The 'S' word: submit

Does that word give you hives?


We don't really like to talk about submission very much.  Recently, I heard a co-worker talk about how much she HATES to hear sermons on marriage because she can't stand the subject of wives being 'submissive' to their husbands.  I think this comes from a misunderstanding or rather misrepresentation of what the Bible says about wives and husbands.  The thing that is so despicable is not the way a wife would be submissive, but the way of a husband--am I right?  No wife wants to feel like she's under the thumb of her husband.

She doesn't need to be.  I don't believe the Bible is asking for that at all.  Let's start with what the Bible does say:

Ephesians 5:21-26


^"21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
"²² Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. ²⁴ Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
 "²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her . . . "


Ok, so we see the word submit in there, right?  'Submit to one another. . . ' that doesn't sound so bad.  But, when we get to the part about the husband being the head of the wife, we all get a little tense, don't we?

I do.

There's something about my understanding of that verse that has just never really settled in my mind.

The issue comes up when we have a disagreement, right?  When we both disagree and our desires are mutually exclusive, who wins?  Who gets to break the tie?  I've heard one philosophy: the man has 51% of the vote.  I've seen that kind of philosophy carried out even more often than I've heard it or others like it.  That, I think, sums up the traditional conservative, evangelical view of a husbands headship--even from some of my more liberal peers.  When we disagree, the husband gets what he wants.

So, my question is: can we back that up with an example of Christ and the church?

Just this evening, I'm thinking about all of this and something occurred to me: maybe I should look at what the Bible DOESN'T say:

It doesn't say that the husband is the one to enforce the submission.

It says that the husband is to love his wife as Christ loves the church.

I can't find any example of Christ enforcing his way on the church.

In the example of Christ, I see a servant.  A protector.  A kind-hearted friend, always choosing to do the right thing, giving everything up for his willing followers.  He never forces his way on anyone, he simply asks and lets each individual make his or her own decision, e.g. the rich young man(Matt 19:16-29; Mark 10:17-30; Luke 18:18-30) or the woman at the well(John 4:1-26.)

My conclusion: husbandly leadership is leading two people to a consensus rather than pushing one viewpoint aside when the two have not yet reached a consensus.

See also: leadership.

Being The Church

Just one week after severe weather ripped Marysville, Indiana apart, 13 people from the Highland Vineyard Church in Louisville, Kentucky went to see if we could help.  We even got on TV as you can see.  The best part, though, is that I got to do all of this alongside a cute girl in a pink 'Purdue' sweatshirt!  This is my perspective on that day.

Signed up, briefed on safety, equipped with gloves and sturdy shoes, we are ready to go.  Pulling up by the post office in Marysville, there is no doubt we are in the right place.  Several trees are missing their tops, telephone poles still sporting their wires are scattered in the fields.  Volunteers have lined the streets with cars and trucks.  The somewhat informal leaders find us a place to work.  "You see that house over there with the diamond window?" they ask.

We head off toward the farmhouse.  The diamond window as our beacon.  Things are looking worse all of a sudden.  The Community Center roof is completely collapsed.  The church has had its siding peeled off and is boarded over.  There is one house halfway to our destination that has no top whatsoever.  You can stand outside, look through the windows and see the cloudless blue sky.  In the yard, between the tree limbs and the debris, the crocuses and the daffodils are blooming as though unaware of the catastrophe surrounding them.  Perhaps, they arrived just late enough to have missed the whole thing.

The scenery is starting to sink in.  I stare around me and each moment I become aware of new things--new levels of destruction--that have been right before my eyes the whole time.  At first, I am unaware of the comprehensive nature of the damage.  I begin to realize that these houses that appear to be standing unscathed are not actually sitting on their foundations.  The church that is missing siding is also displaced three feet from its original location.  Then I notice some concrete slabs--former dwellings--now barely symbols of the structures they formerly supported.

I hadn't even noticed all of that, at first.

As we arrive in the field near the farmhouse there are mounds of rubble.  Mounds.  Not only are there mounds, but in the field toward the horizon there are bits of every kind of human possession strewn in a thin layer for as far as the eye can see.

As far as the eye can see.

A pizza cutter, a broken Barbie doll, bits of insulation, several chapters of Harry Potter, asphalt shingles, a Twilight DVD, and the list goes on.

