Submit to One Another
Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Ephesians 5:22-24
This is a polarizing verse, for obvious reasons in our culture, and, especially in the Bay Area, it’s a difficult topic to broach given the baggage of abuse and misuse. Does ‘everything’ mean everything? Does this even still hold today in our society which has come so far in championing gender equality? Or was this only applicable to the specific context of that type of patriarchal societal that has long since passed out of favor or need today? What does it even mean to submit? How do you submit if your husband doesn’t know as much as you or isn’t as spiritually mature as you?
This verse opens a big can of worms, and there’s a lot of potential for great discussion and reflection. It’d take too long to try to address all the facets of this verse and the associated questions, and there are plenty of books and resources that would be better at addressing those questions than I could. And so that’s not what I’m going to do; instead, I’m simply going to be reflecting on the question of how to submit and the mentality associated with it as I’ve learned from my own reflections and experiences in trying to carry out this verse. I find that often times, if we simply just tested God’s word by putting it into practice, we can understand the ‘why’; it may not answer all our questions, but we don’t need to have everything figured out to put it to the test through obedience. So how do we go about this?
Early on in our relationship, while Vinayak was not yet a Christian, I was asked by a friend on whether I thought I could even be ‘led by’ (Christian-speak for ‘submit to’) Vinayak one day if he were to become a Christian. What my friend was really asking was whether I, who was much further in my faith journey and relationship with God due to being an intentional disciple of Christ since high school, could entrust myself to someone still young in the faith and who may still lack much of the spiritual knowledge and experience that I’d already stored up over the years. ‘Yes’ was my answer.
That conversation has since stuck with me. Before dating Vinayak, I’m not so sure I would have given such an answer; it’s a counterintuitive one. Would I entrust all my current work decisions to a high school statistics student? Probably not, because I’d trust in my own ~7 years education in graduate statistics more than someone else’s 1 year of AP Statistics. So why is this different? Why did I implicitly say back then, and still believe today, that submission, especially in the context of marriage, does not depend on the other person being more mature or knowledgable, or even equal, to you? Because if we understood submission in marriage correctly, we’d realize that at the root of what we are ultimately called to is a submission to and a trust in God. Because submission in marriage is not a trust that your spouse will be more spiritually equipped than you to lead you and your family, but it is a trust that God can and will spiritually equip your spouse to lead you if He’s called you two into marriage.
Within the first few months of our marriage, I was reminded of this conversation and I had to reckon with myself on whether my ‘yes’ would hold now that we were actually married. We had been going to a church in SF over the previous 1-2 years, but we realized that though making the weekly commute to SF for church was not difficult, becoming rooted in the church and growing in community would be difficult since we neither worked nor lived in SF, and it was simply infeasible for us to drive up on a weekday for small group given the traffic situation. So when we got married, we began to look for a new church. The mixture of my church upbringing and history, my type A personality, and my graduate school research training meant that when I went about our church search, it was a. thorough and b. systematic:
- look up all churches within 15-20 minutes of our home
- look at whether they had small groups that met during the week, what the demographic make-up of those groups were, how the groups were structured, and what was the content of those meetings
- for all churches that passed #2, look at the faith statements and beliefs of the church
- for the ones that passed #3, look at what seminary the pastors went to
I narrowed it down to, I think, 5-6 potential churches. I did one final filter round with Vinayak, where we listened to snippets of sermons from some of the churches and we were left with ~4 potential churches. We picked one to check out for the following Sunday.
Sometime later that week, Vinayak messaged me at work with a church he had found through Yelp that had really good reviews. I thought it was cute that he was at least trying to help in the church search process by going through the only medium he knew how to: Yelp; if we go to Yelp for all other searches, such as restaurants or business, then why not churches? But to me, as someone with multiple years of ‘experience’ of church hunting and who had identified what I thought was the ‘ideal’ and most efficient method of church hunting, the idea of finding a church through Yelp was like going to Yahoo for news: you can do it, and you can probably find what you’re looking for, but there’s a difference in efficiency and potentially even quality from going to say, BBC or the Economist.
I praised Vinayak for his intentionality in the search process and was careful to not say anything to discourage him, but before I could dismiss the church in my mind, a thought came up. What if God was going to let Vinayak find the next church we call home? Did I trust that Vinayak, who had just started a regular church life about a year ago and who had always gone to the churches that I had meticulously researched and picked out for us, would be able to find our next church? And that through Yelp? It had never even occurred to me to consider that possibility; I had just assumed that since I knew the ‘right’ method of church hunting and had done it multiple times with some degree of success throughout my life, that I’d be the one responsible for finding our next church. But we were married now, and if God has really called Vinayak to be the head of our home, then isn’t it a real possibility that God could lead Vinayak to find our next church? So I put aside my doubts and questions, and said “Alright God, I’m going to just trust that maybe this time, you’re going to have Vinayak find our next church.” So we added it to our list (it had not been because it was a bit farther from us) and we checked it out the following Sunday (after some follow-up research by me, the type A one in this relationship).
That first Sunday we went, we happened to meet one of the pastors who informed us he was about to start a small group just 5 minutes from our house. Given that an accessible small group community was one of the key things we were looking for in a church, we decided to give it a try. Now, almost a year later, it is the church we’ve come to call home and which we are confident had been the answer to our prayers, and the same small group we were informed of on our first visit is the same one in which we’ve been greatly blessed by in this past year and look forward to rooting ourselves in for the years to come.
I still die a little on the inside whenever Vinayak innocently and enthusiastically answers ‘Through Yelp!” when people ask us how we found our current church, haha. But in all honesty, it is a humbling reminder that God doesn’t care for what I think are the ‘right’ or ‘ideal’ ways of going about things, He can work through unlikely mediums (granted, apparently the #2 way that people find our church is through Yelp!) and through unexpected people. He isn’t subject to the kinds of limits I place on Him, and when we seek His will and guidance, He will accomplish it regardless of ‘right’ or ‘best’ methodology, and no matter how ‘experienced’ or ‘inexperienced’ we may be.
When we consider how or if we can submit to our spouse, it really is not a question of if we can trust our spouse to have all the knowledge, experience, and methodology to lead us in right decision making. It’s really a question of whether we trust God is capable to lead our family through the imperfect spouse He’s placed in our life. And I think that is part of the beauty of marriage – that two imperfect people, with varying degrees of experience, education, and maturity as seen through the lens of our society, come together and set about trying to live according to this ideal picture of the gospel as framed in a marriage. Humanly speaking, there are so many ways this could go wrong, but when we simply trust in God’s word, His goodness, and submit ourselves to Him and to each other in marriage, the potential pitfalls fade away, because God is capable enough to use us, despite our imperfections, to bring us ever closer to the beautiful picture of marriage and true submission as embodied by the gospel.
So instead of focusing on the still-maturing-and-still-being-equipped person that we’ve been called to submit to, may we instead focus on the good and gracious God who is the ultimate head of our household, and for whom our imperfections are just the opportunities through which He can show us how immeasurably more He can do and give than what we could have hoped or imagined.
