The Hymn Written in Five Minutes of Heartbreak

On the evening of June 6, 1882, Scottish minister George Matheson sat alone while his sister's wedding celebration carried on around him. Matheson was nearly blind, and that night something reopened an old wound — what he later described only as "the most severe mental suffering." Many believe the wedding stirred memories of a fiancée who had left him years earlier when she learned his blindness would be permanent.

In five minutes, he wrote every word of the hymn "O Love That Will Not Let Me Go." He later said the verses came almost without conscious thought, as if someone else were writing through him. "I had the impression of having it dictated to me by some inward voice," he recalled.

The opening line is what arrests you: "O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee." Not a love that waits for us to be strong enough, attractive enough, or whole enough. A love that will not let go — even when everyone else has.

That is the love the Apostle Paul described when he wrote that neither death nor life, nor anything in all creation, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38-39). Human love, even at its best, sometimes walks away. But the love of the Almighty holds on.

If you are sitting in your own kind of heartbreak this morning, know this: the Love that found George Matheson in his darkest five minutes has not let go of you either.