Wives and Husbands

²²Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. ²³For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. ²⁴Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Ephesians 5:22-24

This was one of the hardest verses for me to fully grasp in the Bible.  I understood what it means, but even as I read the first few words I was already paraphrasing in my head, thinking that in modern times, this verse was hardly applicable any more.  Even if I wasn’t a wife just yet, I was already justifying the things that I thought should not be under the cover of this particular edict.  My (then) hardened heart and dried out spirit could not take the inherent ‘weakness’ I see in this passage.  I was already thinking of loopholes and excuses, situations in a relationship where I thought this passage should not be the case.  It simply was not possible that I was included within the bounds of this particular rule.

Submit?!  Me??  To someone else!?  Unthinkable, and highly unlikely, you must be quite mistaken, next question please, thank you very much, or good night if there aren’t any more.

Then again, as this blog would strongly suggest, I grew up (in spirit and in truth, so to speak), and learned that the words of God shouldn’t be bended according to our own separate wills, and that we shouldn’t just follow the rules that we are comfortable with, and ignore those that we don’t understand.

Besides, the entire chapter doesn’t end there, it wasn’t Revelations just yet, and Paul didn’t end Ephesians by saying, “And so that is the last rule in the Bible, it is now closed, marriages are traps for women, and so shall it be forever and ever,” or something equally strangulating (and ridiculous) like that.  There was a corollary, and rightly so.  Women should submit to and respect their husbands, fair enough, but the husband in question should exercise his authority with love.  They should love their wives just as they love the Church.  Which is a very refreshing corollary indeed.  What a relief for my overreaching and hyperactive brain, and even more so for my impatient heart.

So the issue then turns into where to find this wonderful God-loving, duty bound husband who will be worthy enough that I will submit to him completely and without compromise.  But that is a story for another entry, and another blog entirely.