So You're
Married
When you said "yes" to Harry, you agreed to "build a nest" or make a home. Many times since then you may have said to yourself, or proclaimed to the world, "But I didn't know it would include this!" What prompted your exclamation could be a moment of sheer bliss or a moment of discontent. You expected only bliss, maybe? Then you forgot that you were still you. You didn't know such bliss existed? Then you are unaware of God's great plan.
The commitment to make a home has such enormous implications that it often takes years to realize how fascinating, how all-encompassing, how strategic your calling really is. But, you may say, I said I'd be a wife, not a homemaker. What you really said may include a far larger assignment that you had in mind, which is precisely why we need solid teaching about the home and the meaning of relationships.
Loving someone in marriage means more than sleeping with them. It is a total commitment of life; it is an overwhelming, lasting desire to give one's self completely to another person and to create for that person an environment in which he or she can become all that God intended him or her to be. It is a building relationship; both partners are
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happier, stronger, and more fully realized than before their union.
The biblical definition of marriage found in Genesis 2:24 says that a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, becoming one flesh with her. Every indication of the strong verbs leave and cleave point to the establishment of a new home, a new unit. Oneness is the goal. Creating a home is a necessity.
Both partners are committed to creating a new thing, something bigger than either of them separately. Their commitment is not just to each other; it is to the new family unit their union has created. In fact, the combined impact of the union of two people from different backgrounds, with different talents, personalities, insights, and character strengths creates something greater than either of them can know at the time. One flesh becomes more rather than less; its sum total is greater than its parts.
Creating the environment, the climate, the quality relationships in which this new union will flourish is part of your job. It is not the wife's job alone, but by the nature of her gifts, which include childbearing and motherhood, she cannot avoid her larger responsibility in this task.
What comes to your mind when you think of the word home? If your response is a feeling of safety, of belonging, of love, of acceptance — then you have experienced home, and you have the necessary framework for being a home maker. If your reaction to home is one of unhappy memories, quarrels, rejection, and attacks on your personhood, then you will appreciate new dimensions of the importance of home, but you may have to make an even greater commitment to create this positive kind of home because you have not had the right kind of model. I have observed often that those who complain most bitterly about their home background do not
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make the commitment and effort to change the pattern when they set up their own homes.
Home and family are under attack today. Television sitcoms portray all kinds of off-beat ways for people to live together. With an increasing number of mothers employed in fulltime jobs, children have become involuntary daily commuters to babysitters or nursery schools. The number of latch-key children — those who come home after school to an empty house — is a present-day phenomena. That's only part of the story. Having jobs means having money, and having money means we can opt out of relationships that seem confining. The past two decades have produced more one-parent families than our nation has ever known. Lost people are looking for answers that will help them face commitments they find frightening because they have never experienced them.
Home and family are the basic building blocks in society, and are God's idea. I am increasingly convinced that we ignore their importance to our peril. If people will not commit themselves in the most important relationships in life, is any other commitment valid? The influence of the home outstrips any other in the world. That it should so often be negative in our day says nothing about the vitality of the institution, but a great deal about us.
The home is the most convincing evidence in the world of the reality of the gospel. Here we can see people living in relationship to each other in a way that enhances their personhood, loving each other, solving conflicts, serving one another, and obeying God. But this kind of home doesn't develop by accident or with our left-over efforts; it takes genuine commitment.
Some time ago I was invited to speak to a Family Living class at a large university. I went with some trepidation
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because I didn't know the professor nor the subject matter already covered. It was the early seventies, and I found the usual cross-section of people characteristic of a university: men, women, the carefully unkempt, the anti-establishment costume-wearers, the neatly dressed and well-combed, the open-faced, the reluctant, the friendly, and the sullen. A classroom full of individuals, a motley crew indeed. Why were they enrolled in Family Living? Some evidenced studied disinterest as I began; one had his head down on his books, feigning sleep. After some introductory remarks I began to discuss a definition of home. I said, "A home is a safe place. It is a fortress where its members are free from attack. Though each is different, the personhood of each is affirmed. . ."
I finished the first sentence, and suddenly everyone was at attention, looking at me. A home is a safe place. Soft, hungry, wistful looks in those eyes that turned toward me. Something emotional was happening in that classroom, and observing it, I felt a sword of compassion stab my heart. Every single person in that room wanted a safe place! It was written on their faces.
