Oba Pamanai Lyrics by Nimesh Fernando

I searched, combing the whole world over,
and unexpectedly I met you
a love that never, ever ends,
flowing from your heart,
that love is found in no one else

Only you, you alone loved me
only you thought of me
only you stayed beside me
only you, Jesus, only you

Bearing a heart of pain, alone in life,
you called me with love
in all my life I have never known
a love as great as this, now found

Withered in sin, pain rising in me,
I lay my heart at your feet
you bore the pain of the cross for my sake,
so wash me in that blood forever
Only you, you alone loved me…

This is a hymn of discovery and devotion, the song of someone who went looking everywhere for love and found it, at last, only in Jesus. The opening image is of a long, weary search, “I searched, combing the whole world over,” and then the grace of it, “unexpectedly I met you.” What he found is “a love that never, ever ends, flowing from your heart,” and the key realization that shapes the whole song: “that love is found in no one else.”

The refrain drives that home with a single insistent word, “only.” Only you loved me; only you thought of me; only you stayed beside me; only you, Jesus. It is the confession of a heart that has tested every other source of love and comfort and concluded that God’s is the one that never fails. The verses fill in why. He had been “bearing a heart of pain, alone in life,” and it was there that Jesus “called me with love,” a love “as great as this” that he had never known in all his years.

The final verse brings it to the cross and to surrender. “Withered in sin, pain rising in me,” he lays his heart “at your feet,” remembering that “you bore the pain of the cross for my sake,” and prays the tender request that follows, “so wash me in that blood forever.” What the listener is left with is the deep relief of a soul that has stopped searching, certain at last that the only love that truly holds is the one that went to the cross for it.