Today I made toffee apples with my friend Chantel (except she says caramel apples because she's from America)

Theology and Feelings Part 2

I wanted to write a theory for you about how to live a life where truth and feelings matter, but it was too difficult! So instead I'm going to write about my experience over the last couple of weeks, which is really all I have to offer on this subject.

I won't go into details but I experienced grief recently that hit me like nothing I've ever felt before. I experienced grief that hurts so much that it physically hurts. These are the circumstances in which I've been thinking about theology and feelings, and I've come back to my favourite psalm (119) time after time, to read

"My soul melts away for sorrow,
strengthen me according to your word!" (v 28)

Never has the Bible been so vital to me. I'm just getting a cup of tea (there is something so comforting about having your hand round a hot mug of tea), then let me explain...

I have always been the kind of person who is led by their feelings. My view of the world and myself have usually been shaped by how I feel on a particular day. I used to stay in bed for days at a time if I felt ugly or insecure, and sometimes I missed church if I felt stressed or inadequate. I socialised only when I felt happy, and turned down all invitations when I didn't. But I recently got to this crossroads where I felt overwhelmed with sorrow, and I could either stay there or turn to God's Word. I could either become entirely self-focused and unable to function, or I could seek strength from God in order to carry on with my relationships and responsibilities.

I learnt that there is a time to cry every few hours, and then following that a time to apply God's truth to your soul for strength, and often alternating between the two (see Ecclesiastes 3:1-8). Because the thing about truth is that it never changes. If I claim to be a Christian (which I do!) then I have to accept that the Bible is true all the time. The Bible says that God is good, all the time. This is challenging to me.

So I found myself in a position where I either have to deny that the Bible is true because I don't feel like God is good, or I have to believe the Bible is stronger than my feelings. Either truth or feelings have to win the battle. This time, for the first time really, truth won me over. I just happened to listen to a song by a worship band called Elysium which sums up what happened:

"When nothing else could help, love lifted me." (from Love Lifted Me, Elysium)

I chose to feed my soul with the love of God, and I found strength beyond anything I could have conjured up myself. I want my feelings to lead me to God and truth, whether in pain or joy.

A Theology of Feelings (from Psalm 119)

If you have a Bible nearby, why not make yourself a coffee and settle down to contemplate Psalm 119. It's a rainy day here, so it's perfect for staying in and reading the Bible! I know it seems like a lot of words (it is the longest psalm in the Bible), but I promise it's worth reading all of it in one go.

"Your testimonies are my delight; they are my counselors." (v.24)

"My soul melts away for sorrow; strengthen me according to your word." (v.28)

"Incline my heart to your testimonies, and not to selfish gain." (v.36)

"You are my hiding place and my shield; I hope in your word." (v.114)


The psalmist's relationship with God's word has changed my life. My understanding of God and my relationship with Him has always been based quite strongly on how I feel. I know lots of us are like that. If we feel negative or far from God then that becomes our truth. If we have an amazing worship time and experience God's closeness, then our faith is strong. I think this is maybe how we are naturally inclined to be as women (can I get away with saying that, because I'm a girl?!).

But I found that this kind of faith doesn't really work when life is difficult. Because people in the Bible suffer extremely and still hold on to God (like the person writing this psalm), and I wasn't doing that. I was essentially chucking my Bible across the room when my life was hard and I didn't understand, or I felt I was suffering unjustly. So I got to the point of thinking, if the Bible is true, is it true for me all the time, or only when things go how I want? If I only want the truth of the Bible when it suites me, then am I really following Jesus?

Feelings, and how we think about things are sometimes very difficult to seperate, I understand this. Feelings are very powerful and they can be all-consuming, and they seem much more real to you than a line of text on a page sometimes. But they are also a rather unstable judge of truth and faith, they are changeable and they often have no foundation ("I just feel like that, ok?").

