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!