Later I led a discussion on my presentation and I heard remarks like: I've been looking for a safe place all my life . . . What makes a home safe? . . . . How do you begin?
It begins with a commitment to build something bigger than yourself — that meets more needs than those of your own small fitfulness. It will take the very best any woman has to offer. It cannot be her casual interest; it must be her major concern. It will drive her to a life with God that is deep and rich and will mean the unconscious expansion of her puny soul. Being a home maker is the great adventure God entrusted to a woman, and her influence spreads beyond her imagination.
We live in a merchandising climate today; if a thing
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doesn't bring in money, its worth is doubtful. Home makers are not paid for their work in dollars, and money is the mark of value in our society. Strong pressure from a variety of quarters makes a young mother doubt whether it really is making good use of her education to stay at home tending a two-year-old and a new baby. "I have a master's degree that is just going to waste." If our idea of education is so utilitarian, I doubt if we have any appreciation of its value. Since when is education only designed to bring in money? I thought it was to provide some inner wealth in terms of being.
I stand up in this age of uncertain values and proclaim a mother's right not to have to work outside the home. Being a home maker is no small task when children are involved. Women are finding this out. Trying to carry on two equal careers is a frustrating and exhausting task, even if she has a mate who shares the load. Increasing numbers of women are opting for "cottage industry" or work that can be done at home in an attempt to avoid the financial crunch of childcare, as well as absence from their children.
Not everyone has the luxury of choice. The single mothers who are called to do double duty need the support and help of friends who care. How happily most of these would give up dual responsibility if they could! For other women, working is considered a necessity to make ends meet in the family budget. The decision to let others raise your children is a tough one. It calls for a tight, wise value judgment that should be reviewed often.
While working mothers were once a rarity, today the mothers who stay at home with their children are becoming the minority group. My niece has chosen that path, but finds that at social gatherings people who ask her, "What do you do?" hardly know how to respond when she says that she is a home maker. She doesn't use the old routine of "I'm just a housewife," but people
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assume that someone who stays at home isn't very interesting. I suggested she answer, "Jim and I have decided to raise our own children!" and see if that gets the same response.
Working is not the issue; our motivation and sense of purpose is. It has almost become a new gospel: If you want to be fulfilled and have your dreams realized, get outside employment. And with women making up half of the nation's labor force, the working wife is a fact of life. However, it is not meaningless to ask the question: Does my present lifestyle enable me to make the largest contribution to the good of my children, my spouse, and myself?
I regard the profession of a home maker too highly not to sound a warning lest a great calling go unappreciated — a calling which profoundly affects our society.
I know all about the mothers who are frustrated career women — who live vicariously through their children. I know about the club women, the over-volunteered who neglect their home, seeking fulfillment apart from a job. There are many ways to be self-centered. You can prove almost anything from a survey if you word the questions right, and if you ask the right people. Only recently I read a survey that claimed that the role of wife and mother meant sacrificing self-esteem, a deficiency that showed up in middle age, while the career woman had a growing sense of self-worth. Married career women viewed themselves as better mothers and more attractive to men than non-working wives, which proves exactly nothing. The process is called rationalization.
Choosing up sides and voting on the right-to-work doesn't give us the answer. We need God's perspective on a larger commitment and His personal direction for our lives. He judges our motives, and it is here that we stand and fall. If our goal is simply the luxury of two incomes, wanting to feel
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important (instead of being important to a few) or having to prove our worth — God has some more basic, eternally satisfying ways to meet those needs.
Our problem is not so much one of lost identity, but lost goals. And the lost goals are evidenced in divorce rates, in delinquent, confused children, and in our shallow, meaningless lives. We need to conduct our lives on the basis of reality, not on the data found in magazine articles or surveys.
A married woman's first duty is to know her husband. Every marriage is a unique combination of two personalities. We might need to add "of two people who are sinners" because sometimes the blinding glare of love leads us to believe that eros has transported us beyond our faults. Given all the differences that exist between two people, that oneness of purpose and action can occur in a marriage is proof of the grace of God. But it is so often the little foxes that spoil the vines: he doesn't hang up his clothes; he leaves the washcloth in the sink; he doesn't wipe his feet. Oh, for the wisdom to know the difference between what is important and what is trivial. Every woman needs to learn how to distill the sweetness from the mixture of every day's experiences. Otherwise her attention to detail can become so perverted that she may consider her husband the enemy of her household — which scarcely qualifies as making a home for someone. Some women are more in love with neatness than with their husbands.
