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Angaerin
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| | For the last four or five weeks, and for another four or five weeks to come, Evan and I are studying marriage together with Pastor Withington. Last week we studied the wife's responsibilities in marriage. My interest was piqued when Pastor Withington gave us a set of worksheets and told us to think about "aggressive submission."
I'm familiar with Biblical passages commanding wives to submit to their own husbands in everything, as to the Lord, and I accept that completely. But I've always been uneasy with the word "submit." There's another word used in the Bible to describe the role of a wife: helpmeet. And my default definition of "submit" doesn't leave a lot of room for "helpmeet." When someone says "submit", I think automatically of receiving a direct order, saying "Yes sir!" and walking into a rain of bullets. As in Henry VI, it's a humiliating word:
"Submission, Dauphin! ’tis a mere French
word;
We English warriors wot not what it means."
But there's another sense of "submit", which we use when we speak of "submitting" a proposal or "submitting" a portfolio, or "submitting" an application. We present something of our own, hopefully of excellent quality, for inspection and approval. In that famous description of the excellent wife in Proverbs 31, there's ample evidence of this sort of submission, which can indeed be called "aggressive." This "excellent wife" is out there stretching her talents to the fullest - in business, decorating, cooking, talking, socializing, instructing - and her husband heartily approves and is proud of what she does. This kind of activeness and creativity is described as doing her husband good and not evil all the days of her life. She clearly doesn't neglect her home: she's cooking meals, running her household, instructing her children, and giving her husband freedom to perform his job, but kitchen and nursery skills aren't the only abilities she exercises. Any knowledge she has can be used to do her husband good. The more talented she is and the more diligently she develops those abilities, the more she brings to the relationship, the more good she can do him, and the more wholly rejoice in his praise, "You excel them all!"
One question on the worksheet asked me to define, in one sentence, a wife's role in marriage. After a certain amount of labor and agony (ONE SENTENCE?) I defined it as follows: "Holding all of herself in complete readiness to minister to and delight her husband."
I emphasize the "all of herself" part because during my four years in college I observed quite a variety of attitudes towards relationships. Some girls were afraid to share their knowledge with their guys. ("What if he doesn't like smart girls? What if he tries to change me?"). But more often they said something like this: "I like this guy, and yeah, when he asks, I'll say yes; but I've made it clear to him that I have my own life. He'll get everything except my acting skills, or musical skills, or business skills, or my time, or my friends, etc. etc.." They resolved to draw their own lines and define their own space. Woe betide the man who wanted it all. They called it liberation. I wonder if any theater director, or orchestra conductor, or classroom, or work buddy, will ever appreciate those skills or enjoy their companionship half as much as their husbands would if they offered it to him first.
As I tried to highlight in my definition, this isn't a painful necessity. We girls have quite a privilege - to take every scrap of knowledge, beauty, and talent we have, and DELIGHT somebody constantly with it. Is that such a hardship?
| | | Posted 4/23/2008 4:39 PM - 2 comments
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