It Is Well...Is it?

Welcome to Traces Space.
When Peace like a river attendeth my soul.  What a profound lyric.  While its truth is prolific and full of itself, I found myself questioning the peace or lack there of I may actually have in my life.
I found myself doing a little research on the song writers, Phillip Bliss and Horatio Spafford.  The incredible stories surrounding their lives and the road that God would have them to travel... I found that these two gentlemen had a same, same but different type of existence, and withstood the ultimate tests of God. 
If you know anything of the story of "It is Well" you know that Horatio Spafford was a wealthy man who had lost most of his fortune during the Chicago fire...Then he had sent his family ahead of himself to England for a family vacation, only for he and his wife to lose their children in a ship wreck.  That is where the first four verses of "It is Well" came from.  The final verse was written many years later after he and his family had left their church because they were told that the reason they had suffered was due to  a "divine punishment"...but yet to him it still was well...He and his family never gave up on God...it just made the relationship with God Stronger.
Phillip Bliss came from nothing.  His family from Pennsylvania, he left home when he was eleven years old.  He left home to work laboring in the lumber fields, where he was exposed to music and also to God.  He eventually worked his way through and earned his teaching certificate.  He was then encouraged to teach music.  Eventually becoming a Evangelist.  He and his wife died in a train accident in Ohio, leaving behind two small children.
You see to me in the midst of their adversity they did not lose focus on God.  They walked in the calling no matter what the circumstance, whether it was having it all and losing it, or coming from nothing and making it work.  For them it was always well.
Fast forward to today...I have been really thinking about it "being well with my soul"...you see I believe that along the way in this life journey that we are all on that we have to somehow find peace in the midst of every circumstance...Not only to simply face it but to make it through it.  No matter how difficult the circumstance the end result is the "wellness" of God.  A good friend of mine always says she does not want to be "considered" as Job was, but yet God knew Job, knew his character and knew that Job in the circumstances that he faced and even the wrongful encouragement of friends would in the end pass the test and proclaim that "it is well".
So where ever you are in your journey, what ever the new thing is that you are facing have peace and hope in knowing that through Christ all things will be well...It is well with my soul...
See you soon