From the archives of Oral Roberts
Horatio Spafford was a prominent lawyer in Chicago when he lost everything he had in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Two years later, he put his wife and three girls on a ship to Europe while he stayed behind to try to recover some of his fortune.
About six days after their ship left port in New York, it collided with another vessel. As the ship sank, Mrs. Spafford gathered her children around her. An oarsman in one of the lifeboats later pulled Mrs. Spafford out of the water unconscious, but all of the children were lost. When she arrived in Wales, she sent a cable to her husband that read, “Saved, but alone.”
Several weeks later, precisely over the area where he’d lost his daughters, Spafford penned one of the greatest hymns we have today. One verse reads:
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.
Matthew 5:45 tells us that it rains on the just and the unjust alike. We’re all going to have trials, hard times, and tears. But with Jesus Christ, we can come through them victoriously.
Romans 8:35, 37-39 says: Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution…or peril? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us…I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels…nor things present, nor things to come…shall be able to separate us from the love of God.
