Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

by Timothy J. Keller

Let me show you how this works. Horatio Spafford was an American lawyer who lost everything he had in the Chicago fire of 1871. Only two years later, he sent his wife, Anna, and their four daughters on a ship across the Atlantic Ocean to England. The ship hit another ship and began to sink. As it was sinking, Anna got the four little girls together and prayed. The ship went under the water, and they all were scattered into the waves, and all four little girls drowned. Anna was found floating unconscious in the water by a rescue ship. They took her to England, and she cabled Horatio Spafford just two words: “saved alone.” When Spafford was on the ship on his way to England to bring his wife home, he began to write a hymn—“It is well with my soul . . . When peace, like a river . . .” Those are the words he wrote. Here is what I want you to think about: why would a man dealing with his grief, seeking the peace of God—the peace like a river—spend the entire hymn on Jesus and his work of salvation? And why would he bring up the subject of his own sin at such a time? He wrote: