What The Atlantic Cannot Steal
12 MINUTES TO THE BOTTOM
The Atlantic in November is not a place that offers second chances. It takes what it takes, and it usually takes it quickly.
On the night of November 22, 1873, the SS Ville du Havre was struck broadside by an iron-hulled sailing vessel in the dark water south of Newfoundland. The collision happened without warning. One moment the ship was crossing, the next its hull was open to the sea. Those who survived described what followed as a kind of terrible orderliness: the water rising, the decks tilting, the screaming, and then the silence. The whole catastrophe lasted a mere twelve minutes.
Horatio Spafford's four daughters (Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta) were all asleep in their cabin when the disaster began. Their mother, Anna, fought to reach them once their bodies were flung into the frigid waters. Once she found them, she fought to hold onto them, then fought the water itself to save her family, but every attempt failed. She was found clinging to wreckage, unconscious. She had been saved by a floating plank, but her daughters were lost to the depths below.
When Anna reached the shore at Cardiff, she sent a cable to her husband in Chicago. Two words, paid by the letter, were sent: “Saved alone”.
Their grammar is perfect and their meaning is annihilating. They arrive not even as a complete sentence but as a door swinging open into a place no one wants to go. Saved alone. Everything behind her in the water. Everything ahead of her in that cable, traveling across an ocean to a man who would have to read it, and keep reading it, and understand its horror over and over again.
What do you do with that? What do you do with your hands as you hold that kind of message?
HUMANS AS LOAD BEARING CREATURES
Here is a thing that is true about human beings: we are, all of us, load-bearing creatures. We do not merely love the people and things in our lives — we build our lives on them. We mortise our hope into their presence. We run the weight of our meaning, our peace, our sense of a navigable future, down through the people we love and into what we believe they will always be. We do this, as well, with things like our careers, marriages, children, and a litany of other things. To us, these are not just good things we enjoy. They become, quietly and without our full consent, the subfloor beneath the floor — the thing that keeps the larger structure of our lives upright and standing. And, all of us do this.
The medieval reformer Martin Luther had a way of describing this tendency, saying "Whatever your heart clings to and confides in," he wrote, "that is really your god." Not what you profess to love most. Not what you would say, if you were asked, was the center of your life. No. Luther was teaching us that whatever our hearts run to — in the dark, or in the diagnosis, or in the moment the ship is tilting — that is what we have actually trusted. That is our load-bearing wall.
THE LOAD BEARING FINDER
Because humans are perpetually prone to building our lives on the wrong load-bearing structures, the First Commandment exposes us. God does not merely forbid carved idols. He says, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” That distinction is not cosmetic. An idol is a visible object that can be smashed. A god is whatever we lean on for weight, whatever we trust to steady us, whatever we believe must remain standing if our lives are to remain intact. Idols can be identified and denounced in public. Gods are the hidden load-bearing walls of the heart. They stand quietly beneath the surface, holding up our sense of safety and meaning, and we rarely recognize them until the tremor comes and the structure begins to crack.
And in this way, most of us will never know what we have actually built our lives on until it is taken. This is the kind of mercy, if you can call it that, of an easy life. Because it lets you go on believing that God is your foundation when you have never once had to test whether your life would remain standing if everything else were taken away. We are like people who live in a house for decades without ever reading the blueprints. The ceiling is up. The walls are standing. And all seems well.
But when the whole thing comes crashing down. When the nightmare becomes reality. When everything is taken away. That is when we realize what was actually holding our lives erect.
THE FATE OF BROKEN CISTERNS
The prophet Jeremiah, watching the city of Jerusalem unravel under the weight of its own infidelities, reached for an image to describe what is happening when a life or a nation collapses, and the image he codified in Holy Scripture was that of a cistern. God, he wrote, is the fountain of living waters — a source that runs cold and clear without bottom, fed from somewhere deeper than the visible earth, and never runs dry. He always satisfies. He always nourishes. But, what have the people done with this? According to Jeremiah, they had turned their backs on it, and gone out from the fountain of living waters, with their shovels in tow, and hewn out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jeremiah 2:13).
