We conclude our spring series this week featuring excerpts from “Let Me Be a Woman”, Elisabeth’s wedding gift to her daughter Valerie. This series has been shared in honor of Valerie and Walter Shepard’s 50th wedding anniversary. While we have only been able to share a few excerpts with you, we recommend reading it in its entirety! We pray it has been a blessing and encouragement to you.
There is a rabbit nibbling clover just under the window where I sit at the typewriter. Two men are standing in a small motorboat that moves by in the harbor, and two mourning doves sit side by side on the telephone wire. The wild roses are in full bloom now, nearly covering the splitrail fence across the road. It is hard to stay at the typewriter on such a morning. I would like to walk with you down the beach and find a hollow in a dune where we could sit and talk.
Your air letter came this morning, written just after your arrival in Amsterdam. You wrote of small, vine-covered thatched cottages and tall, majestic stone houses, of windows with sheer lace-bordered curtains and an abundance of plants and flowers, of neat farmland with canals bordering each plot. You noticed order and cleanliness. Cape Cod has some charming towns, of which Chatham is one, also neat and orderly. Men were out cutting the weeds from curbstones yesterday. The weathered shingle cottages have white curtains. There are many neat vegetable gardens surrounded by wire fences to keep out the rabbits. (Yesterday’s count when I went to the post office on the bicycle was forty-four.)
What is this joy which we feel in order and design? Isn’t it the same kind of pleasure we experience in the rhythm (which is the predictability) of music, the pattern of an Oriental rug, the measured movements of a dance, the unimprovable form of any true work of art? Our joy is in the very discipline of the thing. The discipline doesn’t stifle, it gives power, it makes beauty possible. Why shouldn’t it be so when we consider the glorious hierarchical order too? Each being plays its part in the music, in the pattern, in the dance, and in playing it in accord with the Creator’s instructions finds its fullest joy.
This is a grace, and there is no more beautiful expression in the Bible to describe a married couple than Peter’s “heirs together of the grace of life.” The context of this phrase is interesting. Peter is writing to exiles about how they ought to conduct themselves in the countries to which they have been scattered. Their obedience to authority may ultimately lead the surrounding peoples to glorify God. Servants are to submit to their masters, whether they are good or bad, for Christ suffered unjustly and it is His example they are exhorted to follow. Married women are to adapt themselves to their husbands, following the example of Sarah, who obeyed Abraham. Husbands are to “try to understand” (as Phillip’s translation has it) their wives, honoring them as physically weaker, yet “equally heirs with you of the grace of life.”
Servants, masters, wives, and husbands have their special graces and special instructions. It all makes up the pattern—God’s pattern. Each is as much a part of that pattern as the other, but when we think of the whole in terms of a painting, a dance, or a symphony the notion of equality seems out of place altogether. Yet husband and wife are in an intricate and intimate way “equally heirs,” and their joint inheritance is grace.
**Excerpt originally published in Let Me Be a Woman, pp. 117-119