The Hymn Born from a Broken Heart

On the evening of June 6, 1882, Scottish minister George Matheson sat alone while his sister's wedding celebration carried on around him. The festivities stirred something painful. Matheson had gone nearly blind by age eighteen, and the woman he loved had walked away, unwilling to share a life with a man losing his sight. Now, hearing the joy of his sister's wedding, that old wound opened fresh.

In five minutes, Matheson wrote what he later called the fastest hymn of his life: "O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go." The words poured out as if they had been waiting years for release. "I rest my weary soul in Thee," he wrote — not to the woman who had left, but to the God who never did.

What strikes me about that evening is the direction Matheson turned. Human love had failed him. The world had gone literally dark around him. Yet in the middle of a celebration that reminded him of everything he had lost, he discovered a love that would not release its grip on him — the relentless, pursuing love of the Almighty.

That is the nature of divine love. It does not wait for us to be whole before it holds us. It finds us in our blindness, in our loneliness, in rooms full of joy we cannot quite reach — and it refuses to let go. As the apostle Paul wrote, nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.