It is well with my soul ... Horatio Spafford's heart for Israel
One of my favorite hymns is a favorite because of the story behind its writing: "It Is Well With My Soul" ... Valentine Vester, the 96-year-old wife of the grandson of the hymn's writer, Horatio Spafford, recently passed away and her obituary shares a bit of her family's background in Israel...
Her husband's grandparents, Anna and Horatio Spafford, were millennialist Protestants from Chicago. They arrived in Jerusalem -- then a neglected backwater of the Ottoman Empire -- in 1881 after losing their four daughters in an Atlantic shipwreck and then a son to scarlet fever. They wanted to do charitable works and await the Second Coming.
They gathered around them a community of Americans and Swedes, forming a kind of Christian kibbutz. The Colony's residents made a point of providing help to Jews, Muslims and Christians, and treated both Turkish and British wounded during the battles of World War I. When the Turks surrendered in 1917, their white flag was a sheet from the Colony's hospital, ripped in two and tied to a stick.
"And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll
The trump shall resound and the Lord shall descend
Even so, it is well with my soul"
Once again, God reminds me through my wanderings and curiousities that He sovereignly provides for and keeps His promises to His beloved...and yes, the trump shall resound!
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