Archive for the ‘Marriage’ Category

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Take Care of Your Body

Thursday, October 20th, 2011

take-care-of-your-bodyI don’t know what it is about us women hating our bodies. As a teenager I thought I was ugly because my body was as flat as a pancake. Even as a woman in my 20’s, I hated the way I looked. And then my red hair became a liability when I was brutally attacked. I’m surprised I didn’t blimp out into a huge fat person because I felt so yucky about my body.

I’ve known drop-dead gorgeous women who hate their bodies. I think this is a universal problem. Women on TV are on severely restricted diets and ALL of them are wearing push-up bras. What you see on TV and magazines is often fake, airbrushed to perfection. How on earth we are supposed to measure up to all that is beyond me.

So drop it. Love who you are. And if you are a child of God, that begins with the core of your being. (If you don’t understand your actual value in Christ, please read this article.) In the deepest part of your being, you desire to please God. You are a new creation; you are fresh and clean.

God has you on this earth for a purpose. Ask God what that purpose is. Most people never accomplish their purpose in life because they never yield their entire lives to Christ. They just trust Him for salvation, and then lead a selfish life of misery. They’re scared of sanctification, or growing in holiness, because the enemy has deceived them into saying, “I don’t want to change.” You don’t have to change yourself. That’s what God is for. It’s supposed to be a miracle. Stop trying to do it yourself and ask God to do the work in you.

The sin in your life is what drives people away from you, by the way. The closer you are to Christ, the more beautiful your face looks.

Okay, so inside you are beautiful because you are a new creation in Christ. Now let’s talk about the outer shell, the body that you’re stuck with.

No matter how huge your body is, no matter how many warts or sags or whatever else you don’t like, if you start taking care of your body by exercising, you will gradually look better, and you will see the improvement in yourself. This is the same with sanctification. When you get rid of sin in your life, you will gradually radiate beauty.

My husband always told me that sexiness was a state of mind. When I feel attractive, I AM attractive. So you can begin to accept the raw material that God has given you. Who you are TODAY, right now, is unique and valuable. You can be pretty right this second by taking care of yourself.

Gluttony deserves a whole separate article, and I don’t have time to address it right now. The Bible has a lot to say about gluttony. Look it up in a concordance. If you are married, your body actually belongs to your husband (I Corinthians 7:4-5). So if you don’t take care of your body, you are disobeying God, and you need to repent. This is not optional. You need to at least try to take care of your body. If you’ve given up, that’s wrong.

So yes, you need to accept what God has given you, but that doesn’t mean don’t change. Because if you are gradually becoming a better person inside and out, it will be easier for you to accept who you are.

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Modesty or Frumpiness?

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

Until the past few years, most of my life I’ve worn frumpy clothes. There’s a reason for this. I grew up in a Latin American country where men whistled at me even when I was a child. I felt hatred and a slight bit sick to my stomach. When worse things happened to me as an adult, there was no way I wanted a man to ever look at me. Hence the big, baggy shirts that didn’t fit properly. And in my justified prudishness, I never even considered what my husband thought about the way I dressed.

A few years ago, two of my sisters went shopping for clothes with me at a resale shop. They told me my jeans were way too big. When I tried on jeans that actually fit me, they said, “Wow.” They had me try on shirts that were my size instead of an extra large. The shirts felt too clingy. But my body was completely covered.

“How do you justify showing off your shape to the world?” I asked my sisters in an effort to obey God by submitting to my husband’s reasonable request to wear clothes that fit me.

“The way I see it is this,” answered one of my sisters. “If God had intended me to look like a man, He would have made me a man. It’s not a sin to have bumps.” In fact, by looking like a man, I’m disobeying Scripture that says that a woman should not look like a man.

In this country, men don’t even look at you. And if they do, who cares? I realized that there are different ways that a man looks at a woman. Let me give you an example.

When I wear a dress, I turn heads. Why? I have no idea. My hair and make-up look identical, and I don’t turn heads when I’m not wearing a dress (even with form-fitting clothes). What is it about a dress that’s appealing to men? It’s the shape of the body, the hourglass shape. But my husband taught me the difference between appreciation and lust. When I’m in a dress (completely covered), men look at me with happiness and NOT lust. I know the difference now. I don’t feel yucky when a man looks at me. There’s a difference between “That woman looks pretty” (similar to “That sunset looks pretty”), and “I want to sleep with that woman.” In one instance the man is not sinning, and I feel fine; in the other instance, I feel disgusting.

I also realized that a dress shows vulnerability and femininity. I’m furious about showing vulnerability. I would like to be seen as a person who could knock someone out. But when it comes to my husband, for heaven’s sake, I want to be pretty and feminine and vulnerable, because when I am, we are more connected as a couple. And that’s pleasing to God.

So if your husband wants you to wear something that is not frumpy, and you’re justifying your rebellion on some modesty speech you heard at a homeschool conference, that modesty speech doesn’t apply to you. Guess what? With form-fitting clothes, nobody looks at me. I look pretty for my husband instead of looking ugly.