Knowing a person is the adventure of marriage. Partners rarely come together with highly developed skills in self-disclosure. Knowing your husband means observing his habits, his likes, and dislikes — but it goes beyond that. What makes him uptight and what comforts him? How does he think and what does he feel? Notice that the list
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moves from the less complicated to the greater understanding. If we fail in comprehending and ministering in the area of the simple, what are our chances for success in the complex? For instance, granted that a man can learn how to hang up his pajamas, a wife can make such a big deal out of this that she closes him off from any deeper level of communication.
Individuals are programmed differently. I'm a turnip in the morning. I roll up into a ball and want too stay underground for a while. In contrast, my husband wakes with a song. Every day is beautiful for him and he moves with vigor into it. If he takes more than eight deep breaths at night before falling asleep, he thinks he has insomnia. More often than not, I lay awake and review my day before falling asleep. When I was a new bride (he has managed to make me feel like a bride for years) I sometimes woke him up because I felt he had deserted me and I was lonely. We laugh about that now because it resembles a television commercial.
But his habits have been good for me. I've come to love his cheery whistle coming from the bathroom while I shake myself out of my drowsiness. And he has long since given up the idea that I will bound out of bed first, if indeed he ever expected it. I know he likes a good breakfast, and he wants to begin the day with everyone around the table. And so this is what we do at our house, and as I listen to him read the Scripture and pray for the details of the day each one faces, I'm grateful he had the warm, good sense to insist on living this way.
But another husband may be the opposite. He may not want to speak until twenty minutes after his first cup of coffee. You may want to discuss over breakfast all the things you forgot the night before. Adjustments are necessary for both people in a marriage, and they come with knowing each other,
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talking about living together, and a decision not to bump into a person where they already hurt. And hurts do heal and living patterns do change. That's what growth is all about.
I remember hearing a story of a man speaking to his wife on his deathbed. He said, "Honey, just before I go I want to tell you one thing. I really haven't minded eating all those chicken livers you gave me ever since we were married, even though I hate chicken livers."
"Oh, dear," she said, "and all these years I have watched you eating them and wished I could have them!"
That's a slap-stick illustration of poor communication. God gave us speech so we could talk, and most marriages need help on the level of better communication. Never be content with low quality in this area. A creative God wants to draw us out of our aloneness into the joy of fellowship. But some women are guilty of over-kill with their verbal skills. It's called nagging. And it does kill husbands; it kills their desire to communicate.
"A little more carrot and a little less stick" is an old proverb for getting along with donkeys. And while not wanting to put husbands and donkeys in the same league, it is a principle of life for home makers. Husbands thrive on love; so do children. The creative home maker finds many ways to scatter love around in her life, and finds its rich dividends returning to her.
The Bible uses the marriage relationship to illustrate the relationship God has with His people. Israel is called the wife of God in the Old Testament; in the New Testament the church is called the bride of Christ. These analogies profoundly instruct us in our Christian life and in our married life. For example, imagine Christ abusing the church or being unfaithful to her. Or the church refusing or accusing
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Christ. The quality of earthly relationship is elevated by the mystery of our quality relationship with the living God.
But perhaps the most familiar biblical passage about marriage is also the least understood. Paul gives instructions about relationships in his letter to the Ephesian church. His theme is the unity found in Christ. He instructs Christians in practical relationships between husbands, wives, children, parents, employees, and employers. He begins by teaching that all Christians should be submissive to one another (Ephesians 5:21); that is, they should receive encouragement, exhortation, rebuke, and instruction from one another because this kind of humility marks those who belong to the Christian family.
Then he goes on to give the instructions read at almost every church wedding ceremony: "Wives, submit to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything" (Ephesians 5:22-24). With an angry glint in the eye, many women have accused Paul of perpetrating his prejudices. If their presupposition about marriage is based on togetherness, not oneness, they may have virtually no comprehension of the context of the instruction nor the ideal behind it.
