The Hymn That Wouldn't Let Him Go

George Matheson was a Scottish minister who had been losing his sight since childhood. The woman he had loved in his youth parted from him — unwilling, she said, to be bound to a man who would never see her face. By June 6, 1882, he had made a kind of peace with both losses. But that evening, the eve of his sister's wedding, the old grief returned without warning.

Sitting alone while his family prepared for celebration, Matheson picked up his pen. Five minutes later, he set it down. He had written O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go in a single, uninterrupted burst — every verse complete, needing no revision.

"I had the impression," he later wrote, "of having it dictated to me by some inward voice rather than of working it out myself."

The hymn's opening plea — I rest my weary soul in Thee — is not the prayer of a man who has it together. It is the surrender of someone who has simply run out of places to run. Matheson didn't write redemption as a triumphant arrival. He wrote it as a return — a flickering torch laid back into the hands of the One who first lit it.

That is the grace that makes redemption different from self-improvement. We don't climb our way back to God. We collapse in the direction of a Love that refused to let go in the first place. And in that falling, we are found.