A Gentle & Quiet Spirit Submitted to God

On October 3, 2012, my mother illustrated to her two unmarried daughters the example of a godly wife. For those of you who know my mom, you know that family means the world to her. You also know that she did not want to move to Brazil, and she especially did not want to leave her daughters. I say my mom illustrated a godly wife on October 3, but that’s just because my parents boarded an airplane that day. The reality is, my mom spent several months prior to their flights preparing for a move that her emotions felt no deep desire to make.

My mom is the most gifted homemaker I know. She can transform a rundown, ramshackle building into a beautifully designed and decorated living space. She can also cook. And clean. And iron (which I will never be able to do!). I watched her balance these home duties with being a farmer’s wife for years, and then a pastor’s wife.  She spent hours of her day to commuting her children to and from school, sometimes driving as much as 1 hour each direction, twice a day. She has lived a life devoted to blessing her husband, children, and grandchildren.

One of my favorite things that my mom taught me how to do is cooking. Mom invested in my life as a young person, allowing me to venture into the kitchen, and sometimes even giving me a choice between helping to move pipe in the corn fields or making dinner for the family. She taught me the best chocolate chip cookie recipe in the world, and she continues to provide tips, advice, and encouragement in the kitchen. I don’t remember ever being criticized for making a “bad” meal. If anything, I somehow baked myself into the role of Dessert Queen in the family!

Mom is not a perfect human being. Difficult as it is to admit, I’m fairly awful a lot of times. Mom and I are similar in areas like taking pleasure in homemaking, feeling compassion for the suffering, and the ability to enjoy any activity as long as we’re with someone we care about. We also differ starkly in other areas. Overall, I tend to have more of my dad’s personality. Sometimes I focus on the differences between me and others, and as a result I’ve been pretty hard on my mom over the years. But this year I’ve seen qualities in my mother that I wish I’d perceived much earlier. I’m thankful that, even if nobody else reads my blog, my mom will be that faithful reader who always supports and loves her daughter so much that I could type “flying frisbee frypan” and she’d consider it worth a Nobel Prize!

I read through several books of the Bible this summer, and I’ve spent the last couple months re-reading them. As a verse jumps out, I highlight it and spend time (days, weeks) meditating on it. Most of the time, I’ve sensed a fairly instant understanding of what God desired to speak into my heart as I read and prayed. One verse, though, has ruminated for much longer than the others.

I Peter 3:4, “…rather let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God.”

I struggled with this verse for a few months. I understand that submission to one’s husband is biblical, and ultimately reflects my submission to Christ. I comprehend that a woman’s true beauty is internal, not merely external. (Phew! Because “pony tail” is about as high tech as I can get with my hair!) What I couldn’t connect, and what I believe that God has been teaching me over the last couple years, is that through submission He works freedom.

God has spent a couple years radically chiseling on my character. He’s shown me so many things. My life goal should consist of one thing, and one thing alone: to glorify the One who created and redeemed me. My circumstances do not affect God’s call: circumstances affect only the practical ‘daily doings’ of the call. Not that the capacity for glorifying Him is something I can come up with. Even for performing the only task that matters, I am completely reliant upon His provision and grace! God has healed hurts and insecurities, resentments and fears. He has comforted, chastised, and blessed. His Spirit has instructed and revolutionized my heart, mind, and soul.

Thank God, I will never be finished learning and growing in Christ, either. The more God reveals to me about Himself, the more I become aware that I lack knowledge and understanding. God’s faithfulness to disclose His attributes and His desires for my life, though, generates a thirst in my soul to run ever deeper into my relationship with Him.

This verse in I Peter deserves much more extensive attention than I’m going to give it right now. If I get around to actually writing the whole book, I’ll expound upon the depths of these 29 words. They are amazing and inspiring, and I know that God is going to continue working these words into my heart over the years. I hope that He can use me to inspire other young women as well, in His time.

Our society has drifted far beyond the message that a woman does not have to submit to her husband. Society is violently bent upon demanding that women arise and take charge of the home, work place, and country. Bras have been burned, corsets shredded, and bonnets buried. Now the pitchforks are out, and women are hunting down anything male that implies “submission of the feminine.” We have largely emasculated men, beating them into a subservient role that seeks constantly to elevate the value of womanhood.

The reality is that according to the Word of God, women are valuable. Read Proverbs 31. Read about Sarah, Hannah, Ruth, Abigail, Esther, Deborah, Rahab, Mary, Lydia, or any other female among the host of godly women. These women were valuable to and valued by God. They also share another bond: they submitted to their husbands as a reflection of their submission to God, and through this divinely ordained submission He used the women to accomplish great things for His kingdom and for His people..

