It Is Well

Shane & Shane sing Horatio Spafford's 1873 hymn without altering the text, and the opening line still carries the weight of the story behind it: "when peace, like a river, attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll." Spafford wrote these words crossing the same ocean where his four daughters had recently died.

"My sin, not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more" makes the hymn's real subject clear — not the absence of grief, but the settled weight of sin already dealt with, a claim the hymn makes even as it acknowledges sorrow rolling like sea billows.

"And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight, the trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend" closes the hymn looking past the present grief entirely, toward a return the singer is actively waiting for. Isaiah's promise of peace extended like a river gives the opening line its exact picture, and it's still the line congregations reach for first, a century and a half later.