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.
-Horatio G. Spafford, 1873
Having a blog can be a weird experience sometimes. I feel the need to make everything I say witty and beautiful, and make each post fit into the arc of a story that inherently has no cohesive arc except what I make of it. The human mind likes to create epic tales, but human lives so rarely work out that way.
All this to say that I am trying less to make everything make sense. This dark night, this desert that I have been walking through- it defies explanation in the classic epic narrative, because surely by now I would have vanquished the enemy, gotten the boy, and lived happily ever after. But now, two years after the sun set in my soul, closure doesn’t seem very important. Not that I think this season is permanent- rather, I can feel things shifting slowly, incrementally, day by day.
“It Is Well” is one of my mom’s favorite hymns. Growing up, I always liked the imagery of peace like a river. I pictured the New River in West Virginia, the one that ran behind my grandpa’s childhood home, or Tinker Creek in Roanoke, where my brother and I fished. Steady, smooth, green rivers that rushed when it rained. But the peace I feel now isn’t peace like a river. It is deeper and wider, colder and saltier. It does not flow, but it has stronger currents beneath its surface. I keep remembering the image I couldn’t get out of my mind last spring break, of sitting in on the shore with my ankles in the surf, waiting for the tide to roll in.
Finally, after a long sojourn in the desert, I am remembering the joy that cool, living water is. God has always been easily associated with the ocean in my mind. The peace I feel is not a river but an ocean- shallow at first, but expanding farther and deeper and waiting for me to wade in.
And this doesn’t make sense to me. Why, after so long, I now feel peace. Why here, why now, why me. Why Lent came two years early and is leaving so imperceptibly as to seem unmoving. It doesn’t fit the arc of the story. But on this Fat Tuesday, as the Church prepares for Jesus to enter the desert, I am tired of trying to make it fit. Jesus will be tempted and tried, but he will not yield- and oh, it is well with my soul.
He has taught me, in that long, dark desert, to say it is well.
