If you have entered into God’s invention called marriage, your role is to be your husband’s helper. This does not diminish you any more than the Bible diminishes God by calling him our helper. In fact, being able to help assumes, in one sense, that you have something the person you are helping lacks. If you cease to think of yourself as your husband’s helper, the marriage will suffer, because that’s the way God designed marriage to work.
You should not enter marriage and then entertain “single” thoughts. That is, you shouldn’t become a wife and then act as though you’re still single. The marriage vows of many of us included the line “forsaking all others.” This goes beyond sexual fidelity to include “single” thinking. We agreed to forsake our me-first, single-oriented worldview and committed ourselves to building a
couple
. To be married to a man is to help him; that’s the biblical model. Helping can take different forms, but it always serves the other person’s good. In willingly assuming the role of wife, you pledge to spend a good deal of effort and time on the welfare of your
husband
.
I stress the word “husband” because contemporary life tempts women to focus everywhere else: your job, your home, even your children. Carolyn Mahaney reminds wives, “Notice . . . that we were created to be our husband’s helper, not our children’s mother. Certainly we are to love, care for, and nurture our children, but this love is to flow out of a lifestyle that is first and foremost committed to helping our husbands. Our husbands should always remain first in our hearts and in our care.”
3
How often do you give thought to this role of helper? How often do you wake up and think, “How can I help my husband today?” When you repeatedly ask this question, you’re living in marriage as God designed it. When you allow selfishness to reign (“How come my husband isn’t helping
me
?”), you’re living in marriage as Satan polluted it.
Lest you think I’m being unfair, please know that when I speak to men, I tell them that we should entertain these daily thoughts: “How can I care for my wife today? How can I serve her? How can I lay down my life on her behalf, as Christ laid down his life for me?”
But since I’m talking to you and not your husband, it’s my duty to put this responsibility at your feet. You may feel greatly tempted to picture your marriage as broken — or less than it could be —because of something wrong with or lacking in your husband. The first step is to take a self-inventory, beginning with this fundamental question: “How can I begin helping my husband today?” Once you start putting this into practice, you are on the way to creating a climate more conducive to fostering change in your husband.
Marriage won’t work if the wife neglects this duty. If the wife lacks this attitude, it doesn’t matter if she married the most perfect man on earth; her relationship with him will suffer, because she was designed (and the relationship she has entered into is designed for her) to be a helper.
The Way Men Are
Even some feminists have discovered the wisdom behind biblical submission (though most would
never
use that phrase). Laura Doyle shocked some of her feminist peers in 1999 when she released
The
Surrendered Wife
. The title alone caused great controversy in New York publishing circles; when the book hit the top-ten list, people really started talking.
In her book, Laura admitted that she felt unhappy with her marriage, so she started asking other husbands what they wanted from their wives. After listening to their comments, Laura concluded that her husband probably wanted the same things, so she tried to put them into practice. Laura stopped nagging her husband; she cut out the complaints and criticisms, and then she started letting him lead in important decisions. She did what she could to help him, and she even — this really raised a controversy — started having sex whenever he wanted it. Treated this way, Laura’s man suddenly became a “fabulous” husband.
I’m not endorsing the tactics found in Laura’s book, because I believe our motivation has to come from reverence for Christ more than doing one thing in order to get something else. But at the very least, it shows that even feminists are discovering how a man “works.” The typical man remains unmoved by power plays or criticism or by a wife who disrespects him. He’s moved by a wife who lets him lead and then helps him get where he wants to go.
This isn’t merely cultural. Neuroscience has shown this is how men’s brains are wired. Men, for the most part, are physiologically inclined toward certain attitudes at work and home. If you really want to move your man, you must treat him the way God designed him to be treated.
You can’t make your husband serve you or care for you — but you
can
focus on helping him, and more times than not, that action alone will prompt him to serve and to care. Even if it doesn’t, it will, in the words of one wife (whom you’ll read about later), unleash a great spiritual adventure in your own life.
Thankfully, you’re not in this alone. If you can first accept God’s plan for marriage, then you can receive God’s help to make the marriage work. God wants to help you and your husband build a family that honors him; his help is more than sufficient for your needs: “[Christ] is not weak in dealing with you, but is powerful among you” (2 Corinthians 13:3).
My wife and I have the same goal for our home that Paul has for the church: “And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit” (Ephesians 2:22). How do we become such a dwelling? I need to faithfully discharge the duties of a husband, while my wife needs to faithfully fulfill the duties of a wife. We intend to witness to the beauty of God’s life and God’s church in our own house and neighborhood.
This doesn’t always come naturally for us. I’m not a type A personality; I’m not always the strong leader I need to be. I tend to frustrate Lisa more by letting things slide than by acting in an overbearing way. And Lisa, I’m sure, hasn’t always had the easiest time fulfilling God’s call to submit to an imperfect and sometimes weak husband. But we both remain committed to God’s design. Because God’s plan seems to go against my nature doesn’t mean I question God’s plan; it means I submit to his will and ask him to help me overcome my natural and sinful weaknesses.
The issue isn’t what makes me or Lisa happy; the issue is what makes
God
happy. We don’t direct our lives by what makes us comfortable; we try to order our lives by what brings the maximum glory to God and by what will fulfill our call to proclaim the message of God’s reconciliation. This has given us a joy that far surpasses any temporary happiness.