The instruction does not necessarily mean that the husband has superior intelligence, wisdom, or ability; it simply means he is responsible to God for the family. This being so, God's instructions (and I believe they are God's instructions given through Paul) are that wives should be submissive to their husbands, as to the Lord. In other words, make it easy for your husband to become what God wants him to be. Just because he is a man doesn't mean he is naturally buoyant with self-confidence. Don't destroy his leadership.
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Hold him to his highest. Your submission says nothing about inferiority or superiority, just as his being "head" is no comment on his. It is simply fulfilling responsibility.
The instruction to wives doesn't seem to have a loophole. The text does not say "be submissive if he loves you as Christ loves the church." It says be submissive in everything as to the Lord. Submission is a Christian idea. The opposite of submission in relationships is probably arrogance. Christ demonstrated the finest kind of submission. He willingly washed His disciples' feet; He willingly submitted Himself to the cross. Submission does not mean that you never have an opinion, a complaint, or an original idea. Some men have used this instruction as a put-down for their wives, keeping them uninformed about important family affairs and acting as if their wives were mentally incompetent. That is not even implied in this passage because of its emphasis on oneness. God holds such men responsible for egotistic, domineering leadership which does not reflect His own character. The instruction for the husband to love his wife as Christ loved the church — sacrificially (He died for her), purposefully (He has a high goal in mind for her), and willfully (His love knows no whims) — precludes this kind of behavior.
But that is the husband's problem, not the wife's. The wife's problem may be that she is often willful and competitive, so aggressive and verbal that the husband abdicates his leadership, believing the wife can run the home and family better anyway. And no wife is really happy with that arrangement. A happy marriage experiences a mutuality, an enhancing, a oneness that reflects the character of God.
The verbal skills of some women may intimidate men and cause them to clam up. That becomes both the man and the woman's problem to solve together. He needs to be less
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threatened and carry on with leadership under God. She needs to be more cautious in her speech. But articulation does not equal leadership, as some assume. Character strength and personal integrity are the real tests of leadership.
Good leaders are not dictators. A man's wife is often his best consultant, and the reverse is true as well. In that sense a man and a woman make decisions together. Hierarchy in leadership should not surprise us; it is seen in most human enterprises. It exists within the Godhead. Jesus said He always did the will of His Father in heaven, and was subject to Him. Did this diminish Christ in any way? I think not.
The whole discussion of relationships in Ephesians 5 and 6 is vitally important because high goals undergird all the instructions. They are not meaningless, rigid laws designed to make our life hard. God has a high goal in mind for wives, for husbands, and for children.
Too few married people sit down and talk about adequate goals for their marriage. Without some concept of goals, the home can become a battleground where each grabs to fill personal needs, abusing the other. No woman who is consumed with filling her own emptiness and inner need can make a home for anyone else. She's too immature. Her myopia keeps her from seeing beyond her own needs.
Often in the battles of such a household one person is exploited by the other and becomes a shell instead of a person. Sometimes a husband rules the roost with cocksure opinions, relegating his wife to the servitude of providing for his needs, negating her person. And just as frequently, the wife becomes the domineering, bossy, possessive one, relegating her husband (and her children) to opinionless existence. Whatever the case, such marriages reduce the strength of both persons below their separate strengths.
Another kind of marriage may equal the separate strength
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of both the man and the woman. Each pursues a separate goal, going his individual way. Two people live together in the same house, but are not involved in each other's life in any way which changes the individual's potential. The partners remain free agents, each pursuing his own course. I believe this falls short of the biblical ideal, and confines each person to the prison of self.
The one-flesh concept soars off to greater heights than this. Both husband and wife work toward goals they set for themselves as a unit. Each is more fully realized as they operate an an entity. They are building something bigger than themselves, involving the will of God for their life together. Both husband and wife are liberated in this kind of marriage.
Children who are born into this kind of home are already enrolled in a head-start program. They are less likely to become pawns in the play-off between husband and wife, because everyone is playing on the same team. And there is a game plan. The family has already decided what is valuable, what is worthwhile, and which road to take.
Being a home maker for children is the second delight of a woman. Their whole view of life will be conditioned by your creativity in this role. Their view of God, of safety, of forgiveness, of love, of loyalty — and thousands of other attitudes will come from you and your husband. By sheer virtue of the close relationship necessitated by care, you will influence them most. You will furnish their spirits with the concepts out of which they will build their lives.
