We Will Serve THEE Lord

One week during family devotional, when Jamie was probably four or five years old, our scripture was Joshua 24:15.

Choose ye this day whom ye will serve... but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Joshua 24:15 has long been one of my favorite scriptures. My love for that verse goes back to my mission. When I first read it as a missionary, I remember thinking how profound it was. Since then, I have tried to live with that scripture as a sort of life motto for our family.

By the time this particular memory happened, Joshua 24:15 was already a familiar family scripture. Like 1 Nephi 3:7 and Moses 1:39, it rotated through our “scripture for the week” list regularly.

For more than thirty years, our family has practiced morning devotional together. Annette and I had read scriptures together before we had children, but we formalized family devotional when Jamie and Tanner were young, while we lived in Florida. The tradition carried with us to Oklahoma and later to Texas. (I previously wrote more about our family devotional tradition in another post.)

Each Monday night during Family Home Evening, someone would choose a hymn, and someone would choose a scripture for the week. Then each morning from Tuesday through the following Monday, we would sing the hymn together, recite the scripture together, and read from the Book of Mormon.

Most years, devotional happened before school in the morning. During the seminary years, that could be especially brutal because everyone had to get up so early. We experimented with evenings for a while, but evening activities and schedules never seemed to work very well, so we eventually returned to mornings.

That particular week, for whatever reason, Jamie began emphasizing the final word “the” in the verse and pronounced it as the more formal “THEE.”

So instead of:

"...but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."

it became:

"...but as for me and my house, we will serve THEE Lord!"

At the time, I do not think we thought much about it. Looking back now, I sometimes wonder if Jamie associated that phrasing with the way we addressed Heavenly Father in prayer. Maybe saying “THEE Lord” simply sounded more reverent to a four-year-old little girl learning about scripture, prayer, and God.

But somehow it stuck.

More than thirty years later, Annette and I still pronounce that final “the” as “THEE” whenever we recite Joshua 24:15 together. What began as a little girl’s way of saying the scripture quietly became part of our family tradition.