The Song That Outlasted the Walls

In 1917, Frederick Lehman sat down to write a hymn about the love of God. He composed two verses and a chorus, but felt something was missing — words vast enough to match the love he was trying to describe. Then he remembered a poem he had encountered years before, penciled on the walls of a patient's room in an asylum. No one knew who wrote it. The author had likely been forgotten by the world. But from the depths of suffering, that unnamed soul 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."

That forgotten verse became the soaring third stanza of The Love of God, and it has outlasted every wall that once surrounded it.

Someone the world had locked away still knew they were loved by the Almighty. The illness could not erase it. The isolation could not silence it.

That is what Paul meant when he wrote that nothing — not trouble, not hardship, not anything in all creation — can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38-39).

The love of El Shaddai reaches into every locked room, every forgotten corner, every place the world has given up on. And it writes itself on the walls of the heart where no one can scratch it out.