Written on the Walls of an Asylum

In 1917, Frederick Lehman sat down to write a hymn about the boundless love of God. He composed two verses and a chorus, but felt the song was incomplete. Then he remembered something extraordinary.

Years earlier, a poem had been discovered penciled on the narrow walls of a room in an asylum. No one knew who wrote it — only that a patient, someone the world had forgotten, had scratched these words into the plaster before dying:

"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 when he read it. He set those words to music as the third verse of The Love of God, and it became the most beloved part of the hymn.

Think about that. A person locked away, dismissed by society, suffering in ways we cannot imagine — and yet they understood something about the love of the Almighty that theologians spend lifetimes trying to articulate. No ocean of ink could capture it. No parchment sky could contain it.

That is the reach of God's love. It finds you in the asylum. It finds you in the darkness. It finds you precisely where no one else is looking.

And it writes itself on the walls of your heart.