O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

In June of 1882, a Scottish minister named George Matheson sat alone in his family home while the rest of the household celebrated his sister's wedding. Matheson had been blind since his early twenties, and that evening — surrounded by the joy of others — he was gripped by what he later described as "the most severe mental suffering." In the space of about five minutes, he wrote the entire hymn O Love That Will Not Let Me Go.

He never fully explained the source of his anguish. But what poured out of him that night was not bitterness — it was surrender. "O Love that will not let me go," he wrote, "I rest my weary soul in Thee." He had come to know, through years of darkness and loss, that human love could withdraw. It could fail. It could walk away. But the love of God was different in kind, not just in degree.

Matheson called it the only hymn he ever wrote without revision. It came whole, because the truth it expressed had already been beaten into him by life.

The Apostle Paul says that nothing — not death, nor life, nor things present, nor things to come — can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. That is not poetry. It is the testimony of people who have been held in the dark.