“How do you describe the beautiful sunset reflecting golden rays on the black waters which reflect like a mirror? How do you describe the still quiet of a jungle so thick you can’t see beyond its edge? There is an awesome beauty and mystery about this part of the world. You can’t describe it. You have to experience it. You have to feel it and touch it for yourself.”
These are words I wrote in my dairy July 21, 1979 while working with fellow missionaries on the Amazon River and teaching a seminar for Pastors and laymen in Manaus, Brazil.
There are some experiences in life that defy description. Experiencing the Amazon River and Jungle is one of them. The experience is real yet words are inadequate to express it.
How do you describe the love of God or the grace of God. You really can’t. You just have to experience it and feel it in your heart and soul. Perhaps that is why Frederick M. Lehman penned the words
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.
Lehman wrote the first two stanzas of the hymn but was inspired to include a third stanza which he said were written by a demented man on the wall of his narrow room in the asylum where he died. Research discovered that that message was actually a translation of an Aramaic poem, “Haddamut”, written around 1050 by Rabbi Meir Isaac Nehoral of Worms, Germany.
The words on the asylum wall explain all the more why our vocabulary is too limited to express God’s love.
Could we with ink the ocean fill,
and were the skies of parchment made;
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And everyone 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
In times like these, focus on God’s indescribable love and an unfailing faith in Him who holds the future. As another hymn puts it, “He is the Mighty King; Master of Everything. His Name is Wonderful, Jesus my Lord.” He is our hope and Salvation.
In His Love, Charles
