It Is Well With My Soul

My soul hurts sometimes.  That's a strange thing to say, but it's the only way I know to describe it.  My body feels weak.  My heart trembles as though each beat just may be too overwhelming for it's broken fibers.

I have tried to be a harder, colder person.  I've wanted to keep emotions suppressed and pressured until they turn to stone, never again to affect me so profoundly.  But I have an impressionable soul.  I feel things with an intensity so strongly at times that I fear I may cave in on myself, collapsing into a black hole in the middle of my chest to be stretched through anguish and heartache indefinitely.  But after a while, it is as though my mind is too overwhelmed by the multitude of anxiety ridden questions about what I did to deserve this hurt, and everything shuts off.
The black hole stops swallowing me, and I am suspended in a time of trans-like existence.  I like to refer to this time as my "Emergency Reset."  Physically, everything is going just as it needs to, but my head is a barren wasteland, and my soul aches with the residual from the reset nuke.

My soul aches.

I may or may not have an old hymnal
 taking up space on my bookshelf.

I read a biography about Horatio Spafford, author of the hymn "It Is Well With My Soul."  He was a privileged lawyer who lived in Chicago with his wife--Anna--four daughters, and a son.  He invested a substantial amount of his wealth in some real estate north of Chicago, but in 1871, the Great Fire of Chicago destroyed his investment.  In 1873, he put his wife and daughters on the S. S. Ville du Havre, while he stayed behind at the last minute to attend to some more estate business, but yet another tragedy struck.  The ship was struck at sea and his daughters died.  Anna sent a telegraph back to her husband:  "Saved alone.  What shall I do..."
Three years later, Horatio's son was born, but at four years old, the boy died.
In spite of all of this, Horatio wrote a hymn that continues to be sung to this day.

"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"

Spafford wrote this following the death of his daughters, as he sailed across the Atlantic to bring Anna back.  In the midst of a loss as profound as losing his children, he acknowledged God's faithfulness and our call to remember His sovereignty.

In the book of Job, a man who also experienced great loss swallowed the lamenting he did in chapter 3 where he says, "let the day perishh on which I was to be born" (Job 3:3), and instead shifts his focus to the glory and majesty of God, proclaiming:

"As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives,

And at the last He will take His stand on the earth.

Even after my skin is destroyed,

Yet from my flesh I shall see God."

(Job 19:25-26)

In times of trial and heartache, it is important to accept that we hurt.  It reminds me of a song by twenty one pilots, where the lead says "sometimes you gotta bleed to know/that you're alive and have a soul" ("Tear In My Heart").  I'm not saying we've got to go around kicking doors and stubbing toes in order to know that our nerve endings are functioning efficiently enough for us to be deemed living, but that it's all right to know that something is causing us pain.  The danger, however, is sitting in that state of mind for too long.  It becomes a poison, and the longer we dwell, the harder it is to avert our eyes to the One who offers the very peace we seek (Romans 5:1).  

However, I must be honest here.  That peace doesn't always come the moment we ask.  Sometimes these trials double as a lesson in patience, and if I'm being frank here, my patience is one of those Fruits of the Spirit that I've been neglecting for a while.  

If you're going through something--anything that's causing your soul to ache--it is my hope that you will take some time to shift your gaze from the ache to the Lord.  Glorify Him instead of the trial.  I'm not saying it will fix everything immediately or that everything will be hunky-dory.  That's not what we, as followers of Christ have been promised, but we are promised that we are not alone (Matt. 28:20).  We are promised that "God caused all things to work together for the good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28), even our suffering:

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too."

(2 Corinthians 1:3-5 ESV) 

So breathe.  

Rally whatever energy you have.

Remember the sovereignty and mercy and grace of God.

And let it be well with your soul.