Written on the Asylum Wall

In 1917, a Kansas City pastor named 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 piece of writing that had haunted him for years — a poem discovered penciled on the narrow walls of a room in an asylum, left behind by a patient whose name history never recorded.

The words were breathtaking: "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."

Lehman wept. He made that anonymous poem the third verse of The Love of God, and it became the most beloved stanza of the entire hymn.

Consider what happened here. Someone confined within four walls, someone the world had overlooked and forgotten, grasped the immensity of God's love more clearly than theologians in their studies. They had nothing left — no reputation, no freedom, no audience — and yet they possessed the one thing that mattered.

The Apostle Paul wrote from his own confinement that nothing "shall be able to separate us from the love of God" (Romans 8:39). No wall is thick enough. No night is dark enough. The love of the Almighty finds us wherever we are — especially there.