The Love No Wall Could Contain

In 1917, Frederick Lehman sat down to write a hymn about the boundless love of God. He composed two verses easily enough, but the third eluded him. Then he remembered something remarkable. Years earlier, a poem had been discovered penciled on the wall of a room in an asylum — written by a patient whose name has been lost to history. The words read: "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 scriber 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."

Lehman wept when he read it. He set those words to music, and they became the soaring third verse of The Love of God.

Think about that. Someone locked in an asylum, forgotten by the world, living in circumstances most of us cannot imagine, looked past those walls and saw something infinite. They saw the love of the Almighty — so vast that every ocean of ink and every sky of parchment could never capture it.

That is the nature of God's love. It finds us in the loneliest rooms. It speaks through the most unlikely voices. As Paul wrote, nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

No wall is thick enough. No night is dark enough. His love reaches further still.