Revived in Trouble

Innellan, on the Firth of Clyde, the evening of 6 June 1882. George Matheson, the parish minister, blind since his student years, is alone in the manse. His sister has been married that day. Something had happened to him, he wrote afterwards, known only to himself and causing the most severe mental suffering, and out of that evening came O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go. He said it took about five minutes, that it came as though dictated, and that he never altered a line.

The words people still sing are the ones that refuse to leave the trouble. I trace the rainbow through the rain. Not after the rain. Through it, which is a description of what can actually be seen while it is still coming down.

That is the grammar of the psalm too. Though I walk in the midst of trouble, thou wilt revive me. In the midst, not out of it. And revive is a strong verb, the causative of the word for live: to make alive, used of reviving the exhausted and of God preserving a life. It assumes something has been drained rather than merely inconvenienced. Then two hands do two different jobs in one sentence, one stretched out against the wrath of mine enemies and the other, the right hand, saving. And the psalm ends by saying why any of it holds: God finishes what he has taken on in this man's life, which is not a promise of an easy road but of an unabandoned one.

So go back to the manse and the man sitting in it, in a grief he would only ever describe as known to himself. Nothing in his circumstances changed that evening. He was blind again in the morning and the private suffering was still private. What he was given was five minutes of being made alive in the middle of it, and people are still singing it well over a century later. That is what reviving looks like. It is not the end of the rain.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 198 is Being Alone (James 2:17).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna