When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.
Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.
My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
And, Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.
Public domain hymn text (published 1873). Words by Horatio G. Spafford.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Horatio Spafford was a Chicago lawyer who had already lost his young son and much of his wealth in the Great Chicago Fire when, in 1873, he sent his wife and four daughters ahead of him to England by ship while he attended to business at home. Their ship, the S.S. Ville du Havre, collided with another vessel in the Atlantic and sank. All four of his daughters drowned. His wife survived and sent him a two-word telegram: “Saved alone.”
Spafford sailed to join her, and as his own ship passed near the place where his daughters had died, he wrote these words — not as a denial of grief, but as a declaration made in the middle of it. “When sorrows like sea billows roll” is not a metaphor for Spafford; it was, quite literally, where he was sitting as he wrote.
What makes this hymn endure isn’t that it explains away suffering, but that it refuses to let suffering have the last word. Verse 3 turns from the storm entirely to the cross — “my sin, not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross” — and the final verse looks past the present altogether to Christ’s return. Paul writes something similar to a grieving church: “we are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair” (2 Corinthians 4:8). Spafford’s hymn is that verse set to music — grief and hope, both fully real, held in the same hand.
