Prosperity came after the war, but with prosperity came the beginnings of rampant materialism, another kind of threat to the present. Would the temptation of wealth erode our dependence on God? Today, it seems as if our daily worries are only magnified as the Western world veers sharply away from God and a declining economy causes widespread losses of homes and jobs.

We also face uncertainty about what is to come. Will the economy collapse? Will the inner cities become war zones that breed rampant disorder? Will rogue nations develop an atomic bomb? Are terrorists about to wage another major attack on us? Will government rulings keep backing Christians into corners where we must either defy the law or go underground to avoid persecution?

At every moment in all the history of our fallen race, people have faced threats from both the present and the future, on both a personal and a cosmic level. And each time Christians have asked, “Is God still with me through all this?”

If ever a young man had the right to ask this question, it would seem that George Matheson did. Born in nineteenth-century Scotland, George became a brilliant student in theology at the University of Glasgow, where he earned a graduate degree. While at school, he fell in love and was soon engaged to be married. Meanwhile, his eyesight began to fade rapidly. When he became totally blind at age twenty, his fiancée broke off the engagement, explaining that she was not cut out to be the wife of a blind man.

Matheson was devastated. The pain of her abandonment stayed with him in his blindness. He never married, yet he went on to become a highly successful pastor at a large church in Edinburgh where he preached to fifteen hundred members every Sunday.

Many men enduring such blows might have struck out at God, thinking He had abandoned him. Many would have thought: I’ve dedicated my life to You, God. Yet You allowed me to fall in love, and then You snatched away my fiancée and my eyesight. You must not really love me after all.

But Matheson knew better. Though his beloved fiancée had left him, he knew that God would not. Out of his pain emerged the classic hymn “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go.” His first verse is a ringing affirmation of the love of God, reaching across the chasm of his sadness:

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.