Before we go any further, many of you are probably wondering to yourselves, “What’s with Quills of Stalk? Patrick does know he’s not a hipster, right?”  While it is true I am not presently punching away at a typewriter as I drink free-trade coffee while rocking an American Apparel V-neck, I would like to think the title is a bit novel and underexposed.

It’s a reference to a line from one of our favorite hymns entitled “The Love of God”  which was composed by Frederick M Lehman in 1917.  Lehman was a California businessman who lost everything, which led to him working in a labor camp where he packed produce for distribution.  The story goes that Lehman was so overcome by the cosmic love that God shows sinners, he began to write his hymn with a makeshift pencil on a lemon crate.  A gifted musician, Lehman composed the melody for the two stanzas he had written. It wasn’t enough. Unlike today where its common place for a song or even an entire worship set to consist of two or three sentences repeated over and over again as they ride a perpetuating pedal loop, the early 20th century demanded lyrical variety.  Lehman took several cracks at it, but nothing he came up with was on par with the original two stanzas. That’s when he remembered an old poem someone had once given him.  The poem was discovered scratched on the walls of an insane asylum some two centuries prior and was an English translation of a nearly thousand year old verse composed by a Jewish Rabbi. The identity of the prisoner and the nature of their affliction are lost to eternity, but the words so beautifully translated were written in the exact meter of Lehman’s two stanzas, and have been preserved down through the years through Lehman’s efforts. They read as follows:

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
Tho stretched from sky to sky.

O love of God, how rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure
The saints and angel’s song.

As we seek to proclaim God’s incredible love to the people of Glasgow we know that words in quantity and quality will never fully convey His beauty and His pursuit.  But that doesn’t mean we don’t attempt it.  As feeble as our efforts might be, our lives have been reworked for this purpose; to proclaim the excellencies of Christ, to speak his beauty into brokenness, and to be reminded continually of how faithful He has been, is being, and will be to see these purposes worked out in the lives of his servants.

God’s love is spilling out all around us.  This blog is meant to be the utensil that is dipped in those most precious splashes we have succeeded in bottling up.