Are you an addition or a subtraction? If you are an addition, what do you add? If you are a subtraction, what do you subtract? These are questions we need to ask ourselves when we are involved with any relationship, but I want to focus first on family relationships, particularly with the husband. Single ladies, don’t stop reading; this is for you, too. You need to know whether you would be an addition or subtraction to your husband. So many wives are subtractions to their husbands—emasculating and dehumanizing them—because they didn’t know what God had called a wife to be. I’ll give you some of what Scripture says about being an addition to your spouse—a nurturer, if you will, and in following posts I will help you to understand the impact of a nurturer and help you to be one.

The Call for Addition

“The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him” (Genesis 2:18).

Someone who adds to something so that it grows, becomes better, is a nurturer. This is the role of a wife for her husband, a helper, doing what’s necessary to encourage him to grow. I think women have been so brainwashed into believing that encouraging a husband to grow only involves the wife cooking, cleaning, and having sex so that the husband is free to flourish at work. This is the objection I hear to being a Proverbs 31 woman. Rarely do I hear anyone focus on the emotional care that wives are called to.

“The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life” (Proverbs 31:11-12).

If you only focus on spoil, which means gain, you could believe that this scripture is only speaking about physical gain. If that was the case, the writer simply could have said, “Her husband doth safely trust in her” instead of “The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her.” But when a husband trusts a wife with his heart—the seat of his emotions, he trusts that she will not trample it: No name calling, illicit affairs, double-talk, withholding sex or anything else done to mess with his mind and damage his heart. When considering a husband’s heart and his having “no need of spoil,” this means he has no need to seek emotional comfort elsewhere—in his job, recreation or in the arms of another woman. You provide him good and not evil until you die because you are an addition to his life, and, because of you, he should have no need to add anything or anyone else to satisfy him.

Copyright 2009 by Rhonda J. Smith