When we sang my favorite hymn this morning in church and I cried yet again, I decided I would look it up online to see if there was maybe a history on how this song came to be. Most hymns were written by people who had just gone through trials or had experienced God in such a way that they could only express their emotion musically. This is from the history of my favorite hymn "The Love of God" by Frederick Lehman.
"the lines had been found penciled on the wall of a patient’s room in an insane asylum after he had been carried to his grave, the general opinion was that this inmate had written the epic in moments of sanity."
Wow. Here's my favorite 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 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.
Chorus:
The love of God, how rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure
The saints’ and angels’ song.
That means that if we tried to write down how much God loves us and all the water on earth was ink, and the sky was paper, and every piece of wheat and grass was a pen, and every person on earth was a writer, that we would drain the ocean of ink and we couldn't fit all of that writing on the sky because it wouldn't be enough paper. I can't even write it without feeling amazed.
1 comment:
Amen Christy.
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