The Bible does not deny the existence of emotions, and their validity. If you just flick through the book of Psalms you will notice the overflow of feelings, from ecstatic joy, to deep sorrow. But, as the foundation of our theology, they are going to make our houses collapse. They will lead us all over the place, tie us in knots, and prevent us from hoping in God, if they are our 'truth' rather than the Bible. I know this from personal experience.

• Have you ever thought of the Bible as your counsellor? (see v.24 -far better than any of the "shrinks" people always seem to have in American TV dramas) Do you take counsel from the Bible? Like you would from your closest and wisest friend? Or are you suspicious of it?
• When you feel overwhelmed with sadness, do you turn to the Bible for strength? Or do you wallow in self-pity, letting yourself think self-pitying thoughts? (v.28)

We need God to help us to put His word above our feelings (see v.36). Our hearts need to be re-directed to God's word as our foundation. The Bible has become my most treasured possession and resource. I want it to be the foundation of my life (along with prayer, and other aspects of my relationship with Jesus).

I have found depth in God's word, and a rock-like strength, and a pair of arms open wide, and truth which can be clung to in all circumstances.

As always, I would love to hear from you, with lots of love.x

Go, Company magazine!

I picked up Company magazine in Tesco this week to catch up on girl world, and was amazed to find a feature about women in their twenties who are choosing to take a break from their careers to stay at home and raise their children. The feature, called Generation Happy@ Home, is really positive. Are the tides of feminism turning? Check it out, and well done Company magazine.x




http://www.company.co.uk/magazine-hq/latest-issue/company-magazine-october-2010

Part 2: Yes, I cook for my husband and no, I'm not oppressed!

Hello again, I'm doing a follow up post on my thoughts about being a wife and home life to answer some questions that came up this week. As always please bear in mind that this is all new to me and I am only expressing my developing thoughts about living out marriage. Another important point is that of course the details of how the whole home works are different for everyone, and I can only speak from my experience of how it is working for me.

The three questions we will be looking at are

• What about the difficult times?
• What if you hate housework?
• Isn't the ideal of the excellent wife depressing?

It would be nice before we start thinking about all this to read through Romans 8, so if you have a bit of free time why not grab a cup of tea and take your time to read the whole chapter!

So, all these thoughts about being a wife are like bricks in the walls of a house. But the foundation of that house is the grace of God. We can discuss this without feeling anxious or condemned about our failings because God's grace covers my failings (yes, people who write blogs have failings too!), and yours. Paul says in Romans 8:23...

"There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus [...] For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do."

This is not about being good enough, or trying to be a perfect wife. I will say it again, we are talking about loving and serving our husbands at home in the context of God's grace towards us. This means that when I struggle or suffer or disobey God, I am not condemned. We do not have to do all the washing up or love ironing in order to earn the status of 'good wife', that is living by law, not by grace. We are all flawed, we all find some things easier than others, and we all fail to do things that we should do. Paul expresses our constant struggle as human beings;

"For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing." (Romans 7:19)

Thank God (and I really mean that!) that we do not have to earn anything. But because of Jesus we are now liberated from judgement, and freed to live by His Spirit who is working in us. The grace of God is what I want to shape me when my heart is overflowing and eager to do the food shopping, and when I am weary and low, and I tell Aaron that I just can't make dinner. The love of God will not let us go.

Our second question is for those of us who don't feel naturally inclined towards working in our homes, who may not feel gifted at it or fulfilled by it (which is probably how we all feel sometimes actually). Maybe our husbands are better cooks than us, or more organised than us. Maybe our careers are taking all our energy and seem more important than our homes. What if we just hate housework?

God is gracious to us, and He is patient with us as we learn to be god-centred wives. This is really only between us and God. We need to ask God to help us, and make sure that we have a clear conscience before Him about what we are doing at home. The results will look slightly different in every marriage, because of all the unique combinations of individuals. There is a spirit of team work between the husband and wife which means that we share difficult tasks and help each other. Sometimes there will be circumstances where we cannot look after our homes (during sickness, or after having a baby for example), but these circumstances will not be the norm. I am writing for the normal, every day times, not for exceptional circumstances (in which exceptional roles will have to be taken on).

