In the twentieth century, Lehman was given the third verse of “The Love of God” first as an act of grace, communicated globally and over centuries, not last as an instant and focused deus ex machina to his initial efforts. He held onto that third verse like a diamond in the rough. Then, when it was time, Lehman fashioned the two previous verses for the diamond’s setting.

I want to tell stories that reveal deep truths. I never want to “tell stories” in the sense of making stuff up. This May, during a devotional for our Faculty Senate meeting, I told my colleagues a story that I hoped was in the former category. And it was—once my colleague helped me see through the parts that were simply made up.

I told the story of how Fredrick M. Lehman and his daughter W.W. Mays wrote the hymn “The Love of God.” I drew from several sites on the internet that share how they had written the first two verses but were stuck needing a third, when it was provided in a remarkable way:

During their travels, the father/daughter team came across a German insane asylum. One of the prisoners had recently been put to death, and when the soldiers examined his cell afterwards they found the following words penciled onto the walls of his prison:

     ‘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.’

…  F.M. Lehman and his daughter were amazed—the words etched onto the walls of this asylum matched the rhythm of their new hymn perfectly. They inserted these words as the third and final verse of their hymn and published The Love of God by 1920.¹

This miraculous story spoke to me of God providing through words scrawled on hidden walls. All of us in higher education, experiencing turbulent times with more turbulence ahead, need to be reminded of God’s provision. This image promised that God would provide for our needs, even through eccentric means. So I told it.

Yet some elements of the story nagged at me. Its cited source is a 1950 journal for pastors, not likely to have rigorous historical peer review. The poem itself was reasonably attributed to an eleventh-century Hebrew source from Germany, so could it have been passed down locally to a prisoner almost a thousand years later?

But then, why would it be written on a German wall in an English translation that precisely fit the meter of the other two verses? And how could Lehman and his daughter travel to Germany, when he had “lost everything in business and found himself working manual labor in a California packing house”?² It didn’t add up. As I told the story to my colleagues, I mentioned my skepticism, which now ameliorates my embarrassment at repeating a story that turned out to be too glib and too easy. The truth of how God worked was much bigger than that story allowed.

Immediately after the meeting, my friend Steve Perisho found me. Steve is SPU’s Librarian for Theology, Philosophy, and History, and we were co-leading a reading group on Gregory of Nyssa. Steve is the consummate librarian: He obtained for our group not just a few reference works on Gregory of Nyssa, but an entire shelf-full of books including the massive 10-volume Lexicon Gregorianium. Steve knows how to trace a story back to its source.

I thought Steve would offer to investigate the loose ends of the story. Instead, Steve had already investigated them (Steve works fast). We would continue to pull on the loose ends to reveal a more complicated truth that, even after a lot of work, is still incomplete.

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