Dear Daughters,
God made it quite evident during Creation that He had a purpose in mind when He created Eve – “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” (Gen. 2:18) This is the reason God created woman – to be a helper to her husband. Some women find this to be demeaning, but if that is the case, does the Bible demean God when it describes Him as our helper? I was surprised to read the following verses describing God: The Lord is your shield and helper (Deut. 33:29) The Lord is with me; he is my helper (Psalm 118:7). As Gary Thomas in Sacred Influence points out, Genesis pictures a man created with an acute vulnerability. He is clearly not self-sufficient; he needs someone to come alongside him. Adam, and every man after him is “made for fellowship, not power; he will not live until he loves, giving himself away to another on his own level.”
So, being our husband’s helper is our high calling. It assumes, in one sense, that we have something that the person we are helping lacks. When we entered into marriage, we agreed to forsake our “me-first,” single-orientated worldview and build a couple. Helping takes on different forms in every marriage, but it always serves the other person’s good.
On a side note, we were created to be our man’s helper – not our children’s mother. Certainly we are to care for and nurture our children, but that love is always supposed to flow out of a lifestyle that is first and foremost committed to helping our husbands. I must say that when Dad and I first started having children, caring for them became my main focus, but it shouldn’t have. Many of our conflicts arose because I did not include dad in the child-rearing part of our marriage. I just thought I could handle it all myself – which oftentimes left dad out in the cold. Thankfully, God gradually turned that around, and I was able to put things in their proper place – which made for a much better marriage and family life.
The next section of the chapter entitled “The Helper” deals with submission, which in today’s world can evoke many negative responses. But in Ephesians, Paul writes that all of us are to “submit to each other out of reverence for Christ.” The wife’s submission to her husband gets placed in the context in which a husband is called to be like Christ – laying down his life for his wife, loving her, serving her, just like Christ loved us enough to die for us. 
It is interesting that Jesus submitted to his parents. Here he was, the Creator of the universe, submitting to two human creatures, not because they were somehow more worthy than he, but because this is what his heavenly Father asked of him. So, submission is not determined by the worthiness of the other person, but out of reverence for Christ. We can assume that we will have to watch our husbands fail and make mistakes. And when they do fail, that is when they need our encouragement the most, not our criticisms.
The famous feminist, Laura Doyle, shocked some of her peers in 1999 when she released The Surrendered Wife. In her book, Laura admitted that she was unhappy in her marriage, so she talked to some other men and asked what they wanted in their wives. Then she started putting into practice what these other men had told her. She stopped nagging, cut out the complaints and criticisms, and started letting him lead in important decisions. When she treated him that way, he became a “fabulous” husband. I found the same thing when I first realized that I had been trying to change Dad all those years. When I simply started praying for him, stop the criticisms, and started encouraging, he became a much better husband, and I became a much happier wife. It’s when we give ourselves in sacrificial love that we become more spiritually mature. When we put our husband’s needs before our own, this is truly when we become fulfilled. It’s the opposite of what the world teaches, but then again, isn’t everything in the Bible opposite of what the world teaches?
The last question of the chapter challenges us that if we really want to move our man to become the best he can be, begin every day by praying this prayer: “Lord, how can I help my husband today?”
Love, Mom
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