A Crown or A Cancer
A good friend of ours recently posted on a social networking platform about wives who are like a crown and wives who are like bone cancer. Most people understood his message for what he meant to say, but there was at least one who interpreted it differently. The dissenting opinion stated that men are responsible for their own choices and it’s not the wife’s fault if he lives like a fool. I happen to agree with both of them.
The description of the wife being either a crown or a cancer is certainly going to provoke some strong responses. The glory and brilliance of a crown probably doesn’t relate well to those of us, myself included, who are not familiar with rule of noble sovereignty. I am more familiar with the devastation resulting from cancer in the bones. Someone very dear to our family battled cancer for years. Most of the years he was battling cancer, he refused chemo therapy and refrained from taking pain relievers. He endured the pain of cancer in his body and lived on, until the cancer entered his bones. Once his bones were affected by cancer, the pain was excruciatingly more intense than any pain he had ever experienced. Cancer in the bones wrung life out of his body.
In my life, I have observed a common mistake women make that does resemble the effects of cancer. The mistake too many ladies make is either overlooking sinful behavior in the man they are in love with or participating in the ungodly habits with him. For some reason, they choose to go down that path, mistakenly believing that there is no harm to come out of it. Some believe that the behavior they participate in makes no difference, as long as they do things together. However, I have noticed that, more often than not, a woman who stays silent about her husband’s sinful tendencies and even participates in those practices with him, enjoys it only for a short season. That season comes to a bitter end faster than we expect.
This is definitely a heavy subject to discuss, and I am not pointing fingers or condemning anyone. I believe we can learn from these mistakes and teach others to avoid this trap. That being said, I remember hearing such a story as a teenager from a woman a few decades older than I. She was bitterly weeping over the fact that her children were growing up seeing their father drunk on a regular basis. When they were old enough, he encouraged them to drink with him, providing the alcohol. My heart broke for her. I wondered, how did this happen? How could this well-meaning woman end up in this situation? Sometime later, I heard this same woman excitedly sharing with a group of girls, including myself, how much she enjoyed tasting various alcoholic beverages and getting drunk with her husband early on in their marriage. It struck me, there is something obviously inconsistent with this story. Her husband’s poor choices were not her fault. However, I clearly understood that her response to his choices in the very beginning didn’t help correct the direction their family was headed. Her response encouraged him to go farther.
Her story had such an impact on me at that age that I made a commitment to never stay silent and go along with choices that don’t align with a godly lifestyle. I am not claiming to have lived a perfectly holy life. I am as human as any other person who ever lived and I have made wrong choices. However, that story has stayed with me through all these years and reminded me time and time again that every choice we make has consequences. You may argue that we are responsible only for our own choices and that whatever poor choices my husband makes is not my fault, and I would agree with you. At the same time, I also understand that my husband’s choices will and do affect me and my children. Here is what I believe a lot of women miss: this principle works both ways. My choices and my response to his choices also affect him. If he chooses to entertain his passion for alcohol, movies with inappropriate content, maligning others, you name it, and I respond by going along with it, I have made a poor choice in response to a poor choice, and the decay progresses like a cancer in the bones.
What is the solution? I have resolved to speak up at the very appearance of evil in my home. I do not stay silent, I speak up without delay. The longer we remain silent and timid about rebuking sin, the deeper it sets in and becomes normal, acceptable, and ingrained in the fabric of our family life. If I am not helping my husband stay alert, who will? I know his strengths, his weaknesses, and his struggles because I see his daily life. I know him better than anyone, but I need more than human knowledge. There are things that only God knows about him. If we as wives would only stay close enough to God, He reveals the secret things of the heart that not even the closest people know. I’m not against marriage books, but no marriage book ever written can reach that deep into your husband’s heart. God has revealed to me things I have to pray my husband through during my regular prayer for him. Several times these things had dropped into my heart as I would be washing dishes or folding laundry and praying over him. My most memorable experience was when I saw a vivid dream about my husband, which revealed something that was attacking him since he was a boy. It all begins with simply committing to prayer.
We can’t participate in compromise, we have to speak up against wrong choices. But speaking up is not the first step. If we want our words to have any weight, we have to start with our own walk with God. We can’t correct our spouses if we are participating in the same behavior or if our heart is not right. It all starts with our own relationship with God, allowing God to correct us before we attempt to be tools in his hands to correct anyone else, especially our husbands. When our heart is right before God, we will know how to pray for our husbands. When we have given ourselves to prayer for him, we are able to speak boldly, but respectfully and with love. From my experience, this approach has never failed to result in us both realizing where we were wrong, repenting of the wrong choices, and coming out stronger together.
It is never too late or too early to pray for your family, starting with praying for your marriage. The sooner you start, the sooner you will begin to gain the wisdom and understanding you will need to build a strong family. Pray for your future husband, asking God to help you say yes to the right one. Don’t excuse ungodly behavior for the sake of getting married. Marrying someone seemingly desirable is a disastrous risk to take. I am not advocating making a decision without thinking of the obvious things. Use common sense, but don’t stop there. Approach this decision with prayer and don’t stop praying after you get married. All too often, we relax thinking we got what we wanted, no need to continue praying. Pray for your husband if he needs correction and pray for him if he is a better person than you.
The enemy doesn’t stop attacking good people, he knows that if he can knock the head of the family off the right path, the entire family suffers. We have to fight for our husband’s walk with God and take even the smallest compromise as a serious threat. No, it is not my fault if my husband makes bad choices and no I am not his mother. However, I do have an important role to play in his life. I did choose to marry him, after all. How can I rejoice in his victories and refuse to join the fight in his struggles? Let us fight the good fight of faith, pursuing righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness (1 Timothy 6:11, 12), so that after we have fought the good fight, and have finished the race, and kept the faith, we can be sure that there is in store for us the crown of righteousness (2 Timothy 4:7,8). Until then, I will make every effort to be a wife of noble character, who is her husband’s crown, not a disgraceful wife, who is like decay in his bones (Proverbs 12:4). I hope you will do the same!