Older women are to teach the younger women how to love their husbands (Titus 2). It wasn’t until I entered my 40’s that I gained some perspective on life. I’m telling you, doing this one thing makes your marriage sweet, and you will feel peace from God after you’ve gotten over your prudishness. The bottom line is to ask your husband how he would like you to dress, and then ask God to help you to submit.

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A Wild Submission

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

submissionSomeone recently asked me what was the key to my great marriage. How do I even begin to explain the inward oneness that I have with my husband?

It’s not like I don’t have my own personality. My husband was once asked who my daughter takes after, and he said, “She’s wild, just like her mother.” I looked at my husband when he said this, and he was smiling at me, so I took it as a compliment. I certainly am no doormat. But I don’t start off a conversation with my husband hardened in my own opinion (at least not usually). I come with a complete openness. I ditch whatever is in my head, and I take on what is in my husband’s head. His mind trumps mine. Many times I permanently drop my former opinion, because now that I think of something from my husband’s point of view, I realize that he’s right.

Even if he’s not right, there’s no way for me to influence his thinking unless I fully understand his position. Just so you know, this is called listening. Men wish their wives listened to them. Wives don’t. They stand there and wait for their husband to finish blathering whatever they have to say. Then the wife spouts her own opinion.

Listening to your husband, by the way, is crucial to submission. How can you follow your husband when you have no idea where he is going and don’t even care?

One of my biggest problems in learning how to submit to my husband was that I felt strongly about everything. It’s just the way God made me. This isn’t necessarily sin. But I thought that if I felt more strongly about something than my husband did, it was only fair that I get my way. What I didn’t realize was that I wasn’t letting my husband lead. To avoid conflict, a man will just back off. It’s way less work. But then the wife isn’t happy either, because she resents the fact that her husband isn’t leading. And it’s her fault.

Most women think of submission as having to crucify their own personality, but this is not true at all. Yes, you must crucify SIN that happens to be a part of your personality, but that’s not who you truly are. If you are saved, the core of your being is a new creation, and you are now a saint. Your deepest desire is to please God. Sin has no part of that. You can get rid of sin without losing who you are. Yes, getting rid of sin is painful, but you feel so much more pure afterwards. There’s a singing in your soul that makes you more lovely to your husband, and a better mom, too. Crucifixion of sin causes you to hold more of God within you. And the Spirit of God brings peace and joy to your home.

Click here to find out more about how to submit to your husband.

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A Perfect Example of Submission

Monday, October 17th, 2011

submission-2The Trinity has always fascinated me, especially the relationship of Christ to the Father. Christ yields His will to the Father. Then the Father glorifies the Son. And the Holy Spirit glorifies the other two. It’s like “You take the last chocolate.” “No, You…” And all of them are selfless, even though they are God and created the universe, and if anyone deserves to be prideful it’s God.

But going back to God the Son, who by the way is not inferior to God the Father, but chooses to submit willingly so that there is only one will… The reason two different people can be one is due to the submission of the one, and the selflessness of the other. The reason women find it usually impossible to submit is because of the selfishness of their husbands. But let’s just say that you submitted anyway, and then suddenly your husband realized that you were following him. And that somehow starts to make him a better man, because he doesn’t want to lead you to the wrong place.

One time while taking a theology class at church, we were talking about the Trinity, and I had an epiphany, you know, an “Aha!” moment. I realized that God had to be three and no other number because of the crucifixion. God the Son had to have the sin of the world put onto Him. God the Father couldn’t look at sin and had to turn His back. So there had to be God taking sin into Himself, but God can’t take sin into Himself. Divine irony. Then you have to have the Holy Spirit to raise Jesus from the dead, because Jesus was dead. He had to have a human body to actually die. Hence the Trinity has to be three and no other number.

Well, a marriage is two, and to actually be one, one will has to go under the other. It’s just the way it has to be. The sad reality is that both people have to be selfless for it to work. But you are both still on this earth trapped in your flesh, which has as its default option “serve myself.” Hence the problems in marriage.

In that same theology class, I came to the conclusion that Jesus actually had separate thoughts and a will that was different than the Father during the Garden of Gethsemane the night before His crucifixion. He felt a high level of anxiety about taking on the sin of the world. He didn’t want to do it. The will of Jesus had to die so that the will of the Father could be accomplished.

As a wife, my will must die. (Believe it or not, my husband’s will has also died, which makes our marriage beautiful, because he doesn’t look out just for his own interests, but for mine. He truly cherishes me as his own body.) But my point to wives is that your will must die. Your will has to die for God to rule you anyway.

So when my husband walks into the room, I want to know what his will is, because that’s my will. Any man will tell you that’s the perfect wife. And the funny thing is that when I don’t assert my will is when God fills my needs anyway. Because God knows what I need, and in my rebellion of asserting my will, I am grabbing the reins of my own life. Selfishness will never lead me anywhere that is good. It will only make me miserable.

For more information about how to submit, listen to “My Submission Story.”

“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

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