Someone (or many someones) have begun consolidating this thin layer of debris into little piles.  About 100 feet in any direction and there is a pile, and another, and another, and another.  We step gingerly over the mud and around the piles to make our way to one of the tractors with trailers and we join a group in the loading of the debris.  It is loaded onto the trailer and moved to a large pile in the middle of the field, separated into metal and wood, and left for the next round of cleanup--a bonfire.  Actually, conflagration is probably more appropriate.

Before long, we're shedding our sweatshirts.  The sun is warm.  I can smell the onion sprouts as we trample them underfoot.  We get several piles picked up and loaded and then the tractor heads for the pile.  How good it looks with those piles gone.  Yet, how many more hundreds of piles are left?  More volunteers keep coming in droves and the tractors get kind of crowded.  With my level of coordination, I'm sure that I'm going to poke someone with a splintered piece of hardwood flooring.  I'm getting hungry, anyway.  Time for lunch.

The afternoon is much like the morning, working on the rubble from several houses that used to line this little country street.  Where to start?  We begin by filling 5 gallon pails from what looks like bare ground.  It is actually chunks of wall board, broken glass, silverware, National Geographic magazines--some dating back nearly 70 years, and a few pieces of jewelry that we recovered for a former resident.  You can fill a pail several times over without even moving from one spot.  Without even saying a word, we begin to form a method with these strangers working alongside us: emptying pails into wheelbarrows; rakes and shovels working synchronously to pile and scoop.

At the end of the day, I'm weary.  I survey the afternoon's results: It looks good.  Well . . . it looks better!  We head back to the car, no longer stepping gingerly, and I can't believe how far we've come in only one day!  There is bare ground along the street next to the farmhouse.  The piles out in the field are gone!  GONE!  No more piles.  As far as the eye can see!  But, as far as we've come, I can't believe how much more there is to do.  I can't wait to come back.  I have to come back.  Our work here is not finished.

I am what I am

I was just picking up my journal to write a few things and began reading some past entries.  This has been a big year of transition for me and I've done a lot of thinking introspectively.  I came across an entry where I was journaling about who I am, or maybe even deeper: what defines who I am.  

Where do my roles come from?  With particular regard to marriage, where do my roles come from?  In Ephesians 5, Paul indicates that I have a God-given role as a servant--a leader, following the example of Christ, himself.  Trouble is, I don't always feel like a leader.  I don't always feel like leading, or serving.

So, then I took these thoughts related to marriage and compared them to the business world--this seems to work quite well with one exception: in the business world, I believe, the gender issue disappears.  At any rate, I have a role at work.  That role was given to me by someone else.  I don't really get to define that role, I just have to accept it.  There are leadership aspects to that role at work and sometimes I don't feel like leading.  Sometimes, or rather often, it's a lot of work to lead.  

So, if I don't feel like leading, can I put that role aside?  Can I delegate the leadership to someone else?  I don't think so.  I can delegate the tasks that are under my authority and responsibility, but doing so is leading, isn't it.  The only way to avoid leading would be to ignore my responsibilities altogether.  

My conclusion: if I believe that God defines who I am and my role, then I need to act like the thing that God has declared me to be.  Acting otherwise doesn't make me something else.  It doesn't make me not-a-leader.  It just makes me a bad one.

Who Knows?

"After two marriages that ended in divorce (Tommy Lee and Richie Sambora), I'm sure Heather knows what it takes to make a relationship work."

Quoted from thestir 

Ummm. . . anybody finding something wrong with that logic?  I'm sure Heather knows a few things that can make a marriage fail, but what evidence do we have that she knows what would make it work?  The logic that says that failure teaches you how to succeed is broken logic.  It simply teaches you how to fail.  Wisdom would tell you how to avoid the same failure again, but can failure alone be guaranteed to bring you to success?  I'm going to go with. . . NO!

So, where does this wisdom for success come from?  If you want to know how to do something right, then ask someone who's doing it right!  Who are you listening to?  Cultural generalization? 

