Written on the 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 piece of writing that had haunted him for years — lines discovered penciled on the narrow walls of a patient's room in an asylum. No one knew who wrote them. No one knew the author's name or story. But someone in the grip of suffering had scratched out words about a love so vast that if the ocean were filled with ink and every blade of grass became a quill, they still could not exhaust the love of the Almighty.

Lehman wept when he read those lines again. He set them as the third verse of The Love of God, and for over a century, congregations have sung words born in one of the loneliest places imaginable.

Think about that. The most soaring declaration of God's love in our hymnal didn't come from a theologian's study or a cathedral choir loft. It came from someone the world had forgotten, locked away and dismissed — yet who understood the reach of divine love more deeply than most of us ever will.

That's how the love of El Shaddai works. It finds us in our most confined, most desperate places and declares that even there, we are not beyond its reach. No wall is thick enough. No night is dark enough. The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell.