We sang this song in church this morning. While singing the 3rd stanza, my creative mind was at work. This is what I ended up with. I placed a black rectangle over the water and blended it with Soft light mode and duplicated it. Then I stretched the scroll across the sky and used the same blend mode. The water element being poured out of the ink well was filled with black.
The Love of God
Author: Frederick M. Lehman (1917)
Journaling reads:
1 The love of God is greater far
than tongue or pen can ever tell;
it goes beyond the highest star,
and reaches to the lowest hell.
The wand'ring child is reconciled
by God's beloved Son.
The aching soul again made whole,
and priceless pardon won.
2 When ancient time shall pass away,
and human thrones and kingdoms fall;
when those who here refuse to pray
on rocks and hills and mountains call;
God’s love so sure, shall still endure,
all measureless and strong;
grace will resound the whole earth round—
the saints’ and angels’ song.
3 Could we with ink the ocean fill,
and were the skies of parchment made;
were ev’ry stalk on earth a quill,
and ev’ryone 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:
O love of God, how rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure—
the saints’ and angels’ song.
Frederick Martin Lehman, 1868-1953
Born: August 7, 1868, Mecklenburg, Schwerin, Germany.
Died: February 20, 1953, Pasadena, California.
Buried: Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.
Lehman emigrated to America with his family at age four, settling in Iowa, where he lived most of childhood. He came to Christ at age 11, as he relates:
One glad morning about eleven o’clock while walking up the country lane, skirted by a wild crab-apple grove on the right and an osage fence, with an old white-elm gate in a gap at the left, suddenly Heaven let a cornucopia of glory descend on the eleven-year old lad. The wild crab-apple grove assumed a heavenly glow and the osage fence an unearthly lustre. That old white-elm gate with its sun-warped boards gleamed and glowed like silver bars to shut out the world and shut him in with the ’form of the fourth,’ just come into his heart. The weight of conviction was gone and the paeans of joy and praise fell from his lips.
Lehman studied for the ministry at Northwestern College in Naperville, Illinois, and pastored at Audubon, Iowa; New London, Indiana; and Kansas City, Missouri. The majority of his life was devoted to writing sacred songs; his first was written while a pastor in Kingsley, Iowa, in 1898. He wrote and published hundreds of songs, and compiled five song books. In 1911, he moved to Kansas City, where he helped found the Nazarene Publishing House.
--www.hymntime.com/tch
