Tag Archives: Marriage

10 Ways to Nurture Your Husband

Posted on by
6

Invest in Yourself

1. Make a commitment to be a biblical wife. This commitment should be made first and foremost because God calls you to be one. To strengthen this commitment, read God’s word on the matter, study biblically-sound Christian materials, and refer to my blog, including the two previous posts in this series. Wanting to please God and understanding the impact behind obeying Him make the commitment easier to keep.
2. Examine your fruit. See what areas of the Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) that you need to work on and do it. You can have a heart’s desire to do and understand God’s will, but if your fruit is rank, you will only be able to offer spoiled goods that have no nutritious value for your husband.
3. Take time for yourself. You cannot, I repeat—CANNOT— keep nurturing others and not pour into yourself. Even Jesus took time away from the crowd to be alone with God the Father. You must stop your work and pause the nurturing to get nurtured yourself. Do what you enjoy that will refresh your soul and spirit and enable you to joyfully give to others.

Invest in His Body

4. Show him affection. Initiate kissing him every time you enter each other’s presence. Make love to him even when you don’t feel like it; ask God for strength to help you nurture your husband sexually. Remember, it’s on him if he strays, but it’s up to you not to give him a “reason” to (See “Wife Addition”).
5. Make him comfortable by pampering his body. Some men don’t like manicures and pedicures or even massages, but you know what makes his body feel good. Whatever it is, do it.
6. Make his atmosphere comfortable so he feels comfortable. Create a welcoming environment in your home so he wants to be there. Keep it clean, beautiful (make sure you have some masculine touches, too) and smelling good with food and other delightful fragrances. Declare your home to be a cozy and combat-free zone.

Invest in His Spirit
7. Pray for him. Do this alone and in his presence. He doesn’t always have to pray with you, but make sure you bless him daily and on those special occasions.
8. Share with him scriptures that you have studied that remind you of his strength of character or will otherwise encourage him. Tell him why you are sharing that scripture.
9. Fast for him. Sometimes you see your husband in warfare or he is having a hard time making a tough decision. Fast for him to help his breakthrough come.

Invest in His Emotions

10. All of the above no doubt will positively impact your husband’s emotions, but make sure to also intentionally watch your mouth (Psalm 141:3). This means for us to watch the bad that comes out of our mouths, but we need to ask God to also help us watch for the good that should come out of our mouths. Plan good things to communicate to your husband not just with what you say but even with what you write to him. Dote on him with spoken and written words that you share daily. Why not be like Sara and call him lord (with a little ‘l’)? He is the master of the house; surely you can reverence him as such.

Of course there is a lot more I could say, but I think you understand where I’m coming from. Invest in yourself and make sure you know your husband so you can tailor your investment to his body, spirit and emotions. Nurturing him will surely help him to be the man God has called him to be.

Copyright 2009 by Rhonda J. Smith

Momma Wife?

Posted on by
2

“I got four kids,” I’ve heard women with three children say, taking a stab at their husband by classifying him as the fourth child. A lot of us women feel this way when we pick up our husbands’ clothes, help them figure out logistics and do housework. We think, “What would they do without us?” or “I didn’t sign up to be his mother.” Though these tasks can be annoying, God’s idea of a wife wasn’t a built-in slave for a husband. I don’t even think it was for husbands to be dependent upon wives; I believe God’s idea of a wife being a helper to her husband was the woman’s role in an interdependent relationship, two different minds coming together to compliment the other for the glory of God’s kingdom. I believe the idea of a helper, or a nurturer, was intended for the husband’s growth, not so he can glory in his achievements but so he would be equipped to accomplish God’s will for the salvation of mankind.

Two are better than one. Ecclesiastes 4:9 tells us this for three reasons: 1) if one falls, the other is there to help her up; 2) if they lie down together, they will be warmer than if they lied down alone; and 3) one may be overpowered by an enemy, but two will be able to resist him. Each of these instances shows interdependence, both parties benefiting from the relationship. And most of us want the person on our team to be at his best. Being a nurturer helps a husband to be at his best to give you his best and to fight the enemy. When you are both at your best, you think clearly and can properly prioritize. And the number one priority for a believer is to make God known throughout the earth, and to defeat our number one enemy, Satan, is at the top of the list in order to achieve this.

