Submission

Something that God has laid on my heart is to become a submissive wife. 

Now before you react like the term submissive is foul, it’s important to understand why being a submissive wife is important and what that even looks like. To be honest, I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would be working on myself to become submissive. I have a lot of opinions and I always believed that being submissive would mean being someone’s doormat, and that was not something I was into.

But, like I said, God has put it on my heart to make the change. So I have spent a considerable amount of time researching what that meant because the term “submissive” has a bad rap and I wanted to have a solid understanding.

I read Bible passages (1 Peter 3:1-6, Colossians 3:18, etc), articles by top Christian leaders, and I still didn’t understand. In fact, a lot of the articles I read were conflicting and confusing. One actually made me cry because they walked through “the day in the life of a submissive wife,” and it was horrible. They portrayed the wife to be completely at the beck and call of her husband and her only purpose in life was to ensure he was never stressed. It freaked me out and I thought that if that was what I was being called to do, I would surely fail on an hourly basis.

Thankfully, I have been able to find other sources that break down the good ideals that come from being submissive and weeds out the bad ones.

It turns out that God’s design for marriage is for the man to be the head of the household and when a woman, much like myself, doesn’t submit the marriage can suffer. And that is simply because if the wife takes over the role of her husband, she will grow to resent his inability to lead and he will not know his place.

Now submission does not mean not having an opinion or any influence.

From what I have learned, being a submissive wife means that I am the helper of my husband. It is my responsibility to share my thoughts on things with my husband and help him make decisions. I am my husband’s partner. I am not called to bulldoze him and take over control of our household. I am called to work together with him and ultimately encourage him.

Granted, this is an on-going shift in thinking for me, and a topic I am still trying to completely grasp. But I believe that if it is God’s design for our marriage, it will beautiful.