both. He named the tune Ville du Havre, honoring the ship that had carried so much loss.

The hymn first appeared in Gospel Hymns No. 2, a collection compiled by Bliss and Ira Sankey. It spread quickly through revival meetings and small churches, carried by people who recognized themselves in its mixture of ache and assurance. Yet even this chapter of the hymn’s story carries its own sorrow: only months after setting Spafford’s words to music, Bliss and his wife were killed in a tragic train accident. The song they helped bring into the world became, in a way, their final gift. 

Despite its sorrow‑laden beginnings, the hymn found an immediate home in the hearts of ordinary believers. It didn’t offer shallow comfort or pretend suffering was small. Instead, it spoke plainly of grief while pointing to a peace that does not depend on circumstances. People sang it because it told the truth — about pain, about hope, and about the God who meets His children in both. 

I didn’t know any of this when I first heard the hymn at my pastor’s funeral. I only knew that the room felt heavy with grief, and that the people who loved him were trying to sing through their tears. The story behind the hymn landed in me like a stone dropped into deep water — quiet, heavy, and strangely steadying. It told me that faith could hold sorrow without breaking, and that peace could still rise in places where nothing felt well at all. I knew so little of faith, of sorrow, and of peace at the time, but the story formed scaffolding I would come to depend on as I learned those hard lessons.

Over the years, the hymn has followed me into seasons I never expected — moments of quiet fear, moments of deep loss, moments when faith felt thin and trembling. Each time, its words have met me with the same steady truth: that peace is not the absence of sorrow, but the presence of God within it. I love this hymn so deeply because it doesn’t promise that life will be gentle. It promises that Christ will be near.

And so the hymn continues its quiet work — exposing the truth about sorrow. It reminds us that faith is not a shield against suffering; it is a presence within it. Spafford’s words, born in the darkest waters, have become a kind of lantern for anyone who has ever stood in a place where grief and hope meet. They teach us to breathe again, and to trust that Christ is still near enough to steady the soul.

So when I hear the hymn now, I don’t think first of shipwrecks or funerals or the long trail of sorrow woven through its history. I think of the God who has carried His people through every one of those waters, and who still carries us now. The words rise like a quiet confession- not triumphant, necessarily, but true. Somehow, in His presence, the soul speaks what seems impossible… what Spafford once whispered over the deep: It is well… It is well with my soul.