“Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.” (Titus 2:3-5)
You have no idea how much I love this passage!
We who have been married at least for more than 10 years (me, married for 21 years) are called to teach younger wives what is “good.”
No, we don’t have to define “good” here because the Bible itself defines it for us.
So, those “good” things we “older” wives need to teach younger wives start with this:
To urge young and beautiful wives to love their husbands.
Yeah, this may sound straightforward and some new wives may say, “Duh! I love my husband. That is why I married him!”
Yeah, I thought that too as a new bride but to my nightmare, I came to learn early on that I was not loving my husband the way God created and wired him to be loved by his wife. Love for him mainly is respect. When I respect him, his ideas and suggestions, he deeply feels loved by me. He thinks that I am madly in love with him. When I speak to him with respect, without raising my voice, listening to him carefully without thinking how to respond to him and dominate the conversation, he thinks that my soul is deeply in love with him.
I know! This is completely different from my original wiring and creation. I mean, hello! How can “respect” be interpreted as love in my brain? Well, not in my brain but in my husband’s brain, that is what it is. So, instead of arguing, I convinced myself to accept the truth.
My dearest, first, it was for me like learning to speak Japanese. Even after 21 years of marriage, I can’t claim that I speak this language fluently, but I am much better today than 20 years ago. I first thought that, “I love you, Baby” meant something to him. Oh, no, it didn’t mean anything to him unless those “I love you’s” come from a respectful heart with a respectful attitude.
Why do young wives need to learn this from older women?
Let me be blunt here: Men cannot, let me say this again, CANNOT, teach this to women because we simply don’t listen to them. We think that they are trying to get us dominated, used and abused by our men. So, most of us don’t listen to them. Yes, Paul is a psych! He knows us women well!
And the other obvious thing is this: It is the only language that a wife can learn to speak after she marries her husband and gives herself to Christ first and then to her husband. Then she needs an older women to teach her this “only spoke in a marriage” language.
I first didn’t like the accent, if you know what I mean. It just didn’t come to me naturally. The flow didn’t feel right. I mean, I married my best friend and for example, it was kind of tricky for me to think twice before I open my mouth. Then like a baby learns how to walk, after lots of trials and errors, bumps and knee boobs, I now can say that I can speak this weird language and I believe I can teach a young girl to speak it too (which is what I am doing here, if you didn’t realize it yet). May God help me!
I now have this love-hate relationship with this particular language; Love, because when I speak it, my whole house will be filled with “love and care” and when I stumble and fall, miss a syllabus here and a vowel there, and make a silly mistake to make a meaningful sentence, my whole house will be filled with a tension that you can cut with a knife.
Do I make any sense to someone out there?
I hope I do. But I will continue with the other part of the passage some other time.
For now, have a blessed weekend! ///