O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

Permit me to share a story with you:

“O Love That Will Not Let Me Go” was written on the evening of George Matheson’s sister’s marriage. His whole family had gone to the wedding and left him alone. And he writes of something which had happened to him that caused immense mental anguish.

Many years back, he had been engaged until his fiancé learned that he was going blind, and since there was nothing the doctors could do about it, she told him she couldn’t marry a blind man. The blindness set in while he was studying for ministry.

He had been a brilliant student; some say if he hadn’t gone blind he could have been the leader of the church in Scotland in his days. He wrote a learned work on German theology and also wrote “The Growth of The Spirit of Christianity”.

His blindness was a fatal hindrance, and so he withdrew from the field- “…not without pangs, but finally.” So he turned to pastoral ministry and the Lord richly blessed him, bringing him to a church where he regularly preached to over 1500 people each week. He was able to pastor this church effectively because his sister helped and took care of him. But the eve of her marriage brought him the realization that she was going.

Who will care for him, a blind man? His sister’s marriage also brought a fresh reminder of his own heart break over his fiancé’s refusal to “go through life with a blind man.” It was in the midst of this circumstance and intense sadness that the Lord gave him this hymn- written he said in 5 minutes!

Looking back over his life, he wrote that it was “an obstructed life, a circumscribed life… but a life of quenchless hopefulness, a life which beat persistently against the cage of circumstance, and which even at the time of abandoned work has said not ‘good night’ but ‘good morning’.”

How could he maintain quenchless hopefulness in the midst of such circumstances and trial? His hymn gives us a clue

If you can relate with his story;  Here’s the song:

O Love that will not let me go

I rest my weary soul in Thee

I give Thee back the life I owe

That in the ocean depth its flow

May richer, fuller be

O Light that followest all my way

I yield my flickering torch to Thee

My heart restores its borrowed ray

That in Thy sunshine’s blaze its day

May brighter, fairer be

O Joy that sleekest me through pain

I cannot close my heart to Thee;

I trace the rainbow through the rain

And feel the promise is not vain

That morn shall tearless be

O Cross that liftest up my head

I dare not ask to fly from Thee

I lay in the dust life’s glory dead

And from the ground there blossoms red

Life that shall endless be

Story from www.igracemusic.com/hymnbook/hymns/o08.html