After cleaning up a mess for the fifth time in one day, it is a rare young mother responsible for a couple of preschoolers who does not feel like abandoning everyone and going off on a Caribbean cruise. And she doesn't have to pretend she doesn't feel that way. Similarly, her husband, in the pressure-cooker of his job, may wish he could escape having to earn a living and
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run away to climb the Alps. That's the stuff life is made of, and our commitment to a quality life provides the ballast to keep the ship on course.
To bear and rear children is to take on both joy and sorrow, but this is the heart of living. To present to the world and to the church a covey of people who know how to live and who are not threatened by the world is a gift to humanity beyond comparison.
But the danger for the home maker is that she will lose her sense of humor and begin to take on super-mother qualities in her zeal to do a good job. Self-consciousness can make us try too hard and we can mutilate both our marriage and our children. Probably the biggest boon to raising children is our own mental and spiritual health. We need to learn that fussing doesn't do as much as praying, that consistency is a gem of rare beauty, that discipline and allowing appropriate independence are part of growing up. Loving will mean standing with one foot in the child's life and one foot in the realities of a hard world, for the person who loses the child inside her is in no shape to teach anyone about the world.
A home maker realizes that she is making the home for people, not for pages in a magazine. The compulsive housekeeper has to remember that perfection is not the goal; wholeness and a comfortable sense of well-being come first. Nothing can kill her joy more quickly than jealousy over what someone else has. "How can they afford that?" has spoiled the splendor of many obvious personal blessings.
But, having said that, a child deserves to grow up in an atmosphere of beauty. And he needs to learn that everything in life is not for his use. Be such an atmosphere ever so simple and inexpensive, the home maker has the freedom to create this kind of environment. A vase of forsythia being forced to bloom
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in early March, a candle on a low table, flowers on a sick tray, pictures rightly arranged, a place for things that seems just right. Things to admire, things not to touch, things that make the room seem cozy and warm. In my mind, being a home maker can be the most creative job in the world, and I have great admiration for young mothers I know who surround those they love with a charm that was first born in the heart of Eve.
Phillips Brooks said, "Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully."
A woman can grow beautiful and strong being a home maker. Potentially the position can bring out the best in her because it will tax and test all her resources. But it can also provide the opportunity for her to grow small and petty. It's like any other job in that respect. A woman can regard her children as possessions and harry them to distraction with her demand for perfection or performance that matches the neighbor's children. Her obsession with her house can make her a complaining nuisance. Her jealousy of her husband and her unwise intervention can create a continual feud. She may be so involved with the children that she neglects her husband completely. She can grow unaware of the trials and temptations of his life, and fail to hold him to the commitment of their common goals.
If she compares herself with others, she is bound to suffer defeat. She has to like herself and believe in her natural abilities to do the job. She may not be clever in one area, but she can excel in another. Elsewhere in the world, people take differences in natural ability for granted. Somehow within the home, the woman often believes she has to be a super-person. Personalities differ, so does natural wisdom. The size of the family alone makes demands on a woman, and some women find motherhood easier than others. Success comes in
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different-shaped packages to those who accept themselves and are wise enough to hang on to the resources of God.
Part of the stress on a woman's life derives from her constantly changing role. First she is a bride, learning the basics of relating to her husband; then she is the mother of small children who need much attention; in the next phase she finds herself involved in lessons, in baking cookies for a school party, in transportation; then suddenly she doesn't feel as needed as she once did and she struggles over her children's independence. She may even make the mistake of believing she is no longer needed and become too busy to observe and listen, losing communication with her children at a crucial point in life. Time goes on through a series of phases, and suddenly the nest is empty and she is back to the days of being a bride. Happy is the woman who has managed to stay a bride, a lover, through the years. And happy too is the woman who has managed to maintain her own sense of personhood during all the years when she gave herself so generously to others.
Seeing the stress and the changes in a woman's life, some opt for an easier course, trying to beat off the hazards. But hazards are numerous on other roads too, and the joys are fewer.
I came across a prayer that seems appropriate for home makers....
Lord, teach us to be twice as tough
and twice as tender as only
the truly tough can be tender.