I would humbly suggest that if we hate all work around the home, then something isn't quite right with our view of God, our view of marriage, and our view of ourselves. My experience is that when I do jobs at home with a bad heart attitude, I stop seeing marriage as a glorious reflection of Christ and the church (this is a concept we will come back to), and I stop seeing the privilege of being able to love and serve Aaron.

Here are some questions that I have found useful to think about:

My view of God

• Am I acting like a Christian in this task?
• Have I lost sight of Jesus, or am I looking to demonstrate the love He has showed me to my husband?

My view of marriage

• Do I believe and honour the Biblical view of a wife's role (as equal but different to her husband)?
• Am I viewing our marriage as the Bible views it?
• Am I fulfilling the vows I made on my wedding day?
• Where did my opinions about marriage come from? Who told me that homemaking wasn't beautiful?

My view of myself

• Am I humbly helping my husband and putting him first?
• Am I imitating Jesus, or behaving like my mum (or another influential female relative/friend)?
• Am I feeling too good for menial tasks?
• Am I afraid of making mistakes and therefore not doing what I should?

These factors, and many more may contribute to having a bad attitude to home-related jobs (which we probably all experience on a weekly basis). I think it is worth considering why we feel that way, there is normally an underlying cause.

Generally I have also found it incredibly helpful to lift my eyes to see the calling of homemaking the way God does. There is a fantastic description of what homemaking is and isn't in one of my recommended reads, Recovering Bublical Manhood & Womanhood (ed. John Piper and Wayne Grudem). Dorothy Patterson writes;

"Homemaking is not a destructive drought of usefulness but an overflowing oasis of opportunity; it is not a dreary cell to contain one's talents and skills but a brilliant catalyst to channel creativity and energies into meaningful work; it is not a rope for binding one's productivity in the marketplace, but reins for giuding one's posterity in the home; it is not oppressive restraint of intellectual powers, but a release of wise instruction to your own household; it is not a bitter assignment of inferiority to your person, but the bright assurance of the ingenuity of God's plan for complementarity of the sexes, especially as worked out in God's plan for marriage."

Be encouraged, this is a wonderful thing and a worthy calling!

Our third and final concern for today is that of the ideal, excellent wife who we observed in Proberbs 31 in my last5 post. So, is this ideal depressing?
I can remember studying Proverbs 31 for the first time and feeling like a total failure. I think many women have read it and felt that way. When I was single it was depressing enough that she had a husband and children, and now that I'm married it's potentially depressing that she seems superhuman in her abilities and attitudes. But I have realised that depression only kicks in when we hold our lives up for inspection next to hers, and we see how far we fall short. As we have already discussed, Proverbs 31 was not written for that purpose. No wife can achieve perfection. But we can be inspired by her godly character and strength, and there will be aspects of her homemaking skills which we will be able to incorporate into our lives. The ideal is beautiful, and it should be challenging because it is the word of God.

But we are still holding on to the grace of God here, otherwise we could see Proverbs 31 as a list of rules that we must fulfill in order to be a good wife. Ephesians 2:8-10 says;

"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them."

This passage explains the gift of salvation. Paul has to explain to the church at Ephesus that they haven't earned their salvation by praying lots or giving lots of money to the church. Maybe they were boasting about why they were good enough. But this also works for when we have a list of things which we think prevent us from being close to God, for example,' I haven't read the Bible this week',' I shouted at my husband for nearly two hours', 'I spent a third of my student loan on clothes' etc. Salvation is not your own doing. "It is the gift of God." This is also true in our marriages. Marriage is not your own doing. It is the gift of God (This parallel works here because marriage is a reflection of the relationship between Jesus and the church).

