Stan's Life Verse

An amusing anecdote about my father keeps coming to my mind.

My father has never had any appreciation for what might be referred to as “Pop-Christianity”.  He scoffed at “God is my co-pilot” bumper stickers.  The nifty places people thought to write “WWJD?” did not give him a tingle down his spine.  He preferred a congregation belting out one of the great, tried and true hymns of the faith to a service where no one sings very well because they cannot imitate the ‘bluesy moaning’ of the latest Christian pop sensation’s new ‘God-God-he’s-our-man-if-he-can’t-do-it-nobody-can’ radio hit.

At some point while I was coming up, it became popular within the church for people to claim a life-verse.  People would select a verse that they felt best represented their outlook on life, and they would then casually drop the verse reference into conversation whenever they were able to do so.  It made people feel good about themselves that they had lived the Christian life so fully that they had settled on a single verse that best represented the theme of their lives.

My father thought it just made them look small.  On at least one occasion, he wondered aloud to me how limited a person’s spiritual existence would have to be to narrow it down to the confines of a single verse.

However, known as he was for his great spiritual depth and insight, people would occasionally ask him what his life verse was.  They doubtless thought that this subject would be the perfect way to break through his sometimes taciturn demeanor and get him talking about something they knew him to be interested in, the Bible.  My dad, for his part, soon discovered that responding by telling people exactly what he thought of the concept of a life verse was a recipe for social strain; so instead, he developed a more subtle approach, which satisfied the social norms and helped turn his annoyance to amusement.  He adopted a life verse.

Anyone who asked my father for his life verse would receive from him a reply that his life verse was 1 Chronicles 26:18.  He would hide the twinkle in his eye until after they were out of his line of vision, but it would reappear later as he contemplated them plumbing the depths and riches of his life verse:  “At Parbar westward, four at the causeway, and two at Parbar.”