The Love Written on Asylum Walls

In 1917, Frederick Lehman sat down in Pasadena, California, to write a hymn about the immensity of God's love. He composed the first two verses and the chorus of The Love of God with relative ease. But it was the third verse that would become the hymn's most unforgettable moment — and Lehman didn't write it.

That verse had been discovered years earlier, penciled on the narrow walls of a room in an asylum. A patient — someone the world had forgotten, someone locked away from ordinary life — had scratched out words of staggering beauty: "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."

No one recorded the patient's name. No one preserved their story. But their words outlived every limitation placed upon them, because they had encountered a love too vast to be confined by any wall or diagnosis or circumstance.

That is the nature of the love the Almighty extends to each of us. It reaches into asylums and palaces alike. It finds us in our most forgotten moments. It does not require that we have our lives together before it arrives.

If someone in the depths of suffering could glimpse that love and find words for it, then perhaps we, too, can trust that no darkness in our lives exists beyond its reach.