O His Love

I heard the story of George Matheson today and God used it to greatly encourage me. I looked up his story to fill in the details and this is what I learned:

George Matheson was engaged until his fiancé learned that he was going blind. There was nothing the doctors could do. Upon learning this news, his fiancé broke up with him telling him that she could not go through life with a blind man.

Well, he did go blind while studying for the ministry, and his sister took care of him for years. In the pastoral ministry, the Lord richly blessed him and brought him to a church where he regularly preached to over 1500 people each week during the years his sister cared for him. But one day, his sister got married.

His whole family went to the wedding, leaving him alone. While they were gone, he wrote the words to the hymn, O Love That Will Not Let Me Go, because of the intense pain of knowing his sister would not be there for him anymore and also because her marriage reminded him of the heartbreak and mental anguish he had experienced for years after he lost both his eyesight and his fiancé.

People said he had been a brilliant student and some said that if he hadn’t gone blind he could have been the leader of the church of Scotland in his day.

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

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

1. 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 thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

2. 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.

3. O Joy that seekest 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.

4. O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.

My God, I have never thanked Thee for my thorns. I have thanked Thee a thousand times for my roses, but not once for my thorns. I have been looking forward to a world where I shall get compensation for my cross, but I’ve never thought of my cross as itself, a present glory. Teach me the glory of my cross. Teach me the value of my thorn. Show me that I have climbed to Thee by the path of pain. Show me that my tears have made a rainbow.

~ George Matheson 1842-1906