However, grace does not exempt us from doing things. The second part of the Ephesians passage says that God has purposes for us and good works for us to do, which we are able to do because we are a new creation in Jesus, a new person who is led and enabled by the Holy Spirit. The ideal of the excellent wife is not depressing because we do not have to earn our place as a wife (in fact, we couldn't do it). But, filled with the Holy Spirit, and created in Christ, we are able to do good works in our homes, even things which we couldn't have done before.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this, and I really do welcome and appreciate your comments (positive or negative!). With love, until next time.x

p.s Please do whatever you have to do to read The Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Schaeffer, it is very beautiful and inspiring in regard to homemaking!

Yes, I cook for my husband, and no, I'm not oppressed!

I'm going to be honest, I love planning out dinners in my head. I love choosing wine to compliment the food. I love finding offers at Tesco. I get excited when I light candles and put on an apron to start preparing food. It feels like an act of love for Aaron, and I love to surprise him with nice meals. I have wondered if the novelty will wear off, but really this isn't about novelty for me, it's about loving and serving my husband for the rest of my life.

I'm only a month in to married life (and therefore my experience is very limited!) and I have been surprised by the reactions of shock and somtimes disapproval about the way our home works. When Aaron tells people that I have done the cooking and it's been amazing people's eyes widen and they laugh awkwardly, looking at me sideways with an expression of confusion and fear of the unknown, probably wondering what kind of woman I am.

OK, so it's not like that every time, but it does happen. I'm sure that I will be labelled as backward and conservative, and weird for trying to be like a 1950s housewife in contemporary society. But I know that these judgements aren't true of me, and I strongly believe that I am living in line with the Bible. The funny thing is that most wives will cook meals for their husbands and clean their homes, to some degree. It happens naturally as part of making marriage work. We just have this aversion to being told what to do or being told to fulfill a certain role, so that when someone says that wives should take a significant role in running their homes, we are instantly up in arms. Our defensive hearts prevent us from seeing the good in things because we hate to be told anything that we don't like or that makes us feel judged. Please don't jump at what I'm saying without allowing yourself time to consider it.

I started out reading an instruction in Paul's letter to Titus about how older women should be instructed to teach the young women in their roles as wives and parents. He says...

"train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled."(Titus 2:4)

This list is incredibly useful to us as young wives, and to those who want to prepare for marriage because it summarises the key issues that Paul wants the older women to teach about. In thinking about cooking and running our home, I picked out the phrase "working at home" that Paul uses here.

In the book of Proverbs there is a wonderful poem which is all about an excellent wife, and I think it is useful as a practical expression of the role of "working at home" mentioned in Titus. If I am feeling negative towards my husband because of all I do at home, I read about this wife's skill and strength. She is an ideal (in the style of Proverbs) and therefore all her characteristics and skills are unlikely to be contained in one normal wife! However this does not invalidate her as an example. How wonderful that God gave us this detailed picture of being a godly wife in the Bible!

The poem says

(Proverbs 31:27)

"She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness."

She works hard, and oversees the provision of meals, clothes, and money. Read the whole poem in Proverbs 31:10-31 and you will see that this wife is a bit of a genius. She makes money for her home and she is also great at craft projects. I have a favourite image from the poem, which just makes me love my home and love caring for my husband. Verse 21 says

"She is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household are clothed in scarlet."

What a cosy image! I imagine a wife looking out of the window as snow starts to fall, and feeling the satisfaction of her children and her husband having warm clothes to wear. The poem says that her husband praises her for her diligence and care. I want to be that kind of wife. This is not about being confined to the kitchen, and of course there are situations where husbands clean and cook for their wives, and it isn't wrong. But the wife in Proverbs generally oversees her home, and the result is

"The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain" (v. 11)

Wives can be such a gift to their husbands in their homes, and I would suggest that this can give us great joy and satisfaction. There is no need to see this as a kind of oppression, because in my experience my care for Aaron and my home wells up from a heart of gratitude to God, and also a desire to serve Him by doing what is right. I'm glad to be back to blogging, hope you're all well, and let me know your thoughts. Love,xx