A Testimony of Growth

in the last six months

I woke up the other day with this image in my head and I’ve been playing with it to see if it helps me follow Jesus. This is a picture of how we might rule and reign with Christ. We do that by discerning, willing, and doing God’s ways through the power of the Holy Spirit. The yellow arrow represents our faith that Christ through the Holy Spirit is doing all this in us. This is how we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and, strength and love our neighbors as ourselves.

This picture is helping me see how I’ve developed a lopsided way of operating and how God is growing me through my weaknesses. One of my weaknesses is in my decision-making abilities. In many cases, I don’t feel capable of making decisions unless I thoroughly understand an issue. When it comes to parenting decisions and decisions that affect Phil, I’ve felt completely overwhelmed by how much I don’t know about the world and don’t know what’s best for others. Not only this, but I have doubted whether I was supposed to be making those kinds of decisions at all. Weren’t those decisions too weighty for me to make?

Until about a year ago, I was under the impression that first-century Paul was instructing husbands and wives how to thrive in a male-hierarchal society. I still think Paul was teaching husbands and wives how to do this. But how this was supposed to be applied to my own marriage has utterly confused me.

Was Paul saying we are to perpetuate a Greco-Roman male hierarchy in marriage even though our society’s power structures have changed? Was Paul saying God made men to rule women by deciding the family’s best? Did this mean God doesn’t want women to determine what’s right for their families? Can women not figure it out without men overseeing them? Are women incapable of making big important decisions?

The picture at the beginning of this blog is helping me see why I’ve been so befuddled. I’ve been under the impression that Paul was saying that only husbands were to practice choosing God’s will. Women’s job was to practice giving up their will. Sufficed to say, I didn’t care much for the Apostle Paul or his letters because of this. What Paul said about women just didn’t seem right to me. Why wouldn’t God want women to choose what’s right regardless of how big we think a decision is? Aren’t all decisions important in God’s kingdom? Aren’t all decisions a practice of faith?

At the beginning of our marriage, Phil and I tried, to some degree, to follow Paul’s instructions for how to behave in a male-hierarchical marriage, but it didn’t last long. For one thing, Phil wasn’t a take-charge kind of guy. For another thing, how were we to know what decisions Phil was supposed to take charge of? Not only that, but it seemed silly to divvy out decisions based on the supposed bigness of a decision rather than our God-given strengths and gifts.

Eventually, we stopped worrying about who was the primary decision-making leader and defaulted to what came naturally to us. I was better at finances, taking things apart, analyzing data, thinking critically, and doing handyman jobs (although he has surpassed me in some household repairs now). Phil had the full-time job and was better at creating inviting spaces, acts of service, having good manners, engaging others in conversation, and diffusing tense situations. When it came to making big family decisions, we usually just agreed.

This way of operating worked just fine . . . for a time.

When we were healthy and confident, we accomplished much, made plans, and carried them out by sharing the work. Spurred on by some big willpower people, we installed a playground at the church, bought a house, remodeled a unit on our property, and replaced our house’s foundation.

Having children changed things though. We didn’t sleep. Babies cried. I was sick a lot. We had doctor’s appointments, broken appliances, and periodical vacancies in our rentals. We not only had to manage ourselves but three apartments and three little people. Every decision I made felt important and weighty and stressful. How was I supposed to know what was best for three little kids?

At my overwhelming feelings of inadequacy, I would sometimes wonder if my difficulties were a result of not adhering to a man-lead, women-follow marriage model. Maybe Phil was supposed to be making all these parenting decisions, not me. Maybe our balance of power was wrong.

I see now that yes, I was doing marriage wrong. But not because I didn’t conform to a male leadership model. Rather, I was doing marriage wrong because I was operating without faith that Christ could work through my willpower.

For Christmas last year, Phil gifted me Cynthia Westfall’s book Paul and Gender. Actually, he thought he was getting me a different book. I figured I’d read it out of deference to Phil and our pastor who we thought had recommended it, and then be done with this topic. I didn’t want to spend my precious free time contemplating this stuff while my kids were in school. I wanted to write a sequel to my COVID Diaries novel, replant our front planter, or redo our bathroom.

