The Love No Ocean Could Contain

In 1917, a pastor named Frederick Lehman sat down to write a hymn about the love of God. He composed two verses that morning, but the third eluded him. Then he remembered something extraordinary. Years earlier, someone had discovered a poem penciled on the wall of a room in a psychiatric hospital. No one knew who wrote it. The patient had long since passed away. But the words survived — lines so stunning that Lehman recognized them immediately as the missing heart of his hymn.

"Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade — to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry, nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky."

Scholars later traced those lines back nearly a thousand years to a Jewish poem from medieval Europe. Think about that journey. Words about the inexhaustible love of the Almighty, written by an anonymous poet centuries ago, survived through the scratching of a forgotten patient on an asylum wall, and found their way into one of the most beloved hymns in Christian worship.

That is how the love of God works. It finds us in the most unlikely places. It speaks through the most unexpected voices. No suffering is too deep, no wall too thick, no person too forgotten to be beyond the reach of a love that would drain the ocean dry in the telling.