Everything is an affair of the spirit. If eating and drinking can be done “to the glory of God” (1 Cor 10:31, KJV) so can everything else. For those who long to follow Christ, “the performance of smaller duties, yes, even of the smallest, will do more to give us temporary repose … than the greatest joys that can come to us from any other quarter” (George MacDonald).
At a conference where I was speaking about the little sacrifices of love I suggested that if, for example, your husband drops his clothes on the floor and leaves them there, you might, instead of nagging (your views on the subject have been well-known to him for a long time!), simply pick them up. That sort of suggestion does not go over well these days-we’re terrified of being “walked on,” or becoming “co-dependent” or “enablers.” One woman’s questions following that talk were:
1. Why shouldn’t my husband change, and quit dropping his clothes?
2. If he doesn’t, how do I handle the resentment I feel?
The first answer was simple: of course he should change, but you can’t make him! God knows you’ve tried. It’s time to leave him to God. I was not talking to husbands!
The second question pierces to the heart of things.
I greatly value Question and Answer sessions, hoping to clarify the application to individual lives of the principles I try to set forth. But having been at this a good number of years, I am more and more aware of the difficulty of helping people to turn their eyes to Jesus. The world is, as Wordsworth put it, too much with us. Has a husband’s careless habit anything to do with my relationship to Jesus? Yes, everything to do with it, since:
1. It has become perfectly clear that I cannot change him, and,
2. I resent it. Here the question pierces to the heart my heart, my attitude toward the man, which reveals my attitude toward Jesus Himself, for what I do to one of His brothers, I do to Him-alas!
As I reminded my daughter Valerie (in the book I wrote as a wedding present to her, Let Me be a Woman), you marry a sinner. There simply isn’t anything else to marry. So the husband sins against the wife and-let us wives not forget-he, too, married a sinner. If he sins in being thoughtless and my reaction is sinful, two wrongs don’t make a right.
Continued next week
**Excerpt originally published in The Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter September/October 1994