The Verse I Used to Win Things With

The refrigerator in the house I grew up in had a magnet clip that held a stack of index cards, and every week the stack changed. My mother wrote a verse on the top card in blue ballpoint. I was seven or eight, and I was good at it. Not good at understanding it. Good at saying it. I won a plaque at a church competition once for reciting Proverbs 3:5-6 without a stumble, and I remember feeling more proud of the plaque than of the words, which should have told me something at the time and didn't.

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding (KJV).

That was the one. The whole stack rotated but that card came back maybe four times a year. I could say it the way you say the pledge. I had no idea what it cost.

What a child thinks it means

At eight I thought it meant: don't worry, God has a plan, everything works out. A kind of spiritual insurance. The verse sat flat and round in my mouth, easy to hold, easy to put down. I quoted it to a friend whose dog had died. I was ten. That was the whole pastoral care I had in me, and I delivered it like a coupon.

I do not blame myself for that. Children paraphrase the things they inherit. The problem is I kept paraphrasing it well into my thirties, long after the paraphrase had stopped being true. It was the verse I reached for when something went badly, and I said it the same way every time, and it quieted me, and nothing changed.

What it means with my hand on the car door

Two weeks ago I sat in the school pickup line, which is where I do most of my reading now, ten minutes at a time on a phone with the engine off and the windows down because the air conditioning makes me colder than I want to be. My daughter got in the back and did not say hello. She said, Why did God let the thing happen to my teacher.

And I opened my mouth and the verse was there. Right there, first thing, already in the chamber. Trust in the Lord. Lean not on your own understanding.

I did not say it. I sat with my hands on the wheel and noticed what the verse was actually doing in me, and it was not comfort. It was deflection. It was a smooth, memorized way of not saying the frightening thing, which is I do not know, and I am angry too, and I sit in this car with you and I cannot explain God to you.

Somewhere in the last few years the verse turned over. It is not a promise that it works out. It is a personal address. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. There is a you doing the trusting, and a Lord being trusted, and no clause anywhere about the outcome. Lean not on your own understanding is not God asking for the benefit of the doubt on his plan. It is God saying: your understanding is small, and it is going to run out, and that is not a failure. That is the condition you live in.

I used to memorize the verse because a plaque was on the line. Now I say it because I have run out of my own understanding on a Tuesday afternoon in a parking lot, and there is a person on the other end of it. The words did not change. The me saying them did, and I did not notice for about twenty-five years.

The translation has changed too, at least for me. The King James is what my mother wrote in blue pen, and I still hear it that way. But the ESV is what I read now, and it drops thine own down to your own, which is flatter and somehow more exposed. I do not need the poetry anymore. I need the plain word.

I still do not know what to say to my daughter about her teacher. I said the true thing, or closer to it. That I am sorry, and that I am angry too, and that I will ask God about it tonight and probably not get an answer, and that not getting one for a long time is something I am used to and not something I am at peace with.

She nodded like this was normal, which it is.

What verse did you learn first, and how many years did it take before you heard what it was actually saying?