Recently,
a friend sent me the history of a hymn that I often heard in church when I was
a boy:
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.
These
words are part of an ancient Jewish poem and were once found on the wall of a
patient’s room in an insane asylum.
Also,
Frederick M. Lehman was so moved by the poem that he desired to expand on it.
In 1917, while seated on a lemon box during his lunch break from his job as a
laborer, he added the words of the first two stanzas and the chorus, completing
the song “The Love of God.”
The psalmist describes the comforting assurance of God’s love in Psalm 36: “Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens” (v.5 esv). Regardless of the circumstances of life—whether in a moment of sanity in a mind otherwise muddled with confusion or during a dark time of trial—God’s love is a beacon of hope, our ever-present, inexhaustible source of strength and confidence.
You are loved with everlasting love. (RBC)
