The Hymn That Wrote Itself in Five Minutes

George Matheson was a Scottish minister who lost his sight almost entirely by the age of eighteen. According to the traditional account, his fiancée returned his engagement ring when she learned his blindness would be permanent. He never married.

Years passed. Matheson built a remarkable ministry, preaching to over eighteen hundred congregants each Sunday, memorizing his sermons word for word because he could not read his notes. But on the evening of June 6, 1882, as his sister prepared for her wedding, something broke open inside him. The joy surrounding him met some deep, private grief, and in what he later described as the most severe mental suffering of his life, he picked up a pen.

In five minutes, the hymn O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go poured out of him. "I had the impression of having it dictated to me," he wrote. The words came not from a man who had been loved well by the world, but from a man who had discovered a Love that remained when every other love had walked away.

"I rest my weary soul in Thee," he wrote. Not "I cling to Thee" or "I chase after Thee." I rest. The posture of someone who has finally stopped striving because he has been found by a Love that does not let go.

That is the love of the Almighty. Not a love we must earn or keep, but a love that holds us, especially in the dark.