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When We Have Lost Our Glasses but Not Our Way...


I am sitting in my house looking out at a foggy world.  White mist blankets everything I can see, obscuring the details and leaving the imagination to fill in the blanks.  And sometimes life feels like this.  We can see an outline but clarity may escape us.  Propped up in the middle of my double window is a piece of wood with the words “It is well with my soul” engraved on the attached metal.  

And it seems an oxymoron with that fuzzy world peering in through the windows behind the art.  The words are clear and bright and beautiful.  The view surrounding them is so withering and damp and uninviting.  There are days when life is just that way precisely, but there  are words that can be an anchor.  A centerpiece of stability for our hearts and minds.  His words.  Words of promise that we can hang everything on.  He doesn’t guarantee us that life will always go smoothly.  In fact, He promises us that in this world we will have trouble, but we are to take heart because of the next radical statement He makes- that He has overcome the world.  

When my view of life feels like I have lost my glasses and nothing will quite come into focus,  it is His promise of peace that I must take hold of.  His presence and peace in us has the power to calm storms that rage around us.  The word says that our peace is itself a sign to the enemy (of our souls) of his impending doom.  

So to get there I must Trust- let go of my white knuckled grasp that holds so tightly to those things which I can’t control… as a friend inadvertently reminded me just yesterday.  And I must ask Him for the bigger perspective… the one where He has overcome the world.  And I need to hear myself say it out loud.  The promises.  The Word spoken over my life and loved ones.

The original writer of those words did just that.  Horatio Spafford (1828-1888)  penned that phrase- "It is well with my soul-" just after he found out that his four daughters had drowned at sea.  It is well with my soul.  Can you imagine?  I have just a peek but my grief was for only one of my children.  Can you imagine writing that after losing four of your children?  There are only two options.  Either he was delusional or there Really Is a peace that passes understanding.  And a God who has overcome this world- a God who is inviting us into that place of victory with Him and lending us the faith to believe it is so before we feel it.  A Daddy who wants to pull His tired children up into His lap even when we have lost our glasses, and we can’t quite see clearly.  








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