Wife, Make Him Look Good

 

Marriage 19

 

          How do you boil a frog? Put him in a pan of water and slowly bring it up to temp. If you had dropped American Christians from 1924 into our society today, they would be horrified by a host of things we have long since begun to accept, including many of the tenets of feminism. The proof is how my title and essential point today will cause even good people to recoil immediately. Yet this is precisely part of God's plan for a wife in relation to her husband. A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband: but she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones. (Proverbs 12.4)

          What does a crown do? Depending on the context in which it is worn, several things come to mind. Primarily, it sends the message that the wearer is a person of authority. Along the same lines, a crown causes an ordinary man or woman to look positively royal. In other words, a crown is a visible extension of the elevated position and authority of the one who wears it.

          A man looks like a better man when he has a capable, beautiful wife gazing up at him adoringly. And men, while they do not generally care how they physically look, care greatly about how they look to other people and what others think of them. I have often enough adjusted my own estimation of a man by the way his wife acts, for good or for ill. Occasionally, that mental adjustment on my part is rather drastic.

          Nor am I the only one who does so. Earlier today, I was reading William Taubman's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Mikhail Gorbachev. As a student at Moscow University, he was somewhat overlooked, being of poor peasant stock from a distant province. But when he won the hand of Raisa, in his words, he obtained instant prestige. How could he not? She was beautiful, cultured, intelligent, educated, and poised.

Here is a man I become acquainted with. I place his leadership ability and potential about the middle of the scale so to speak. Then I meet his wife. Suddenly, I realize I have enormously underestimated him. Consequently, I will act toward him differently going forward than I would have otherwise for the sole reason that his wife has made him look good. She is her husband's crown, revealing his otherwise unseen authority and high position.

          There are practical and philosophical ramifications to this, or perhaps I should say more noticeable and less noticeable applications of this. On the easily noticed negative side of the ledger, we see a wife who publicly interrupts her husband, disrespects his friends, dresses inappropriately, shares her disappointments and frustrations with him, nags him, compares him unfavorably to some other man, makes jokes at his expense, mocks him, or defies him, for example. Maketh ashamed, indeed. On the positive side, we see a wife who handles negative things in private, publicly speaks well of him, sees that he presents well in the sense of clothes and carriage, minds the children when he is otherwise occupied, encourages others to turn to him for advice or help, and affirms that she feels loved, satisfied, and content in her marriage. A crown, indeed.

          But I also think there is a deeper layer to this. Proverbs 31 famously shows us what is, in some real sense, the ideal wife. There we find the following: Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land. (Proverbs 31.23) The implication here is that she has something to do with this. In other words, she does not just happen to be married to a publicly successful and accomplished husband. Rather, he is publicly successful and accomplished, at least in part because she married him.

          Many years ago, I heard a thought-provoking message entitled "Woman the Assembler." When she married her man, he had all or mostly all of the parts necessary to be a success, but it took a woman's deft touch and patient skill to assemble those into the man that everyone admired so much twenty years down the road.

          I feel this at the twenty-five-year mark in my marriage. My wife avoids/fulfills all or most of the surface illustrations I mentioned above. More importantly, living with her has changed me. It has grown me, molded me, shaping me into a better man. I am less sentimental and more sensible. I am more compassionate and less rattled. I am more groomed and less wild, and I am talking about the inside, not the outside. I am deeper, more wise, less angry, and less naïve than I was when I married her. And my ministry is more extensive. And the fact that this coincided with twenty-five years of living with her is not mere happenstance. She has (and is still) assembled me. If I am a king, she placed the crown on my head.

          The details of your marriage do not need to match my own, naturally, but your marriage arc should. God did not design the man and wife to share one address while building independent lives. He created the man to do a task and the woman to do all she could to help him do his task. And make him look good while he is doing it.

          If your husband is not a king, do not blame him. Look in the mirror. Repent. And go to work putting a crown on his head.