The Love That Cannot Be Measured

In 1917, a hymn writer named Frederick Lehman set out to capture the love of God in a song called The Love of God. He composed two verses with relative ease, but felt the hymn was incomplete — it needed something that pushed past the limits of ordinary language.

Then he recalled a poem he had discovered penciled on the wall of a room in an asylum. The anonymous words, rooted in an ancient Jewish liturgical poem nearly a thousand years old, became the hymn's breathtaking third verse: "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."

Consider the source. Someone confined to an asylum — overlooked by society, perhaps abandoned by family — understood something about the love of the Almighty that the rest of us struggle to articulate. They knew that God's love is not measured by our circumstances or diminished by our suffering.

Paul prayed that believers might "grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ" (Ephesians 3:18), yet even he admitted this love "surpasses knowledge."

Some truths are too vast for textbooks. They can only be sung. And sometimes the most profound songs about love emerge from the most broken places — because that is precisely where love does its deepest work.