The Hymn That Took Five Minutes and a Lifetime

In June of 1882, Scottish pastor George Matheson sat alone in his manse on the evening of his sister's wedding. Nearly blind since his university years, Matheson had already lost much to his failing eyesight — including, by most accounts, the woman he had hoped to marry. As the wedding celebration carried on without him, a wave of grief swept over him unlike anything he had known.

In that darkness, he picked up a pen. In roughly five minutes, he wrote every word of the hymn "O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go." He later said he never needed to correct or revise a single line. The words arrived whole, as if they had been waiting for a heart broken enough to receive them.

"O Love that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee. I give Thee back the life I owe, that in Thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be."

What strikes me about that hymn is where it was born. Not in a moment of triumph, but in a moment of abandonment. Matheson did not write about a love he had to chase down. He wrote about a Love that refused to release him — even when everything else had.

That is the love of the Almighty. It is not a love we must earn or maintain. It is a love that grips us tightest precisely when we have nothing left to offer. Human love sometimes walks away. The love of God holds on.