The Love of God.

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.

~ 1050 Meir Ben Isaac Nehorai (Haddanut).

Lehman was working in a packing-house, lifting and
moving as much as thirty tons of lemons and oranges a
day which were then packed into crates for shipment.
The previous Sunday, he had heard a heart-warming
sermon on God's love. He could hardly contain
himself. In fact, so much so, that he had found it
hard to get to sleep. The next morning, the thrill of
the previous evening had not left him and as he was
eating breakfast, the first words to this song came to
him. On the way to work, more followed. At work,
during short intervals of inattention (break time),
more words came which he jotted down until he had
completed the first two verses. When he got home, he
went to the old upright piano and composed the melody
for the two verses and chorus. However, a hymn has to
have three verses to be complete. As he tried to
write the third, he found the words were not falling
into place as had the first two. As he tried to
figure out what to do, he remembered about the poem he
had heard at a camp meeting. The profound depths of
the lines moved him to preserve them for future use
and it was not until coming to California that this
urge was fulfilled. He knew that he had saved the
card with the poem but where was it now? His search
was soon rewarded because he had used it for a
bookmark. As Lehman again read the words, his heart
was thrilled just as had happened when he heard them
originally. This time he noticed some smaller print
that told this story, "These lines were found in
translated form on the walls of a patient's room in an
insane asylum after the patient's death." As he set
the words to the third verse to the tune, he found
they matched exactly. God knew when he had the poem,
written in 1050, that it would be translated into
English and brought to America at the exact time
Lehman was going to need it to finish this hymn. That
is 867 years from the time the words were written and
they traveled half-way around the world to be joined
with this song. Since then, this hymn has been
translated into at least 18 languages. This hymn was
first published in Songs That Are Different, Volume 2,
1919.

(http://www.himknowledgey.org/Hymns/329.asp)

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