A Drippy Faucet

We Christian wives and mothers have a difficult task before us. Ours is a heavy burden filled with failures, disappointments, grievances, and complaints. Our job sometimes seems thankless, tedious, and well... lonely. Since when is the last time your 11 month old thanked you for the most recent diaper change? We have been given such great responsibility as women, and with that comes a fantastic ability to ruin the lives of those around us.

In our marriages, God has called us to be a blessing to our husbands. Ironically enough, in my obsessive browsing of Pinterest this morning, I  found a "pin" of the saying, "Don't talk bad about your husband to anyone. Ever." No wife is exempt from this criticism that, ironically, comes straight from Scripture. Proverbs 14:1 says, "Every wise woman buildeth her house, but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands." You can replace the use of hands with mouth and the command is the same. Wives have the distinct honor and privilege to either destroy their homes or build them, and the constant disguise of "venting" a wife's frustrations about her husband to her friend is a surefire way to destroy the God given relationship between men and women. It's quite humbling to imagine how transformed the church could be if we only followed this Biblical principle.

In our roles as mothers, we have a responsibility to demonstrate what it means to respect our husbands. Our sons and daughters need to see that Scriptural principle played out in their homes first--no movie, youth minister, teacher, or pastor should be a child's first and only real glimpse of respecting a husband. Christian sons will one day pursue marriage and Christian mothers should graciously show their sons what kind of woman to wed (she will be your daughter-in-law, after all!) And the application for Christian daughters is obvious--in a culture that spurns authority and submission, it's our young Christian women who will need to reclaim true respect in a marriage and they'll either learn to love it or hate it as it is practiced in the home.

Do men share responsibilities in marriage and fatherhood? Of course. Theirs is a different monster with entirely different struggles and concerns. God has graciously created us as unique people who were meant to complement one another; unfortunately it's far too easy to capitalize on our differences as an excuse to be discontent, self-consumed wives and mothers.

My prayer for myself and for my fellow Christian women is that we will learn what Godly marriage looks like and choose to imitate that to our children. They, in turn, will hopefully do a better job than we have done, and their children will do a better job than our children, and so on. In a commentary written by Charles Bridges, he says (re: Proverbs), "Many are the miseries of a man's life; but none like that which cometh from one who should be the stay of his life."