Each has spoken to a different decade of life.

Although I have never had a life verse, God used three different Scripture verses to speak to me in three different decades of my life.

The first verse the Lord clearly brought to my attention in the 1950s, when I was in my 40s and head of the education department at Eastern Mennonite College in Harrisonburg, Va. I had just been awarded my doctoral degree from the University of Virginia and was doing some adjunct teaching for the university.

My passion was working with colleagues to develop a cutting-edge teacher preparation program at EMC in line with the innovative standards of the profession. EMC was being recognized as a front-runner among Virginia’s private colleges.

I held positions in several state organizations and encouraged students in achieving offices in their state body. I knew I was accepting assignments that were too big for me, but I went ahead. Then one day, as I was reading in Jeremiah, the Lord made verse five of chapter 45 (JKV) stand out: “Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not.”

Shortly thereafter I received an invitation to become principal of Lancaster (Pa.) Mennonite School, which I accepted as guidance from the Lord even though many people seemed confounded by my accepting a “lower” position by going from college work to high school. Although I faced a variety of temptations along the way, the Lord has continued using this verse as a stabilizing influence on my life.

The second scriptural gift the Lord gave me was in the 1970s, when I was serving as administrator of Lancaster Mennonite High School. On this particular occasion, faculty member Louise Showalter was in charge of the morning chapel service. She asked several colleagues to read assigned Scripture verses, to which she then added brief commentary. The verse she gave me to read was Ecclesiastes 5:5, KJV: “Better is it thou shouldest not vow than though shouldest vow and not keep.”

Somehow that verse made a lasting impression on me, perhaps because when I was a young boy my father, who loved trains—a love he apparently passed on to me—promised he would sometime take my two brothers and me on a train ride around the famous Horseshoe Curve near Altoona, Pa. That “sometime” never came, and I was disappointed in a promise not kept. Although I have tried to be faithful in keeping promises, I know that I have sometimes failed.

In our society, vows seem to be easily broken, even marriage vows or vows to Christ and the church. Promises quickly slide off our lips, then just as quickly are forgotten. But they are not so easily forgotten by the one to whom the promise was made. Broken promises can hurt—sometimes deeply. I am grateful for the way the Lord used this Scripture in my life as a reminder not to make glib or pressured promises that will likely not be kept. By God’s grace, I have tried to make fewer promises and to hold in faithful remembrance those I do make.

The third Scripture the Lord has used strongly in my life came to me in about 1985, when I was in my 60s. How or when I became aware of it, I don’t know. I only know that I found these words repeated over and over in my mind: “The Lord is good to all.” At the time, I wondered why these words should come to me so clearly and repeatedly; I really didn’t know if they were a phrase I read or heard somewhere or if they were found in the Bible.

Then on Good Friday evening in 1986, we received a telephone call from 100 miles away that our son and daughter-in-law had been involved in a serious accident that fatally injured them both. In the aftermath of that experience, I felt compelled to take my concordance and determine whether or not those words are actually in the Bible. I found them in Psalm 145:9—and then I understood.

Our all-knowing Lord was preparing me for this tragedy by bringing those words to me months in advance. I firmly believe God is not a great manipulator of events to make us think we are “happy”; rather God intends that we use whatever happens as an opportunity to have our hearts open to know a strength that is beyond our own and to see the good that exists in the midst of the bad.

At the right time in my life, the Lord used three short verses from the Bible to speak to my need and to grant me an eternal blessing.

J. Lester Brubaker lives in Lititz, Pa.