The Song That Survived the Asylum Wall

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 extraordinary. Years earlier, a poem had been discovered penciled on the narrow wall of a patient's room in an asylum. No one knew who wrote it. The patient had died alone, anonymous, forgotten by the world — but not by the Almighty. 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 scribe by trade — to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry."

Lehman wept when he first heard those lines. He set them as the final verse of The Love of God, and they became the most beloved part of the hymn.

Think about that. The deepest expression of divine love we have in hymnody came from someone the world had discarded. Someone locked away, deemed worthless by society. Yet that forgotten soul understood something theologians spend lifetimes trying to articulate — that the love of the Most High is so vast it would exhaust every ocean of ink to describe.

That is how God works. He takes the overlooked, the broken, the nameless, and through them He declares His love to generations. No one is beyond the reach of that love. No one is too small to be its messenger.