They sang one of my long time favourite songs at church last Sunday . When Peace Like a River Attendeth my Way. And through this last week as I’ve thought about it a little, it’s brought me back 15 years to the first time I remember loving this song.
I was a 14 year old hanging out with Karilee at her house in Zomba, Malawi. I don’t remember the specifics -did we sing it with her family once when I stayed with them -or maybe it was during workers meeting when we were bored and paging through a Christian Hymnal? What I do remember was that one of us said, “I love this song!” and the rest of us all agreed. But like maybe that wasn’t strictly true. Maybe we hardly even knew the song because we were growing up in Africa and weren’t used to singing English Christian Hymnal songs. Maybe it just resonated because it was something that reminded us all of our little kid days back in various parts of America, a bit of a history we all had in common (and in many ways we didn’t have a lot of commonality, our motley crew of teenagers from various parts of North America growing up in various parts of Africa.). One thing I know for certain sure is that the lyrics weren’t real to us at that point. Because what do a 14 year olds know. Oh they thought they knew. But they didn’t.
However trite, that day was a small beginning for me, regarding this song. Many times throughout the coming years when we sang this song in my church in Canada I was reminded of this tiny anecdote, but slowly the memory has faded to the point where I’ve lost many of the details and is replaced by newer memories attached to this song. At nearly every crossroads or change in my life, these lyrics have resonated, “Whatever my lot … It is well !”
Sometimes this has been easy. As a carefree teenager doing all the carefree teenager things, the happy times of so many baby sisters, when we sang this song at our wedding, when my son was born. In these times when life was easy and happy it’s been easy to say it is well.
Other times I’ve felt the “sorrows like sea billows roll[ing].” The times that left gaping holes of losing whole sisters to the system, or the times that threw long heavy shadows with years of family dramas and traumas, the hard times. This beautiful and horrible fall when we had to put our perfect and precious teeny tiny baby boy in the ground.
These hard times are the ones the song refers to in this phrase :
Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
Learning, particularly learning acceptance, learning to say the words it is well even when it doesn’t feel like it is really that well, doesn’t often come in the easy happy times. It can, it does, I desperately wish it would more. But most of the deepest, stay-with-me-for-a-lifetime lessons are the ones learned in a bit of darkness, right in the middle of the sorrows like sea billows. And that’s where I’ve been this last month, deep deep in the sea billows. And there really is nothing more to say than this, it is well with my soul.
Here is the song in full. Written by Mr. Horatio Spafford. Google the story behind the song sometime when you think your life is hard.
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 hath 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!
Oh 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.