I think God had other plans.

Reading and summarizing this book and then wrestling with its implications has hijacked my thoughts for the last six months. Time and time again, I would reach a new realization only to have the Lord ask me another hard question. And since all my children were in school—which provided me with a freedom I haven’t had in twelve years—, I have continued seeking answers.

I suspect that God set me up to study this topic on purpose. What I’ve discovered has enlarged my world and freed me from that lingering guilt that Phil and I were doing marriage wrong.

Westfall’s explanations of Pauline corpus made far more sense than anything I’d ever heard. She brought cohesion to Paul’s letters and the entire Bible. She showed how Paul was most likely not implying that we should perpetuate male-hierarchical marriages but was teaching how to thrive within that society. The principles Paul taught are everlasting; the conditions under which he taught are not.

Through her book, I’m seeing how I’ve half-believed several lies: one, that Christ’s decision-making power was only for men; two, that the solution to my stress was to give “big” decisions to Phil; and three, that Phil was somehow better designed to make decisions than me. Now I see that Phil isn’t supposed to rescue me from the decision I’m afraid to make. The Lord is, and the Lord does that, not by taking those decisions away from me, but by empowering me to make them through faith that Christ is doing it through me. Through faith, I don’t have to fret about not knowing everything before deciding. I trust God’s power through me is making good of all I decide to do. This turns decision-making into a blessing instead of a curse.

Westfall’s book has freed both Phil and me to listen to the Holy Spirit’s leading instead of trying to cram ourselves into a traditional mold of he-makes-the-decisions and she-submits-to-it. It has also shown me how God wants to empower both men and women’s decision-making willpower. All followers of Christ need to learn to discern, will, and act God’s ways through faith in Christ.

When both husbands and wives recognize their need to grow and when they trust Christ to do the growing, they can resist the temptation to take over or give up the decision-making privilege in marriage. However, even if a spouse does take over the decision-making, or if earthly authorities demand men rule women—as they did in Paul’s day—those hindrances don’t have to stump our development.

For example, in some marriages and cultures, men still insist they ought to embody the decision-making willpower in the family. In some marriages, men are not secure enough in Christ to operate against their religious traditions or narratives. And in some marriages, the husband is just naturally better at making decisions than the wife. None of these situations are a crime or hindrance to growth. They’re just some of the circumstances in which God grows people.

In these cases, Paul’s instructions still apply to husbands. Paul tells husbands to love their wives as they would their own bodies. In other words, if a husband values the use of his own willpower or if he sees how much he grows in faith when he has to make family decisions, the husband may extend that same value to his wife’s willpower by inviting his wife into the same growth-inducing exercise of making family decisions with him.

In some marriages, the opposite is true. Women have taken over the decision-making power and don’t allow their husbands space to have a say. Paul’s instructions to the husband may then be applied to the wife. We women are to love our husbands’ willpower as much as we love our own bodies. Now that is a potent message for body-enthralled American women!

I like how Paul describes this mission of marriage in Ephesians 5. It’s like we’re presenting one another as a bride to Christ. This analogy gets weird because of the reversed gender roles but the meaning remains.

Christ, the bridegroom, served and died to prepare the Church to be his perfect bride. If we are to be like Christ, then we, when filled with the abundance of Him, help prepare one another for eternal “marriage” with Christ. That’s a task for both men and women since God calls everyone to be fully functioning, fully discerning, willpower-using, action and faith-filled people.

This frees us from the guilt of having to follow traditional gender roles regardless of circumstances or personalities. It means God sets the schedule for our growth and we take our orders from Him regarding when to exercise our decision-making muscles and when to use self-control. We practice making or refraining from making decisions while lovingly respecting one another’s willpower.

We’re obviously not going to do this perfectly, but when we overstep boundaries, we trust that God uses even our failings to grow us and our spouse. In fact, if we’re trusting Christ is working in us, we know God is using every misstep to our good. This frees us up to apologize to one another when we mess up. And it also encourages us to try again after we fail.

Phew! What a relief! Just like there’s no perfect model of what motherhood ought to look like, there’s no perfect model of what our marriages ought to look like. God guides each couple differently to grow us up into Christ for His glory.

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