Month: April 2026

A meditation on Horatio G. Spafford’s “It is well” and a suggestion for a new last verse

  1. 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.

    • Refrain:
      It is well with my soul,
      It is well, it is well with my soul

  2. Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
    Let this blest assurance control,
    That Christ hath regarded my helpless estate,
    And hath shed His own blood for my soul.
  3. 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!
  4. For me, be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live:
    If Jordan above me shall roll,
    No pang shall be mine, for in death as in life
    Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.
  5. But, Lord, ’tis for Thee, for Thy coming we wait,
    The sky, not the grave, is our goal;
    Oh, trump of the angel! Oh, voice of the Lord!
    Blessed hope, blessed rest of my soul!
  6. And Lord, haste the day when the 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.

    (added verse)

  7. Though worm, flood or flame come to ravage this frame,
    Yet still shall this hope ever hold:
    In that my Saviour liveth and calleth my name —
    “It is well, it is well with thy soul!”

“It Is Well”: The Story Behind a Hymn Forged in Fire, Flood and Faith

Most people who know It Is Well with My Soul (also known as When Peace Like a River) know it as a hymn of serenity — a calm, steady declaration of trust in God. What far fewer people know is the story of the man who wrote it, and the extraordinary grief out of which those words were born.

Horatio Gates Spafford was a respected Chicago lawyer and a committed Christian layman. In the early 1870s, his life seemed secure: a thriving legal practice, a growing family, and deep involvement in the ministry of D. L. Moody. But in 1871, the Great Chicago Fire swept through the city and destroyed much of his property. It was a heavy blow, but not the end.

Two years later came the tragedy that would define his life. His wife Anna and their four daughters — Annie (11), Maggie (9), Bessie (7), and Tanetta (2) — boarded the S.S. Ville du Havre for a trip to Europe. Spafford, delayed by business, planned to follow shortly. Mid‑Atlantic, the ship collided with another vessel and sank within minutes. Anna survived. Their daughters did not.

Her telegram to him nine days later from Caerdydd contained only the words: “Saved alone, what shall I do?”

It was on the voyage to meet his grieving wife that Spafford wrote the words that would become his only hymn. He was not a poet by profession, nor a hymn writer by habit. He was simply a man standing in the ashes of his life, reaching for the one thing that had not been taken from him — the faithfulness of God. That single act of writing became, for him, a way of stitching his confidence in God back together. And in the decades that followed, those same words brought solace to millions who found themselves in their own valleys of loss.

Philip Bliss and the Naming of the Tune

The text alone did not make the hymn what it became. Its melody — the part that carries the words into the heart — was composed by Philip Paul Bliss, one of the most influential gospel musicians of the 19th century.

Bliss encountered Spafford’s text through the Moody–Sankey revival network. Deeply moved by the story of the shipwreck and the father who had lost four daughters, he set the words to a new tune of remarkable tenderness and strength.

He named the melody “Ville du Havre”, after the sunken vessel that carried Spafford’s daughters to their deaths. It was a gesture of compassion, a way of binding the music to the grief that inspired the text. The tune and the story became inseparable.

Tragically, Bliss himself died only a few years later in a train accident. Most of his manuscripts were destroyed in the fire that followed. It Is Well with My Soul is one of the few pieces of his work that survived — a hymn born of one disaster and preserved through another.

A Life Poured Out in Jerusalem

Spafford’s story did not end in despair. He and Anna later had three more children:

  • Horatio Goertner Spafford (1875–1879)
  • Bertha Spafford (1878–1968)
  • Grace Spafford (1881–1954)

Seeking a new beginning, the family moved to Jerusalem in the 1880s and founded what became known as the American Colony. It was not a sect or a commune, but a community devoted to practical Christian charity.

Their work included:

  • feeding the poor
  • caring for orphans
  • establishing hospitals and clinics
  • offering relief during famine, war, and plague
  • serving both Jews and Arabs without distinction

The Colony became famous for its neutrality, compassion, and integrity. During World War I, when Jerusalem was ravaged by hunger and disease, the American Colony became one of the city’s most important humanitarian lifelines.

After Spafford’s death, the work continued under Anna and later under their daughter Bertha. The American Colony eventually evolved into a cultural and philanthropic institution, and part of its property became the American Colony Hotel, still renowned today for its hospitality and its role as a meeting place for diplomats, journalists, and peace negotiators.

What began in grief became a legacy of mercy.

A Modern Echo of Job

Spafford’s story has long reminded readers of the biblical figure Job. Both men endured losses that would have crushed most people. Both refused to let grief extinguish their trust in God. And both emerged with a deeper, quieter conviction that suffering does not have the final word.

Job’s great declaration — “I know that my Redeemer lives” — is the heartbeat of that conviction. It is the cry of a man who has lost everything yet still anchors his hope in the God who will one day stand upon the earth and make all things new.

