Hugh Bonneville on "It Is Well With My Soul"
And the account I want to share with you this Christmas season is just such a story. My contribution to the Christmas concert is the one of narrator, narrating a story, which is very much a tradition of these events. And the story I'm telling is actually a very sad tale on the surface, and doesn't seem very Christmassy, but I think at its heart are some of the themes that we try to connect to at Christmas. It's the story of the Spafford family who go through very dark times, who have a catalog of hurt and pain weaved through their lives. But somehow, they find the strength to use that and actually turn outward, and to use their suffering for good. It sounds like a strange contradiction, but through the turmoil they endure, they find solace in reaching out to others and helping others. It's a story I didn't know. It is about a family who are literally shipwrecked, and then, through their own pain, they rebuild their lives by helping those who have been shipwrecked themselves, figuratively or literally, I suppose, but, and they ended up in Jerusalem, the daughter of the family setting up a hospital that whose works still carries on to this day, so it's a tremendous legacy, but extraordinary to think that that need to help others came from a place where other people might have given up, but they built on it, they built on the pain they suffered and turned it into good, and I think that sense of new hope, new birth, which, of course, the nativity is all about, of finding a way forward out of darkness into light, is something we can recognize at Christmas whoever we are. It is well with my soul Fa la la la la la la la la
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