Life Verse

Proverbs 16:3  "Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established."

I don't recall the first time that I heard or read this verse out of Proverbs, but it was almost certainly while I was still in high school and just starting my exploration of scripture.  From that early time, I remember thinking of this verse as a personal motto, or as something I could carry with me throughout my life.  It would be many more years before I would hear the term, "life verse," but when I heard the term I realized this is exactly what Proverbs 16:3 has been for me.

Of course, when I first encountered it, it was in the King James Version, and therefore what I memorized and think of today is, "Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established."  From the beginning I literally saw this as a direct command to me, personally, and nothing in the Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, has ever spoken to me with such clarity and relevance.  God decided long ago to make this the message I would most distinctly hear, for reasons that are His own.  My job for over twenty years has been to try, again and again, to internalize its wisdom.

I've been thinking a lot about scripture lately.  A few days ago I finally completed a Bible-in-a-year program which involved a steady, daily reading of three, four, or five chapters of scripture every day.  It wasn't easy, but it was fulfilling. I'd read the Bible through before, and I have reread portions of it time after time, but I had not read it in this manner until last year.  Doing so, I learned a great deal, not merely about the contents of the Bible, but also about what the book is -- what Christian scripture is.

I realized again the vibrancy and vitality of the Holy Book.  It is easy to flip open the Bible to some random page and think that it is impenetrable and even boring, but when seen as a whole, the Bible is an amazing document, spanning not only time, but also the depth of literature, from the wisdom of Ecclesiastes to the theological fullness of Romans, from the pain of Lamentations to the glory of Matthew, the Book has it all. 

Yet how few of us even attempt to truly live amongst its pages and live out its message?  Reading the Bible is a start, yes, but it is a work so vast and so rich that it takes more than reading it to absorb it.  We need to read it with an eye toward finding familiarity, while never losing the wonder of our first encounter with the Holy Word.  Entire churches, entire communities, have ignored the Bible, or read it from too mundane a perspective, and therefore, lost its meaning.  In the short story L'Ingenu, Voltaire presents a Huron Indian encountering European culture, and religion, it the late seventeenth century.  He reads the Bible, and is shocked by the discrepancy between the scripture itself and the religion which claims to represent it.  "I notice every day," he says, "that innumerable things go on here which are not in your Book, and that nobody follows what it says."  Indeed, are we better?  How many of us live out the message of the Bible?  How many of us sincerely begin to try?  I have a long way to go myself, I know.

But it is a book written for us, for each of us, as if each and every one of us happened to be the only intended audience.  When the Bible is read in sincerity, with openness of mind and soul, it speaks directly to us as individuals.  It provides us with that certain something -- variously called a roadmap, a guidebook, a compass -- that we need in order to live our lives with meaning and purpose.  The Bible itself does not provide the inspiration -- that is God's role -- but it is indeed our source of instruction. 

And so can any of us be surprised to find a special verse that speaks to us on a level that no other words of scripture do?  Surely not.   "Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established."  If I had never read those words, or perhaps more to the point, if God had never written them within my heart, what would I be doing now?  Not writing these thoughts, that is certain.