Most of us have sung "It Is Well With My Soul" without knowing what it cost the man who wrote it. Horatio Spafford lost his fortune in the Great Chicago Fire, then lost his four daughters when the Ville du Havre went down in the Atlantic in 1873. His wife's telegram read "Saved alone." He wrote the hymn on the crossing to meet her, over the water where they drowned.

But that is where most tellings stop, and Spafford's life did not stop there. This is the fuller, truer story: the son he buried, the church he left, the complicated colony he founded in Jerusalem, and underneath all of it, the question that matters most for anyone who leads a room in worship. Not why the song still moves us. What the song actually formed, in him, and in everyone who has sung it since.

This is a special long-form episode, the audio of the first in a new monthly worship documentary series. If you would rather watch the visual version, it is on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/RwNs9DZO3Wk

Worship that holds in the dark is formed long before the dark arrives.

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