I think too many so-called strong black women protest nurturing their husbands with a “what about me? What’s he going to do for me?” And those are legitimate questions, but I believe Ecclesiastes helps to answer those and so do Ephesians 5:25-33, Colossians 3:19, 1 Corinthians 7:3 and 1 Peter 3:7. You need to know what your husband’s role is too. And you shouldn’t enter a marriage if you aren’t sure that your mate can be a husband according to Scripture. But if your husband goes crazy in the marriage and forgets that he is a biblical husband, you are not absolved from being a biblical wife.

What god put together, let no man tear apart (Mark 10:9). We focus so much on this meaning the couple shouldn’t divorce and rightly so because this is the proper interpretation, but I want us to apply this to the roles that God put in place for the wife. We cannot tear away the biblical roles from the definition of wife because God defined the wife. When we decide to do so is like us deciding to be God. We are not free to redefine our roles to our level of comfort. Let us be the wives, the nurturers of our husbands, that God called us to be.

Copyright 2009 by Rhonda J. Smith

Wife Addition

Posted on by
2

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

Pride

Posted on by
2

This Mother’s Day I got treated to rest and dinner. My husband took care of my one-year-old all through church service and fulfilled most of our children’s demands throughout the weekend; I ate at my favorite restaurant (The Blue Nile, Ethiopian); and I finally watched the TD Jakes’ movie Not Easily Broken with Morris Chestnut and Taraji P. Henson.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, it’s about what happens to a married couple that doesn’t keep God at the center of the marriage. In this movie, selfish desires take precedence and allow bitterness and blame shifting to become basis of the couple’s interactions. Ultimately, pride is what keeps each of them from continually pursuing the other to make amends. But a conversation with her mother led the wife to a revelation of her complicity in destroying her marriage.

In defending why she encouraged her daughter to put her husband out of the house, her mother said: “Black women have to be strong and you know that.” “And in all your lessons about how I need to be strong and proud and independent, Mama, you left out some very important things. How to love, Mama. How to really care about somebody. How to forgive.” Oh, this struck a chord with me. My mama, too, like many of our mothers, gave us the reality lesson of the double struggle that comes with being black and a woman: People automatically discount your strengths so you have to work twice as hard to be considered half as good. And for me and others I know, this made us work more than twice as hard because we wanted to be considered more than half as good. This excellence, for me, resulted in pride. Not the kind that prompts you to have good self grooming and appreciate how God made you (this is good pride), but the kind that says, “I’m all that. I’d rather just do it myself to make sure it gets done right.” I became self-reliant and in my recovery, I have had to learn how to have God esteem, not self-esteem, and let people help me.

Pride has been my source of strength, my vice, for many years. We know that pride comes in many forms, and I have dealt with a good variety of them: intellectual pride, family pride, sorority pride, material pride, just to name a few (Yes, there are more. I will be delivered, in Jesus’ name). As I prepare to reveal my proud self in various areas of my life, tell me where you struggle with pride. How has pride been a hindrance for you? Talk to me.

Copyright 2009 by Rhonda J. Smith

Marital Equality

Posted on by
Reply

I had it all figured out. I told my husband to be: “When we get married, we ain’t going over to your people’s house every week for dinner. And I’m still going to present at academic conferences. I’ll just have our baby strapped to me, but I’m going.” There was no way that I was going to be obligated to his family’s idea of together time, and there was no way that I was going to stop my career aspirations. I knew the scriptures told a man to leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and I knew that God had gifted me to work just like He had gifted my man (Genesis 2:24; 1 Corinthians 12:4-11). I wanted to assert myself, make sure that he knew how things were laying before he gave me the ring, before I said I do. I wanted him to know that he couldn’t make all the decisions because we were equal. But none of my thoughts considered what God had to say about marriage, namely that the two shall be one and that husbands and wives have different roles. I’ll discuss both more fully in future entries.

I didn’t consider what God had to say because I thought what I had to say was more important (Proverbs 3:7). My wisdom told me that we could still operate married like we were single and that we were equal in how we should function. And though I talked about the 50/50 split in marriage, I always wrestled with that one because my common sense let me know that would be impossible (though it would be ideal, I thought); the only way you could split everything 50/50 in marriage is if you marry your clone.

Marital equality calls for each spouse to seek to operate fully in their functions, not to perform the same functions. And sometimes these functions require what you’d rather not do, like submit to attending a family dinner or postpone an academic career to properly care for children. Initially both seemed hard, but God’s wisdom has proven that my notions were the way of death (Proverbs 14:12).

Copyright 2009 by Rhonda J. Smith