The Love That Wouldn't Let Go

In 1882, Scottish minister George Matheson sat alone on the evening of his sister's wedding. The celebration around him stirred an old wound — years earlier, his fiancée had broken their engagement when his eyesight failed completely. She could not imagine a life married to a blind man. That rejection never fully healed.

As the wedding festivities carried on without him, Matheson picked up a pen. In what he later described as five minutes of intense emotion, he wrote the hymn O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go. "Something happened to me," he recalled, "which caused me the most severe mental suffering. The hymn was the fruit of that suffering."

What poured out was not bitterness but surrender: "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."

Matheson had discovered something that every human heart eventually learns. Human love, even at its best, sometimes lets go. People walk away. Promises break. But the love of the Almighty never releases its grip. As Paul wrote, nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The most beautiful love songs in history have been written not from places of fulfillment, but from places of loss — because it is only when every other love fails that we finally feel the one Love that never will.