#16. A Variety of Difficulties

As I mentioned in article #15, there’s such thing as a mum who is actively pursuing the kind of self-sufficiency that undermines her own obedience to Jesus. Perhaps similar on the surface, but profoundly different, is the woman who inherits a situation which she didn’t want. Two lives can scan the same in a snapshot, but beyond that moment they are moving in different directions, with different longings, different causes and different effects.

It might help to consider the variety of difficulties so we can discern our own starting place and trajectory.

Degrees of difficulty

A while back, I attempted to untangle a few different kinds of inadequacy. At the risk of creating a Russian doll writing project, those ideas might help us understand the different ways marriage can be fraught.

There can be a husband and wife who like each other but are inexperienced or unaware. They don’t yet understand what God has called them to in marriage. No one has ever told them and they haven’t sat down with their Bibles open to work it out. With Bible open, in submission to the Lord Jesus, they will mature together. If they continue on cultural default settings, they will make things harder than they need to be. Inexperience can be steered by wisdom or folly.

A solid marriage makes motherhood simpler—not easy, but more straightforward. The longer it takes a couple to figure God’s wisdom out, the harder both marriage and parenting get. Learning to be a wife who is committed to helping her husband, and a husband learning to be in the habit of taking responsibility, are much easier early in a marriage. They are very awkward to retrofit. When the marriage starts to carry a load of responsibility (parenting, financial, career, church), it is harder to renovate the structures underneath. Poor structures can’t bear much of a load. At the same time, a lot of what we believe about men, women and marriage doesn’t get a chance to show in the earlier stages when there isn’t as much responsibility. We don’t wait to be fit before we start exercising, the strain of exercise is what makes us fitter. But the very same strain which strengthens, can damage.

Then there are those who have a theoretical knowledge of Christian marriage, but who don’t know how to get there. Or perhaps one member of the marriage has a growing idea, but their spouse is yet to catch up. It’s tricky to help a husband and submit to his leadership while he is still maturing into it. It’s hard for a man to lead in a gentle, nourishing but clear, way when his wife doesn’t share his convictions. There is a patient grace needed to keep moving towards each other in genuine, wholehearted affection while absorbing the other person’s stride. But that’s what marriage vows are for; a commitment of the will to stick together while things are less than ideal. To love, honour and respect each other even when we, or the world around us, are not performing well.

And then there are the inadequacies which grow from sin, when we refuse to do what God says is good. When we use the other person’s sin as a licence for our own. This dismantles marriage and good motherhood. This persistent refusal throws away the good we could otherwise enjoy and give—good we owe—to each other and our children. Even if a marriage continues to exist, there is a multitude of ways that married people can mar each other and limit each other’s space to do good.

It only takes one member of the marriage to trainwreck the whole thing. My friend, Tim Adeney, along with Rick Creighton, have written about this; you can read their article on divorce here. Sometimes this dead-end of difficulty finds us when we weren’t aiming for it. In this situation, the marriage has ended, though the responsibilities of motherhood continue.

Submission in Difficulty

While a marriage still exists, submission—being a helper—is inflamed (hot and sore) when either party is not pursuing all that’s good. A wife’s job is to help her husband do all that God says is good. Not the opposite. Submission is not being a sin enabler. When we considered duty at the beginning of this project, we clarified that good duty is the kind that gives a good which is owed. A good defined by God, not a due which is defined and demanded by the other person. Like duty, submission must be God-centred. Submission and helping in marriage is always meant to be “as unto the Lord”, as both husband and wife are in submission to God’s word. When a husband wants his wife to do something which God says isn’t good, her duty to God and her husband is to not do what her husband wants. Because a wife’s helping isn’t generic, it’s purposeful. It’s helping him to fill and subdue the earth as an image-bearer of God. Our help is not meant to strengthen our husband’s vandalism of that image. If a husband is not obeying Jesus, then our work as his helper is to not follow him and fortify him in sin. It is not loving to bankroll disobedience. In these situations, resisting the sinful leadership of a husband is actually helping him on some level, even if it is only a signpost reminding him of what is good, real and true.

But when help and encouragement start to involve resistance, it still ought to be done in respect, and with warmth and genuine affection. The goal is not bitter hostility, soothing our indignation, but to smooth the path to repentance and maturity—to show that godliness is really good. In these moments, is resistance is about a commitment to godliness or a commitment to my own preferences?

When we’re trying to work out how to be married and how to mother in difficulty, we need the counsel of Christians who know us. Digital guidance is not nearly enough—it might be the opposite of what we need. Husbands and wives learning how to be godly is the work of face-to-face relationships in the local church. Online, it’s too easy to craft a narrative that disguises our own disobedience by pointing to someone else’s. It’s harder to do that in a local church. Not impossible, but not as easy.

No Perfect Conditions

There are good things all Christian mothers are called into regardless of what the father of her children is or isn’t doing. A father’s disobedience, while it will complicate what a mother’s obedience might look like, does not doom her. We live in a world where all kinds of obedience are made harder by the sinfulness of others. There are no perfect conditions.

The Christian mother who has an unbelieving husband, or absent husband, will have some different fruit to bear than the woman who enjoys the shelter of a godly man’s leadership. But it is all fruit which the Master Gardener brings about, for his own good pleasure (and eventually, ours too). As we work through the good that Jesus has saved us for, it’s clear that good motherhood—joyful and fruitful motherhood—is not only for the favourable conditions. God grows it in all sorts of places.

Good motherhood is faithful, godly mothering in the middle of less-than-ideal conditions. In some situations, that faithfulness will include repenting towards a more mature marriage, making space for godly manhood and womanhood to grow, cultivating a good which we ought to be eager for. For other women, the complications are such that faithfulness is more about patiently trusting Jesus in a situation which is unlikely to change. It’s working out how to love what’s good, while we’re grieving the absence of it.

Whatever the variety of difficulty we have, our prayer is still, “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,”. As we pray and live for earth to conform to the perfect goodness of heaven, some of us will feel the ache of distance more than others. That ache is not merely the feeling of difficulty, it’s a hunger that Jesus died to fill. Which he is filling. Which will be filled. Jesus comforts broken-spirited women, those sorrowing and longing for righteousness. He says:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn,

for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek,

for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful,

for they will be shown mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart,

for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,

for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 5:3-10