Spafford never claimed such words for himself. His humility was too deep, his grief too honest. But the spiritual kinship is unmistakable. The hymn he wrote is, in its own way, a modern Job‑song: a testimony that faith can survive the storm, the fire, the worm, and the flood.

The added verse, drawing explicitly on Job 19, simply makes visible what was already there beneath the surface — the hope of resurrection, the certainty of redemption, and the deeply personal truth that God calls each of His people by name.

A Personal Reflection

The first time I ever heard this hymn was at the funeral of my great‑grandmother. I was not a believer at the time. I stood there as an outsider to the faith, listening to words that were not yet mine, sung by people whose hope I did not yet share. And yet It Is Well with My Soul, together with Henry Bickersteth’s Peace, perfect peace, somehow spoke to me that day with a clarity I could not explain.

Looking back, I can see that moment as part of the slow, patient work God does in the heart — the seeding and watering that He gives in His own way, at His own pace, as He calls each of His people to Himself. I did not understand it then, but something in those hymns lodged itself in me. Perhaps it was the honesty of them, the refusal to pretend that life is easy, the way they hold grief and hope in the same hand. Whatever it was, it stayed with me.

Since becoming a Christian, I have sung this hymn many times and in many languages. It has travelled with me through seasons of joy and seasons of sorrow. One of my favourite renditions is by Joni Eareckson Tada — another believer who has walked through deep tribulation and yet radiates a confidence that God’s will is best. When she sings It Is Well, the words carry the weight of a life lived under the sovereignty of God, and the sweetness of a faith that has learned to trust Him in the dark.

Perhaps that is why I feel such a personal connection to this hymn. It was there at the beginning of my journey, before I even knew I was on one. It has accompanied me since. And now, reflecting on the life of Horatio Spafford — a man who suffered more than most of us can imagine, and yet found a way to say “It is well” — I see more clearly why this hymn has endured.

It is not a song of triumph. It is not a song of denial. It is a song of trust — the trust of a modern Job, who knew that his Redeemer lives.

And so the final verse added here, echoing Job 19, is not an embellishment but a completion of that thought: that our Redeemer not only lives and shall stand upon the earth, but that He knows each of us by name, calls us by name, and assures us that in Him, all is well — and could not be more secure.

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The Wednesday Essay #1 Toward a Geometry of Paradox

Toward a Geometry of Paradox


Every so often, a modest technical question becomes the doorway to a larger meditation. My own began with music, which is often where philosophy hides when it wishes to be discovered without announcing itself. I had been comparing the tidy symmetry of equal temperament with the unruly contours of real acoustic frequencies. In the world of equal temperament, the octave is sliced into twelve identical wedges, each semitone occupying its allotted thirty degrees like a well‑behaved citizen of a rational republic. But the moment one consults the actual Hertz values, the geometry rebels. The perfect fifth lies almost exactly halfway through the octave in frequency, the major third sits near a quarter of the way, and the seventh falls not at the neat three‑quarter mark but somewhere slightly off to the side. The shapes formed by these bearings are not the crisp polygons of a Euclidean diagram but the living asymmetries of a natural organism.  They are certainly far from what you would get if you wrote the notes of the chtromatic octave on a clock face with C at 12 o clock, C# at 1 oclock. That system gives us D# and not E at the three o clock position (or fifteen minutes past the hour if you prefer to look at it that way) at the half hour/six o’clock position you have F# when in hertz terms the G is half way between two Cs.

To see exactly what I mean and how far apart the two systems are, see the table below,

Note Hz (approx) ΔHz from C Fraction of octave Degrees What the degrees would be in equal temperament Δ in deg How many minutes past the hour (rounded) in reality How many minutes past the hour in the usual diagrams of music theory
C(4) 262 0 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 0
C♯ / D♭ 279 17 0.065 23.4 30.0 -6.6 4 5
D 294 32 0.122 45.0 60.0 -15.0 8 10
D♯ / E♭ 314 52 0.198 71.5 90.0 -18.5 12 15
E 327 65 0.248 89.3 120.0 -30.7 15 20
F 349 87 0.333 119.8 150.0 -30.2 20 25
F♯ / G♭ 367 105 0.401 144.3 180.0 -35.7 24 30
G 392 130 0.496 178.6 210.0 -31.4 30 35
G♯ / A♭ 419 157 0.599 215.7 240.0 -24.3 36 40
A 436 174 0.664 239.1 270.0 -30.9 40 45
A♯ / B♭ 471 209 0.798 287.2 300.0 -12.8 48 50
B 491 229 0.874 314.7 330.0 -15.3 52 55
C(5) 524 262 1 360.0 360.0 0.0 60 60

 

Irreconcilably far apart, yet both systems work. Equal temperament, for all its artificiality, gives us a musical language of extraordinary flexibility. It allows us to modulate, transpose, and wander freely through keys without the tuning collapsing under our feet. Harmonic tuning, for all its irregularity, gives us the physics of resonance, the way a choir instinctively adjusts its intervals until the chord locks and the air itself seems to vibrate with agreement. They contradict each other if we insist on forcing them into the same frame, but the contradiction dissolves when we recognise that they are describing different aspects of musical reality. One is a map; the other is the terrain. The map is not false because it simplifies, and the terrain is not incoherent because it refuses to be simplified.

