Blog 113 March 10, 2019
MIRACLES NEVER CEASE ~ DO YOU HAVE AN EXPERIENCE TO SHARE? Robert Wise would be delighted to learn about your divine intervention. If you have a story to share, please contact him at revwise@att.net. He’s looking forward to hearing from you.
While dramatic empowerment is exciting, sometimes the more subtle work of the Holy Spirit touches us equally deeply. Such is the case with the story of Horatio G. Spafford, a successful lawyer and businessman in Chicago in a past century.
While his wife and four children were crossing the Atlantic, their ship collided with another vessel. Understanding the grave danger, Anna knelt with her four daughters and prayed as the ship was sinking. The daughters perished and only Anna survived. A sailor in a small rowboat saw her floating on a piece of debris and saved her.
Nine days later Anna Spafford landed in Cardiff, Wales. One of the survivors, Pastor Weiss remembers Anna saying, “God gave me four daughters. Now they are taken from me. Someday I will understand why.”
Anna immediately wired her husband. “Saved alone, what shall I do?”
Horatio Spafford immediately booked passage and sailed to join his wife. In four days, the ship approached the exact place where the four daughters had gone down. Horatio had the Captain awaken him when they sailed over that exact place. As he stood there on the deck in the cold wind, at that moment he prayed and then with tears rolling down his cheeks, he wrote these words in his journal.
When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like the sea billows roll,
Whatever my lot. Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well with my soul.
A Chorus came to mind:
It is well with my soul. It is well with my soul.
Spafford’s lines were put to music and over the following decades, millions of people have been moved by the power of those words without knowing where they came from or the circumstances that produced the hymn. Without understanding, they were moved by the same power that enabled Horatio Spafford to go on with his life after such an overwhelming loss.
He was sustained by the promise in Philippians 4:7. “And the peace of God which surpasses all understanding, shall keep your heart and your mind through Christ Jesus.”
Anyone who has lost a child, much less four, will understand how the words of that beloved hymn reflect a divine intervention that sustained during the worst experience possible.
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