The Song That Survived the Asylum Walls

In 1917, Frederick M. Lehman sat down to write a hymn about the boundless love of God. He composed two verses and a chorus, but felt something was missing. Then he remembered a poem he had encountered years earlier — lines discovered penciled on the walls of a room in a psychiatric institution, written by an unnamed patient whose identity has never been confirmed.

Those words became the hymn's legendary 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 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."

Consider what happened here. Someone forgotten by the world, locked away in a place of suffering, grasped something about the love of the Almighty that theologians spend lifetimes trying to articulate. No seminary degree. No publishing contract. Just a soul that had apparently been so overwhelmed by the love of God that the only response was to reach for the infinite — oceans of ink, skies of parchment — and declare it still insufficient.

That is what the love of God does. It finds us in our most confined, most forgotten places, and it turns even the walls of our suffering into a canvas for praise.

No room is too small, no person too overlooked, for the love of the Most High to reach and to inspire.