Tragedy strikes all of us at different times in our lives. For the believer, those hardships form our faith through the experience of God’s grace at work in our lives. Difficulty is the place we learn the greatest lessons about God’s faithfulness to us.

Paul and Silas found themselves wrongfully imprisoned in the jail in Philippi. The song they sing at midnight changes everything and demonstrates the power of the gospel to impact lives even in the worst of circumstances. Consider the following well-loved hymn a midnight song and the truth we find in the story of how it was written.

In 1844 a young Irishman, Joseph Scriven, had completed his college education and returned home to marry his sweet-heart. As he was traveling to meet her on the day before the planned wedding, he came upon a horrible scene—his beautiful fiancée tragically lying under the water in a creek bed after falling off her horse.

Later he moved to Canada and eventually fell in love again, only to experience devastation once more when she became ill and died just weeks before their marriage. For the second time, this humble Christian felt the loss of the woman he loved. The following year, he wrote a poem to his mother in Ireland that described the deep friendship with Jesus he had cultivated in prayer through the hardships of his life. Ten years after he shared it with his mother, he acknowledged this well-loved text had been written by him and his friend, Jesus. In 1868 the text was set to a tune and named “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

Instead of thinking God was punishing him, Scriven cherished God’s friendship through all of his hardship—a friendship he discovered in prayer.

May we learn that our relationship with God will grow the same way—in prayer. This article is from a more in-depth article by Mike Harland.