Both of us have to regularly throw ourselves before God to ful-fill his calling in our lives. In the twenty-plus years we have been living this out as husband and wife, we have found that God is more than able. And we have discovered the truth of Ephesians 3:20 – 21: “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”
I challenge you: if you really want to move your man, begin by praying this prayer: “Lord, how can I help my husband today?”
Tired Helpers
“Hannah” works full-time while raising a preschooler and feels guilty about the waning romance in her marriage: “I wake up at six o’clock, get my daughter ready, get myself to work, put in eight or nine hours, come home, spend time with my child, try to get us all something to eat, put the child to bed — and there’s just not much energy left for physical intimacy.”
Such weariness is legitimate. It’s cruel to make wives feel guilty for not measuring up when their schedules literally overflow. The last thing I want to do when talking about helping husbands is to lecture working wives that they’re not doing enough. I’m a realist, and real life involves compromises. A husband whose wife works outside the home has to realize that other elements within the home will give way. If you’re raising small children and working full-time (or even thirty hours a week), this is, in fact, essentially how you’re helping your husband in this season of your life.
If the situation exists because of the husband’s inability or unwillingness to earn enough for the woman to stay home, he has to bear some responsibility for this and cut his wife some slack. In many cases, the issue isn’t the reasons the wife feels too tired to have sex; it’s the priorities and lifestyle choices that have led to the wife’s weariness.
But occasional sacrifices can still speak volumes. Since I work full-time, let me use myself as an example. I face the same struggles you do — trying to faithfully love my spouse while working well over forty hours a week. One morning, I awoke and uttered a prayer that in “Sacred Marriage” seminars I encourage other couples to use: “Lord, how do I love my wife today like she’s never been loved and never will be loved?”
It didn’t take long to become convinced that I needed to take my daughter to a physical therapy session that afternoon. Normally, my wife carried out this four-hour task; but the more I sat and listened to God, the more I became persuaded he wanted me to do this — even though it would blow a hole in my work schedule.
When I mentioned my plans to Lisa, she responded with a tepid “OK, whatever.”
Frankly, I expected something a little heartier, such as, “You know, I could search the world over and not find such a generous, loving man as you, one who is willing to give up his own work time so that I can have an afternoon off!” No such luck. But since I had already made the commitment, I was stuck.
As the morning wore on, Lisa began feeling ill; she actually took a nap right after lunch, something she almost never does. Then her sister called, informing us that she intended to visit. We had just moved into our house, and none of Lisa’s siblings had seen it — so Lisa went on a tear to get the house ready for the next day.
When I prayed about loving Lisa, and God answered with a very practical suggestion, neither Lisa nor I knew she was going to feel ill — but God did. Neither Lisa nor I knew her sister would call to ask if she could pay an unexpected, last-minute visit — but God did. And he wanted to love my wife through me by removing a major time commitment from her day — at my expense.
On another occasion, I prayed that same prayer and sensed strongly that I needed to let Lisa sleep in while I got the kids up and made sure they ate breakfast and left for school, lunch bags in hand. At this direction, panic rose in my heart — I was due to give a keynote address the next day and still had to pull my notes together. Plus, I had to organize two workshops, and I enjoy my most productive time during the early-morning hours. But God made it clear I was to put my wife’s needs over the nine hundred people scheduled to hear me the next day. Lisa would essentially become a “single mother” the rest of the week in the absence of her husband, and her heavenly Father wanted her to get a little rest before that task overtook her.
Of course, I can’t do this every day. I don’t even do it most days. But I still think that, at times, God will ask us to let work suffer so that we can care for our spouse. I didn’t arrive at that conference as prepared as I wanted to be, but my first and best commitment must be to Lisa, not to any employer.
In the same way, you too should expect God to call you from time to time to make some vocational sacrifices so that you can help your husband. My friend Melody Rhode has often impressed me in this regard. I’m convinced she has a groundbreaking book in her, but she has chosen to refrain from actively pursuing it right now because of family responsibilities. She works three days a week as a marriage and family therapist and believes that any more vocational effort would interfere with her ability to love and care for her family. She does, however, fully intend to pursue the writing of her book when her family commitments allow it.
As Melody and I discussed vocational and family responsibilities, I found her advice very refreshing. “Life is about compromises,” she observed. We shoot for the ideal, but we have to live in the real.Family, of course, always comes before personal ambition. Some couples may decide to drastically change their style of living so that the wife doesn’t have to work full-time or perhaps at all. Some of our friends made that choice and have achieved thrilling results. Of course, they had to learn how to do without certain things, but the intimacy that followed, combined with the sense of family togetherness that resulted, has convinced them that the trade-off has been more than worth it.
Whatever choices you and your husband make, I pray that your decisions will draw the two of you together. Working two jobs to provide a home and food for your children can become a cooperative effort when you support each other, show interest in each other, and make those occasional sacrifices that show you care.
If, in the midst of all this, you can convince your husband that you’re on his side, committed to his welfare and well-being, then you’ll likely discover an intimacy and a loyalty that know no bounds.
How
you help your husband depends on your family’s situation, but the call to help your husband remains.
How can you help your husband today?
*
Some scholars break these two labels into additional distinctions.
Chapter 7: A Claim, a Call,
and a Commitment
Focusing on Personal Responsibilities
I
had my seminary students laughing one day as we compared Mother’s Day sermons with Father’s Day sermons. The former are almost always odes to the glory, strength, wonder, and beauty of a woman’s love; the latter invariably chastise men for not stepping up to their responsibilities and calling.