I’ll be honest, when I first met Sarah I thought she was mindless and weak. Sarah obeyed her husband, Abraham, and called him her master … And you are now her true daughters if … I didn’t want to be her daughter; I liked being a daughter of the feminist movement and much preferred the mantra, “I am woman hear me roar!” I thought this made me powerful and strong; I didn’t know that these very attributes had already been infused into the core of who I was as a woman, and that I was feeding them fuel, from the world … and not God.
Sarah embodied the opposite of everything I was, and knew about being a wife. There appeared to be an uncrossable chasm between us and when I read verses like the one above, the chasm widened as my inner woman squirmed, “he’s not the boss of me … he can run his 50% and I’ll run my 50%.” Now that’s equality in marriage.
And so began God’s battle with me, to straighten me out and show me that the 50/50 split was not His view of marriage … it was the world’s. He slipped a little burr in the middle of my back. This burr had a name: it was called marriage. It also had a face: it was Darrell’s. This burr stuck to my skin and as I wrestled and fought with God, for 14 years, it rubbed my back raw.
All my crying out to God seemed to fall on deaf ears. I wanted Darrell to listen to me. I wanted to do things my way; it seemed that he made most, if not all, of the decisions. I had ideas and solutions about how to run our family; but it was always so conflicted between us whenever we tried to talk about things or solve problems; and it just kept getting worse.
Weeks turned into months and then into years, and every passing day I became more and more contentious about NOT seeing any circumstances or solutions … Darrell’s way
…and the burr just kept slicing away.
I had created a war zone in our home, and a hardened-heart within myself.
Finally, in a woman-child pout, I screamed at God, “fine, I just won’t have an opinion about anything; is that what YOU want?” God responded with silence. A deafening silence. I had been in our kitchen doing dishes and slamming cupboards and the silence stopped me dead when I realized what I had said through gritted teeth, and Who I had said it to. I fell to my knees, not so much in repentance of my somewhat calloused heart, or adoration of God, but in a slump of emotional fatigue and confusion and started to cry. “Why did You give me a brain if You didn’t want me to use it? There will be nothing left of me,” I sobbed to my Father. Then I heard God’s voice, “Yes, there will be nothing left of you, and that is the point.” He paused (I think, to let that sink in a bit) then continued, “My Spirit can’t work in you, with you in the way.”
That was the beginning of the end of me. It was that day on my kitchen floor with a tear stained face and a badly bruised pride, that I saw the first glimmer of understanding and freedom that comes with the death of self. God showed me that because I had been so focused on getting my own way, what I thought I deserved, and my own “rights” that I had clouded the insight and change of what He wanted to do in me. It wasn’t about obeying Darrell because he was always right or me not using my mind; it was about God using my husband through our marriage to shape me 
into who He had created me to be. I had been so focused on the natural, the earthly situations, that I couldn‘t see the bigger picture of what I needed to learn and what was important … the supernatural. I had turned our marriage into a “he/she“ issue and pitted myself against my husband and was living in the fruit of what a 50/50 marriage really was.
I was reaping what I had sown.
Marriage cannot work this way. A home divided against itself will not stand. (Mk 3:25). I had to be 100% for the marriage; not fighting for my 50% of the marriage.
This is what I hadn’t liked about Sarah. She was 100% for her marriage. Looking at her through my 50/50 vision, her way seemed totally wimpy and unacceptable to me. But as I began to view her through God’s lenses, I saw a whole different view of marriage; and a brand new part of God’s personality started to emerge for me!
If anyone would have asked me if I was 100% for my marriage; I believed and would have answered, yes. But clearly my words and actions didn’t connect.
Something to think about
Does what you say reflect what you believe … in your relationship with your husband?
Does what you do reflect what you say … towards your husband?
Or is there a disconnect like I found that I had.
