The Excellent Wife.........kind of

Oh ye shall be blessed again….with another blog that is. So proceeds another week of being on-call. Thursday night was HORRIBLE. I hardly got any calls before bed but as soon as that clock hit 3am the phone exploded and didn’t stop until 7:30. Then it took me 30 minutes to get back to sleep, as usual. Luckily I was able to come in late friday at 10. So I got an extra hour of sleep, which I think just made my body mad for teasing it. I was SOOO tired! (Do I sound like the biggest baby yet??)

Well, Thursday night was our first softball game and we WON! Yayyy. Undefeated so far, haha. And I still have not found my beloved glove. Justin and I have torn that house apart. I can’t believe someone came into our house and only stole my softball glove……..well, I guess I will have to get a new one and try to break it in by next week.

I finally finished my book (The Excellent Wife) and will be sure to buy a copy for my newly married friends and family. Although I’ll have to warn them that if they are not wanting to submit fully and give themselves up wholly to God and their husband, they WILL walk away from it in the first couple of chapters. I really suggest the book though, I was shocked at first, at just how submissive God truly calls us to be, and then shocked a second time to see that he overwhelmingly blesses you and your marriage when you actually TRY! I have been reading this book for sometime now. I am trying to take my time and really apply It’s knowledge to my life. It’s a completely biblical perspective on what a wife should be. Man, some of the concepts in this book are hard to swallow at first but I must say, that even when I doubted what the author said, she ALWAYS gave multiple scriptures to back it up. But I soon discovered this is not a book for someone who is not willing to submit her every thought and her whole life to being God’s tool. I decided and prayed before hand that I would try to put into practice every biblical principle that was taught in this book. Man, did God probably laugh at me while I promised that………I had no idea what I was getting into. There were a couple chapters when my ghetto diva attitude came out and I was like……… “Oh NO she didn’t just say that!” haha. But again, she did back everything up scripturally so I swallowed it, HARD. I was telling Kristen and Toby about it the other day, about how I had decided to put these things into practice but, deep down I was afraid they wouldn’t work…….that I would get walked all over and taken advantage of. But I did them and tried to just remind myself that I was glorifying God and prepared myself for the inevitable consequences. And I cannot describe my amazement. I thought that if I gave in and basically became the “helper” God created me to be, that I would be taken advantage of………much to my surprise, I wasn’t walked on at all. In fact, my husband started wanting to help me! Who’d have thought, instead of yelling out more things for me to accomplish, he would tell me to rest and let him pamper me. Or he would smile at me sooo gratefully and tell me I’m the best wife?? Not me, I was so pessimistic about it in my heart, but it was finally drilled into my head that, DUH, my God isn’t out to embarrass me, or make my life harder, he gives me these rules and guidelines to help me be a better person, to help me be a little less selfish, to bless my marriage more than I could ever do by myself! I am so thankful for this book. It still is hard sometimes to always make the right decision in my actions, but I’m learning and working on it everyday. It is sooo true that to fix a problem with someone, you just have to be a better person yourself………instead of focusing on everything they should work on, or everything they should or shouldn’t do……….focus on what you can work on and what should or shouldn’t do. I mean, no one likes to be outdone, if he/she sees you growing leaps and bounds in your faith, in your maturity, or in your life in general………it makes the other person want to strive a little harder too.

Well, my whole reason for writing this in the first place was chapter nineteen, where the book gives certain reasons WHY you can submit to all these principles laid before us as wives in the bible. One of the reasons we can feel secure in making this commitment is because “God keeps his word”. Sounds simple enough right? Well, of course my little mind goes on one of it’s tangents and I start thinking about what that means. You know when you hear something said sooo many times that it just loses it’s meaning kind of. Like “Jesus Loves you”, man I’ve heard that a million times and sometimes I don’t even stop to think what that means. So sad. Well, “God keeps his word” is one of those phrases. When anyone we know says they give you their word, that sounds pretty serious. But deep down you know, even though you want to believe them, and you really think that they are a good person, you still have that lingering thought that they may NOT keep their word. Because humans lie ALL the time. It is something we are very capable of. But that is not the case with God……..it’s not possible. He has no choice being the holy sovereign God that he is, he just CANNOT do it. Makes me think of that movie with Jim Carey (Liar Liar). When someone just absolutely CAN’T lie, you would, no doubt, believe anything they say, if you knew this was a definite about them right?? Wouldn’t that be wonderful……..well, hello, it is! So, we know our God cannot lie. If I was this person (one who can’t lie), I would never tell anyone I promised something because I know then, I am bound to keep that promise. Haha. Then you would HAVE to do everything you said (even though I wish I could be like that, being selfish like we all are, this would make our little lives harder, just being honest). So why does my awesome God who owes me nothing, make so many promises to me in his Word??? Promises that he is forced to keep?? It doesn’t make sense. This amazing, bigger than anything being has the very universe at his fingertips, bounds himself wrapped up in a little promise to ME??? Only extreme love can make someone do that, and anyone who loves me that much, to give up all his control just to make me feel secure in the little areas of my life………I will worship! I was just in total awe when I pictured all these wonderful promises like chains. And my awesome mighty God was bound by all these chains, chains that were unbreakable, and the crazy thing is, he put these chains on himself! Just for me………

So, needless to say, I’ve gotten a lot from this book. Little ‘ol me, who hates to pick up a new book because there is sooo much else to do. God is good, even when on-call phones are involved. Ahhhhh!