Let Me Be a Woman (By Elisabeth Elliot) - Part VII

Let Me Be a Woman: Notes on Womanhood for Valerie

* Who is it you marry?
* What is marriage?
* What makes marriage work?

Chapter 29 A Union

* Marriage is a union. It takes two to make a union. One cannot do it. When God created man, He saw that it was not good for him to be alone, and He created a woman from and for him, specifically designed to help him, to be suitable for him, to be his mate. The woman is totally other, totally different, totally God's gift to man, and each stands in relation to the other, responsible to the other in obedience to the command of God, responsible to be a man or a woman, and, in marriage, to unite as one flesh. It is for this reason that a man leaves his parents. He forsakes all other ties in the flesh in order to establish this most intimate one of all, the only one which is a perfect union of one flesh.

* There is no competition in a union. ... Each is for the other, pulling with and not against him.

* He only wanted to confess his difficulty with this competition. ... He recognized that differences of gifts is one of the facts of life and he was able eventually to accept this. It was a question of feelings, not reason ... Both of us began to learn - and this is a lesson which we never stop learning - that whatever gifts either of us had were not that we might flaunt them but that we might use them for the sake of other people.

* So there is union in marriage, two separate persons made one in the flesh, and, if they are Christians, one in Christ, subject to His headship. If they are one in Christ, they have not only union but communion, and this is a priceless thing.

Chapter 30 A Mirror

* Marriage turns out to be mirror. Each reflects the other, which is bound to be in some degree painful, for none of us can bear too much reality at once.

* Marriage is for most people the first experience in adulthood of common life - of the daily, ordinary, humble doing of duties in close contact with and mutual dependence on another person. Few have had to take responsibility on a day-to-day basis until they marry.

* And in such earthly matters you will be tested. You will see yourself in this context as you have not seen yourself before. You will see yourself through your husband's eyes and that will be a revelation. Sometimes you will see faults in him. It is quite likely that you are seeing in him faults you need to work on in yourself.
If you are depressed, you may notice that he is depressed. If you make it a point to be cheerful, it may surprise you what a difference it makes in your husband when he has good reason not to be cheerful. You can create a climate for him according to your attitude, and this is part of your job as a wife. The home you make and the atmosphere of that home is the world he comes back to from the world of his work. Let is be a place of beauty and peace.

Chapter 31 A Vocation

* Finally, and I think most importantly, marriage is a vocation. It is a task to which you are called. If it is a task, it means you work at it. It is not something which happens. You hear the call, you answer, you accept the task, you enter into it willingly and eagerly, you commit yourself to its disciplines and responsibilities and limitations and privileges and joys. You concentrate on it, giving yourself to it day after day in a lifelong Yes. Having said Yes to the man who asked you to marry him, you go on saying Yes to marriage.

* Speaking from my own experience, even a woman who has a career when she marries finds it easy to make marriage her primary task, to lay down the career with "hallelujah" as Ruth Benedict said, in order to let her husband have first place. Perhaps, in the plan of God, she does not actually lay down this career. .... although in both cases it was clear to me that my primary vocation was marriage. If I had not been willing and eager to enter this vocation with its disciplines, responsibilities, limitations, and privileges then I ought not to have married. That seemed self-evident to me. ... If a woman wants her career to have priority she will do better to stay single, for the simple scriptural reason she was made to adapt to a man (made "for him") if she has a man.

* You know my temperament, so easily convinced that the will of God is whatever I don't want to do.

* A woman I know says to her husband, "I am your wife, but you are my life." A woman is never a man's life in the same sense that a man is a woman's life, and this is the way it was meant to be - "Woman was made for man, not man for woman." But this is why it is not easy for a man to see marriage as a vocation. And if he does not see it as such, he will not take seriously its implications.

* God alone, who calls you to your task, will help you to know where the balance lies as you weigh your responsibilities before Him, and pray and trust.

* Every task requires faith. All must be recognized and accepted or rejected by faith, believing that God who orders all things can order and direct your life so that it is not a selfish one lived "in flowery beds of ease," nor one so cluttered and hectic that the peace of God cannot rule.

* Let's settle it forever - if a Christian life requires sacrifice, a Christian marriage requires sacrifice, the laying down of your life for the other, which is the central principle of Christianity. But laying down your life everyday for your husband is to me not the most difficult kind of sacrifice. It doesn't usually feel anything like sacrifice. It doesn't often hurt. But when the two of you must together sacrifice yourselves for others it can feel more like it. ... "to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the LORD." That devotion may at times require the laying down of your lives together for the sake of others. At other times your devotion to your husband will be accepted as devotion to the LORD. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" - Jesus' words are proof that the way we treat other people (including, don't ever forget, your husband) is the way we treat Him and is accepted as that.

* So marriage is a vocation. You are called to it. Accept marriage, then, as a God-given task. Throw yourself into it with joy. Do it heartily, with faith, prayer, and thanksgiving.