Particularly in the areas of finances and marriage, I see people with similar problems talking to each other and giving advice to each other.  Is this really the best idea?  Why do we think that someone with similar problems will help solve our own?  Perhaps it just makes us feel better about the fact that we have problems.  I would assert that we should be cautious about the people we use for advice and the assumptions we make about what they know.  

You know what 'they' say.  

Do you know who 'they' are?

Well, if you know me, then you know that I'm going to take my advice from the Bible.  It's not always the easiest to apply to everyday life, but that's where the other people come in.  People with life experience that I want to duplicate.  I don't believe we are meant to live our lives alone.  I do, however, believe that we should be selective in choosing whom to emulate.  

Is Marriage Obsolete?

I was talking to a friend of mine recently.  He and his girlfriend live together and, he says, will probably never get married.  He says that they're already committed to each other for the long haul.  Marriage is just the expensive way to break up if it doesn't work out.

Is that really all there is to it?

If that's it, then you must be defining marriage to consist of the legal contract of joint material ownership.  Lots of people sign pre-nuptual agreements, though.  Are they still married if they don't agree that they own everything jointly?  What about common-law?  Not married, just living together.

Now we've gone from husband and wife to partners.  Long term commitment.  Best friends.  Same thing, right?  I mean, most places offer benefits to domestic partners.  Two-income households have no tax benefit from a legal marriage.  From the outside, it looks the same.  No rings--I guess, it's not exactly the same.  Close.  Perhaps that's why we're wondering if marriage has become obsolete.

In my estimation, these friends of mine that are living together are already as close to married as most people ever get--with or without the 'red tape.'  My definition of marriage includes an element of faith--a promise between two people and God.  My friends, however, don't believe in God.  That is the fundamental difference, as far as I can tell.  In the absence of that element of faith, I don't really see a difference.  I see no concrete advantage to telling the state of your intentions.

Is it marriage, or the sanctions of the state that have become obsolete?

'Tis the season. . .

My grandfather once told me, "You can tell a lot about a person by what makes them excited."

Men,

If you haven't already, this is the time to be thinking about a Christmas gift for your wife or girlfriend.  I find that lots of guys talk like they never get the right stuff.  Sometimes, they even feel like they've got a little making up do to next time.  I think that's because we, too often, go for the standards.  Mrs O is not identical to any other woman, so some standards just don't work for her.  They don't communicate that I love her.  It's not about the way I communicate, but the way she communicates.

When your girl is excited, what is she excited about?

Mrs O gets excited about quality time.  I discovered a long time ago that taking a surprise day off and making a simple itinerary of fun things to do together was one of the best ways to show Mrs O that I love her and that I know her.  I never would have put that together on my own, but I asked her about it.  I asked her what gifts meant the most to her.  Those are enlightening conversations.

Ladies,

If you find that your man is awkward when it comes to buying gifts, make sure you are vocal about your favorite ones, even if it's not exactly perfect.  Think about the little things he does--or used to do--and tell him how much you appreciated those things.  I remember one day when Mrs O told me that she really appreciated when I send her cards in the mail.  Her admiration meant so much to me.  It made me want to keep doing it!

Saving Daylight

photo courtesy of http://kidsandfamilyproducts.com

Ahhh, this is my favorite morning of the whole year: the boys are awake at 5:30 because their internal clocks don't reset overnight, it'll be dark when I get out of work today, and we're all headed for a sound case of Seasonal Affective Disorder!  Can you hear my sarcasm?  It makes me wonder who ever thought 'daylight savings' was such a great idea in the first place.

I tried to research that a little bit. . . I admit, it wasn't important enough for real solid research, but some cursory web-surfing was in order.  I found it difficult to determine exactly who came up with the idea first.  There were several founding-father types suggested along with several long-obsolete reasons for doing it: Ben Franklin suggests saving whale oil in the street lamps, a meddling brit wants to prevent his neighbors from sleeping away useful daylight hours, but my favorite is the next one.  Wikipedia gives the true credit to an entomologist from New Zealand:


"Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson, whose shift-work job gave him leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-hours daylight." 


Does this seem strange to anyone else?  A bug-collector needs light after work to seek out his critters and the whole world changes their clocks to accommodate?  


Oh well.  I guess it's not as bad as I make it out to be.  But, I do wonder why we quit saving daylight in the winter when it is the scarcest.