The Hymn That Christ Himself Inspired

In 1882, George Matheson, a Scottish pastor who had gone completely blind by age eighteen, sat alone in his manse on the evening of his sister's wedding. The woman he had once loved had left him years earlier when his blindness became permanent. As the household celebrated downstairs, Matheson felt the full weight of his loneliness — and in that aching solitude, he wrote the hymn "O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go" in under five minutes.

He later said the words came to him almost involuntarily, as though something beyond himself was doing the writing. The opening line is a prayer that has comforted millions since: "O Love that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee."

What strikes me about Matheson's story is where the hymn was born — not in a cathedral, not in a moment of triumph, but in a small room where a blind man sat with his grief while everyone else was celebrating. That is precisely where the love of God does its deepest work. The Almighty does not wait for us to pull ourselves together. He meets us in the room where we have been left behind.

First John 4:19 tells us, "We love because He first loved us." Matheson did not go looking for God that evening. God came looking for him — and gave him a song the whole world would sing.

That is the nature of divine love. It finds you before you even know you are lost.