It Is Well With My Soul

It is well with my soul.  That’s a mind-blowing statement. 

I’m sure you know the ancient song that chants the statement in an anthem of hope.  I grew up singing it often at my church and I often hear it ring out over funeral settings.  But today, those words struck me upside the head in a very different light.  You know, it’s the statement you’ve heard over and over, but then came the day you actually understood it.  As if it had been stated for the very first time. 

IT.  IS.  WELL.

 

IT.  The situation.  The trial.  The reality.  The current peril.

IS.  How things are.  Present tense.  Admission of reality.  Apart of my existence. Tangible what’s what.

WELL.

It means I am at peace with the situation.  It doesn’t mean the situation is good.  And it doesn’t mean I want it or like it, but it does mean I have reconciled my core to accept the reality that God has allowed in my present tense.  And when we can move to that place, we move to a perspective that allows us to recognize the turmoil and heartache, but not to fall prey to it.

This life takes some pretty painful twists and turns, leaves us sometimes speechless, with a pit in our stomach, shaking our head at the affliction we may feel.  The loss of a loved one.  The death of a dream.  The pain of a chronic illness. And it might not be peril at all, it may simply be uncertainty.  

Regardless of the weight of our present circumstances, the heart response we must move toward is the same. We have to have enough gall to say to God, “this is what I see, feel, and am going through.  And I don’t like it.  I can’t stand it.  In the deepest part of my being, I wish it was something it’s not.” I think we are sometimes too afraid to tell God what he already knows, as if he is waiting with his magical lightning rod to zap us.  But the opposite is true.  When we can feel comfortable enough in our own skin to honestly process with our Creator the reality He has allowed, it means we can then have the opportunity to move to a place where we can say in all sincerity, IT IS WELL.  

And that, my friends, is the difference between the person who is tormented by the heartache they have faced along the way, and the person who rises above it. 

How we respond will determine what we will become.