At creation, God imbued the feminine with incomparable value. He gave to woman a task that He gave not to man. He entrusted the wife with a calling designed to complement the mission of her husband. The question is not whether women have value if they submit to a man, but rather, what character does God value in His daughters? What good works does He desire to accomplish in my life, and what attitude do those works require?

The last few months, I’ve watched my mom exemplify a godly woman. I can think of no greater example than the massive garage sale, during which our family sold at least 30,000 of the 50,000 items my dad estimated we had accumulated. (Yuck. Less is more…more space, more sanity, more time, more mobility.) But among those items were treasures. Maybe not to me, maybe not to my dad, maybe not to anyone else…except to my mom. I watched her sort through her belongings, often making a painful decision to part with something she genuinely loved because she knew that she could only store so many things, and she could take even fewer to Brazil.

Now, this is an area where I differ a bit from my mom. I’m not overly sentimental about most things, and I really don’t like knick knacks. I enjoy ‘feminine’ hobbies, like cross stitching and baking. I simply prefer a sparser dwelling place than my mom (and most women). As I proceeded through my relocation, I threw away or burned more things than I could count. By the time I’d worked on the move for a couple weeks, I was so fried that I seriously contemplated just driving away, having staked a “please steal my junk” sign in the yard. I found things I’d saved from when I was a teenager, and I was mad at myself every time I had to unpack some stupid box of “collections.” Increasingly, I became determined to never accumulate that much stuff. Yet somehow, even when I got to Montana, I discovered more things to throw away.

This difference in our personalities is what opened my eyes to how amazing of a woman my mom has been these last few months. She takes great pleasure in finding the perfect decorative item to place on a cute shelf or side table. She rearranges things multiple times until she finds the perfect setting that displays the beauty of each item. She knows the perfect colors and perfect throw pillows and perfect everything to make a house her & my dad’s home. She packed things for Brazil that I couldn’t imagine taking, and yet it was the perfect decision for her because she needs that expression of who she is inside.

My mom made difficult, painful decisions of what to keep and what to get rid of. Right up until the last day, she was sorting, packing, rearranging, and weighing tubs and suitcases. It was a bit insane. All the while, I knew that on the inside my mom struggled with a significant lack of joy and desire to move. She was moving to another country for one reason, primarily: because in 1976, she took a vow in the eyes of God to love and submit to her husband, and this year her husband said they were called by God to move to Brazil.

Some people might think my mom is crazy for following her husband. Some people might say she drew the short straw in who she married. I say my mom is a living example to her daughters that a life of true freedom – spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically – is a life marked by a gentle and quiet spirit submitted to God. Because her perspective is eternity-minded, elevating the ministry to which God has called her (being a helpmate to my dad...and goodness knows he needs it!) above her own earthly concerns (her daughters, her sentimental mementos, her comforts), she is able to see the wondrous things that God continuously works in and around her.

Today, I am an unmarried woman. I do not have a husband to whom I offer my life as a helpmate. I’m quite aware that my extended habitation in “singlehood” has morphed me into an independent, intelligent woman capable of paying someone to repair things I can’t fix with duct tape. I’ve spent the last couple years afraid of marriage. “Marriage equates ‘losing autonomy.’ Marriage means making myself vulnerable to another human being. Marriage results in me relinquishing authority to a fallible human being, and trusting that man to lead me in love and wisdom toward God’s glorification in and through our marriage.”

A godly marriage will involve me submitting to my husband (ahem…with a good attitude), and this may require me to follow him down a path about which I do not feel certain. No guarantees about how many shoes I can own, whether or not I’ll get my 2 story farmhouse with a wrap-around porch, how many times I’ll have to move, or if I’ll ever own a horse. This submission is not enslavement, though. It is not “losing autonomy” in the negative connotation. Rather, submission in God’s design is a route to freedom wherein I can express my love for my Creator through fulfilling His calling upon my life as a wife: to be a helpmate to my husband. I will be free to watch God work in my life, and the life of my husband, and our life together, in ways that I never imagined He could.

Does this mean that I sit on my laurels until God puts a dude in my life? Quite the contrary! A gentle and quiet spirit is not required only of a wife. While I believe that God most likely will lead me into marriage one of these days, He clearly intends that I offer my life to Him – my heart & mind, dreams & plans – to His leading, and to do so relying on His faithfulness and provision, regardless of marital status. A gentle and quiet spirit signifies a heart submitted to God, ready and willing to do His bidding without being held back by fears, doubts, or anxieties. He daily grants me the opportunity to participate in His purpose by relinquishing the concerns of the world and embracing an eternal perspective. In the stillness of my soul, sitting at the feet of my Savior, I glorify my King.