Let me share with you two stories that, at first, will seem miles apart. At the end they will come together in a beautiful concerto of Biblical truth. The first story takes us to 1888 and an American lawyer named John Loud. When writing documents, you could either use a pencil or fountain pens and quills dipped in ink wells. Loud wanted something that could write on all surfaces: wood, leather, and paper. He submitted a patent for a pen that had a roller ball in the end and ink in a reservoir. It worked well on rough surfaces but tended to tear paper and make a mess. It also leaked which was a sure way to make the invention flop. Loud didn’t make any improvements and his patent lapsed.
On June 15, 1938, László Bíró, a Hungarian newspaper editor, filed for a British patent on a fountain pen. With the help of his brother, a dentist, a new formula for ink was developed. A new patent was filed in 1941 in Argentina and the pens began to sell. It wasn’t until October 29, 1945 that ballpoint pens made their debut in America, being featured at the famous Gimbels in NYC. The cost of a pen was $12.50. While that sounds steep for a ballpoint pen, remember that this is 1945. Figuring for inflation, that would be the equivalent of $212.00 in our money today!
“Despite a cost-prohibitive price tag of $12.50 ($173.07, with inflation added) according to a 1946 New York Times article, more than 5,000 people swarmed Gimbel’s department store on the day that the pens were first sold in October of 1945, and the ensuing competition and price war meant that millions were sold on the market in the first year.”1
Here’s the second story. German immigrant Frederick Lehman came to the U.S. as a four-year-old in 1872. As an adult, he moved from Iowa to California and started a business. The business went well – until it didn’t. When several business deals went bad at the same time, Lehman lost his business and had to work for a company packing produce. As a devout Christian, his love for the Lord never waned.
At a church service one Sunday night, the preacher gave a sermon on the love of God. The topic spoke to Lehman’s heart in a powerful way, and he couldn’t shake it. Words to a song began developing and he rushed home after work to write music to go with those words. He had written two stanzas and needed a third.
As he was thinking about a third verse, he remembered a poem that had been given to him years ago. When he found it, at the bottom of the page were these words of explanation. “These words were found written on a cell wall in a prison some 200 years ago. It is not known why the prisoner was incarcerated; neither is it known if the words were original or if he had heard them somewhere and had decided to put them in a place where he could be reminded of the greatness of God’s love – whatever the circumstances, he wrote them on the wall of his prison cell. In due time, he died and the men who had the job of repainting his cell were impressed by the words. Before their paint brushes had obliterated them, one of the men jotted them down and thus they were preserved.”2 What were those words?
“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.”
The hymn The Love of God was born!
Put these two stories together. One is about the creation of a ballpoint pen with ink in a reservoir. The second is about how there’s not enough ink or paper on which to write about the love of God. Even if all the ballpoint pens were used that were made since they went on sale in 1945, we still would run out of ink. The topic of God’s love is incomprehensible.
1 John 3:1 says, “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.” And 1 John 4:9-10 reminds us, “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. (10) Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
John, the Beloved, is the author who wrote the most about the love of God. In his four books, at least 110 times, a form of the word love is used. Think about the words of the hymn and their Biblical truth. Think about the Scriptures that speak of the love of God. Then, consider the last verse written in the Gospel of John, John 21:25. “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.”
Think what John could have done with a ballpoint pen!
1https://tedium.co/2018/08/02/disposable-ballpoint-pen-history
2https://westpark-baptist.com/frederick-m-lehman/
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