Another example of how perception is far from physical reality is the way we see things as solid regardless of the fact that we know that most of he space between subatomic particles is completely empty and that mass bearing matter is so spread out that when it is concentrated together you can get a black hole and eventually a singularity.  We are looking into what should be an almost empty space but as light itself is made to the appropriate wavelength, this is not what we see, but we see matter the way we need to see it.  Seeing it like this makes it hard to believe how empty most of space is, not just outer space but even inside a diamond, and yet we seem to be able to accept that both these ways of viewing reality are true at once.

Calvinism vs Arminianism

Once I had seen this, I began to notice the same structure in places where I had not expected it. The long quarrel between Calvinism and Arminianism, so often conducted with the heat of a family dispute, suddenly looked less like a contest of doctrines and more like a pair of coordinate systems. One describes God’s initiative, the other human response. Each is internally coherent, each illuminates something essential, and each becomes distorted when made to swallow the other whole. The paradox is not a flaw in the theology but a sign that the reality it seeks to describe is too rich to be captured by a single model. We are creatures who experience both divine sovereignty and human agency, and any account that denies either does violence to the lived texture of faith.

Just as the sinner coming to Christ maybe perfectly unaware ibn his course of coming that he is being led there by the movement of the Holy Spirit, who is, in a way unique to this new Christian as an individual, breaking every barrier down, so what seems to be going on – the sinner making all the effort – is not necessarily what is really going on, just in the way we believe we are hearing equal temperament in music whereas what we are actually hearing in hertzometric, physical terms is far from that.   There are scriptures enough that talk both of man’s agency in believing, coming, repenting, working and scriptures enough that tell us it is not of him that willeth nor of hjim that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy, but somehow many Christians (with notable exceptions such as C.S. Lewis in his essays) see incapable of understandingf that here too there are separate, apparenbtly mutually exclusive models of how to understand something which are both true. Why Christians find this hard to accept when it is clear that God has made a world in which Einstein can correctly say that God does not play dice and Niels Bohr can equally correctly show that He does, is probably a function of intelligence, and the good news here is that people can work on their intelligence, (as well as it being a gift).

Creation vs Evolution

The same pattern appears again when we consider the origins of the world. Scientific models, grounded in continuity and observable processes, trace the unfolding of natural laws across deep time. The theological account of creation speaks instead of divine purpose, of a world summoned into being by a word rather than assembled by a mechanism. And the old idea of apparent age — that creation may have been brought forth in a state of functional maturity (Omphalism as initially discussed by Philip Henry Gosse in 1857) — adds a third dimension, not as a deception but as a recognition that beginnings are not always gradual. These frameworks seem contradictory only when we demand that they answer the same question. Once we allow each to speak in its own register, the tension becomes intelligible rather than adversarial. Mechanism, meaning, and initial condition are not rivals; they are layers.

What unites these reflections is the recognition that our perception is limited. Our ears, our minds, our interpretive habits are shaped by the constraints of our present condition. We cannot compose music using a Hertz‑based geometry because our biological hearing is not tuned to such crystalline symmetry. But the very fact that we can imagine it hints that our current sensory world is only a partial view of a richer reality. Christian hope has always included the renewal of perception — the idea that the resurrection does not merely restore life but transforms the very faculties by which we apprehend beauty. If that is so, then the harmonies we know now may be shadows of a more perfect music, one in which the asymmetries of the present are gathered into a higher order we cannot yet hear.

What began as a technical inquiry into tuning thus becomes a small philosophical ascent, an anabasis from the particulars of sound into a broader reflection on how truth often comes to us in pairs of models that cannot be collapsed into one another. Equal temperament and harmonic tuning, Calvinism and Arminianism, scientific cosmology and creation theology: each pair forms a kind of binocular vision. Depth appears only when both eyes are open. The satisfaction we feel in recognising this pattern is not the thrill of novelty but the quiet sense that reality is larger than any single framework, and that contradiction, far from being the enemy of coherence, is sometimes its most faithful guide.

This is of course down to the fact that our Creator is a glorious Being, not easy to understand because his thoughts and ways are so much higher than our own.  He who comes to the Lord must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. One of the greatest of these rewards can be a rich seam of wisdom and understanding, to those who have ears to hear.

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