Now, lest the metaphor escape us, a cistern is nothing more than a hole in the ground lined with stone. It does not generate water. It is not fed by a living spring. It simply gathers whatever falls into it from above and stores it for later. That is the tragedy the prophet names. We abandon the ever-flowing fountain and attempt to secure ourselves by collecting what little we can, stockpiling it against drought, quietly afraid of the day it runs dry. And it always runs dry. The water disappears. The stone cracks. We are left thirsting.
Bring that into our world and the image becomes uncomfortably familiar. We have forsaken the inexhaustible supply of God and dug cisterns named career, comfort, reputation, control. Each promises stability. Each assures us it will hold. Yet every one of them is, in the end, a containment chamber split by fractures too deep to retain a single drop. We choose broken cisterns over the fountain that never fails.
The lie of every substitute god is not that it gives you nothing. But that it gives you the thing — significance, peace, belonging, security — in quantities too small to live on, and then charges you everything you have for the refill. You do not notice, for years sometimes, that you are being slowly emptied and hollowed out. The ceiling is still up. The walls are standing. Then one night an iron-hulled ship comes out of the dark, and you discover what you were actually trusting in.
BUT, EVEN SO, IT IS WELL
When Horatio Spafford received the tragic news, he boarded a ship to go and meet his wife.
While he was en route, and when the vessel had reached the approximate coordinates of the wreck, the captain brought him to the bridge and gestured at the water. “This is the place”, he said, or with words basically to that effect. Below them, somewhere in the cold and the dark, were his own daughters. Four of them. Annie and Maggie and Bessie and Tanetta.
Spafford stood thousands of feet over top of them. And what he did next would be a matter of mystery to most men. Instead of giving into despair, falling into a tormenting depression, or blaming God for the misfortune, he went below to his cabin, and he did something that has no rational explanation.
He wrote a hymn.
Not a dirge. Not a wail rising from the wreckage. He wrote a hymn of peace.
“When peace like a river attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll.”
Not if sorrows roll. When. He was not speculating about suffering. He was standing inside it. He knew what sea billows were. He had seen what they take. And still he sang:
“Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.”
This should not be possible. Many would insist it is not even healthy. And yet, on the day his eyes beheld the hardest thing they had ever seen, his soul was fastened to something more solid than the deck that gave way beneath his daughters. His gaze was not anchored to the wreckage. It was fixed on a reality more immovable than timber, more unshakable than the sea, more enduring than death itself.
This kind of response is only possible when a man’s soul is fastened to something deeper than the Atlantic. Only if the load-bearing wall of his life has been driven down into ground that cannot shift with the ocean floor, into a foundation beneath his daughters, beneath his health, beneath his plans, beneath every gift the years had given and the sea had taken in minutes.
Spafford understood this so deeply that he could write the rest: 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. His daughters were gone. But his sin was also gone. And in the economy of the Gospel, that is the deeper rescue — not because his grief doesn't matter, and not because the loss was not real and tragic, but because what Christ absorbed on the cross was greater. Whatever the ocean took, it could not take that. Its frigid depths could not touch the covenant. Could not reach the mercy given to a man, writing from his own ruins, proclaiming in Christ that it is well with my soul.
WOULD HE BE ENOUGH?
There is a question underneath all of this that most of us have the luxury of never answering.
If God took everything else away from you, everything you owned except for Him, would He be enough?
Not in the superficial protestations we make on Sunday mornings, where the answer is obvious and costs us nothing. I mean in the actual dark, with the actual loss staring you in the face, in the place where your entire legacy was drowned in twelve paralyzing minutes, in that place where the “Saved alone” is gnawing at your soul. Would the LORD, and only the LORD, be sufficient ground for you to stand on? Could you then proclaim with Spafford, that “It is well with my soul.”
We cannot pre-answer that question. We can only begin now by asking what we are truly standing on. Not what we claim. What we reach for when the lights go out. What loss would not merely wound us, but unmake us. The children. The approval. The health. The life we have so carefully constructed. Good gifts, all of them. Terrible gods.
Spafford’s last verse looks past the wreckage:
“And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight…
Even so, it is well with my soul.”
He calls it well not because the sea returned what it took, but because there is a day when the unseen ground will be seen, when the foundation that held in the dark will stand revealed as Christ Himself.
Everything else will give way. He will not.
