Fortunately, that afternoon Chip switched over to a different infant’s sleeping cycle, because he kept quiet for longer periods of time and was easily pacified with bottles and diaper changes. I even managed to squeeze in a three-hour nap while Dan kept an eye on him.
That night, Chip woke me with his cries once or twice, but I got a lot more rest than the night before, so I felt my confidence and affection returning.
“I’m sorry I called you Chucky,” I told Chip before drifting off to sleep, one arm draped across his crib. I could have sworn I saw a little grin creep across his vinyl lips, but I suppose that was just the delirium.
The next morning Dan took some photos of me and Chip to post on Facebook.
As soon as I shared them, I heard from a mom who expressed concern that I was bottle feeding . . . my computer baby.
(For the record, La Leche Leaguers, the Baby-Think-It-Over manual clearly states that “although you will be feeding Baby with a bottle, the recommended method for best nutrition is breast feeding.”)
As the day wore on, Chip reverted back to hellion mode, crying every forty-five minutes and requiring longer and longer feeding times. The final night was as bad as the first.
I felt only a slight twinge of guilt the next afternoon when I removed Chip’s batteries, swaddled him in Bubble Wrap, and placed him back in the box to return to the rental company, where he’ll probably be sent to some irresponsible high school football player who will pay an opportunistic computer geek to deactivate him. Of course, real moms don’t have the option to mail their kids to Virginia.
I never received the report from Chip’s computer, and I got so busy with the next month’s activities I forgot to follow up with the rental place.
“You were so stressed-out about that report,” Dan said. “Now you’re just going to wonder.”
I surprised myself by responding, “I don’t need some computer printout to tell me I’ll be a great mom someday. I already know I will.”
Dan’s Journal
June 10, 2011
Part of last month’s project bled over into this month. His name was Chip. After experiencing Chip, I decided we didn’t need any more enlightenment and self-discovery for a while.
READ MORE ONLINE:
“Babysitting”— http://rachelheldevans.com/babysitting
THE SAMARITAN AT THE WELL
Praised be Thou, O Lord, who did not make me a gentile; Praised be Thou O Lord, who did not make me a boor; Praised be Thou, O Lord, who did not make me a woman.
—R. JUDAH
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
—GALATIANS 3:28 UPDATED NIV
In the Bible, important things happened at wells.
Rebekah earned the favor of Abraham’s servant by tending to his camels at the well outside of Nahor, thereby securing Isaac’s hand in marriage and her place among Israel’s matriarchs. When Jacob stopped for water at a well in Paddan Aram, he encountered the shepherdess Rachel, whose beauty captured his heart. Moses, too, met his wife, Zipporah, at a well, and it was at a cool spring beside the road to Shur that the banished Hagar was promised a son by God. In ancient literature, water symbolized fertility, promise, and life, so when John told a story that began with Jesus by a well, it was intended to be momentous.
According to the fourth chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus and his disciples were on their way from Judea to Galilee when they had to pass through Samaria. This route would have troubled any group of Jewish travelers, for it is well documented that in the first century, the Jews and the Samaritans absolutely hated each other. Upon reaching Jacob’s well near a Samaritan town called Sychar, Jesus sat down for a rest while his disciples went into town to buy some food. As he waited, a Samaritan woman approached to draw water from the well.
“Will you give me a drink?” Jesus asked.
The woman was taken aback. “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?”
Here John reminded readers that Jews and Samaritans did not associate with one another, but also implicit in the woman’s response is the fact that men in that culture, particularly rabbis, were discouraged from talking to women.
“If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink,” Jesus replied, “you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
“Sir, you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep,” she responded. “Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and livestock?”
The Samaritan woman seemed to suppose this Jewish traveler to be arrogant and self-righteous.
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
“Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
“Go call your husband and come back,” Jesus said.
“I have no husband,” she replied.
“You are right when you say you have no husband,” Jesus answered. “The fact is, you have five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”
Traditionally, readers of the text have assumed that Jesus called the woman out on her loose morals, confronting the aberrant nature of her sexual history in order to convict her of her sin. But such a confident interpretation reveals a certain level of bias, for John never actually revealed the reason why the Samaritan woman had five husbands. It is just as plausible, therefore, to assume that her marital history was a tragic one—women were not permitted to initiate divorce at that time, after all—and that Jesus sought to acknowledge the difficult set of circumstances facing a woman in first-century Palestine. She may have been a concubine or a slave, which would explain why the man she was with was not her husband.
Whatever Jesus’ meaning, his words signal a significant change in the woman’s banter with him.
“Sir, I can see that you are a prophet,” she said.
Then, just like the Pharisee Nicodemus in the chapter before, she engaged Jesus in a theological conversation, asking him his opinion about the temple debate between the Samaritans and the Jews. Jesus transcended the debate entirely by telling the woman, “Believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. . . . A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
The woman responded by expressing confidence in the coming Messiah, who both Jews and Samaritans believed would settle all disputes regarding the Law.
“I, the one speaking to you—I am he,” Jesus said.
She was the first person to whom he disclosed that he is the Messiah.
At that moment, the disciples returned with some food, and were “surprised to see him talking with a woman.” But the Samaritan woman had taken to heart the words of this strange traveler, and so she ran back to the town to tell her family and friends, leaving her water jar, like the apostles’ abandoned fishing nets, behind. Because of her testimony, many in Sychar came to believe that Jesus was not only the Messiah but the “savior of the world,” and they welcomed Jesus and his disciples into their homes (John 4:7–42 UPDATED NIV).
With this unconventional well story, unique to John’s gospel, Jesus establishes a new kind of family, a family that transcends marriage, endogamy, and fertility, to include the most despised and marginalized of first-century society. The Samaritan woman was nothing like the untouched Rebekah, the beautiful Rachel, or the pregnant Hagar, and yet she was the first to be presented with everlasting water, the kind available to all who thirst,
no matter their status or station in life. Perhaps she is not named because the disciples could not be bothered to take her name down, or perhaps she is not named because she could be any one of us.
June: Submission
* * *
A Disposition to Yield
Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.
—EPHESIANS 5:22
TO DO THIS MONTH:
□ Submit to Dan “in everything” (Ephesians 5:22–24; see also Colossians 3:18–19; 1 Peter 3:1–2)
□ Serve as Dan’s executive assistant, based on Debi Pearl’s understanding of “helpmeet” (Genesis 2:18)
□ Observe the Good Wife Rules, circa 1950
□ Find out what biblical submission really means
My mother says she’s submitted to my father exactly three times: Once in 2004, when he preferred the gray Honda Pilot and she preferred the blue Honda Pilot. Once in 1995, when he preferred “silver stone” exterior paint and she preferred “peaceful sky.” And once in 1976, when he was sure they could make it the rest of the way down a snow-covered mountain road, and she was convinced it would be their deaths.
Mom says she remembers every word the two of them exchanged in their ’69 Camaro the night they almost died on Highway 226 through Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Having just survived a nasty slide that fortuitously sent them crashing into the side of the mountain rather than flying off of it, Mom had no interest in testing their luck twice. When you grow up in Florida, snow is not something you negotiate with.
“That’s it. We’re walking the rest of the way,” she reportedly said, unbuckling her seatbelt and reaching for the door
“No. We can make it,” Dad insisted.
“This is crazy! We’re going to die.”
“Robin, please. You need to stay in the car. I’m taking it down the hill, and I’m asking you to go with me.”
“You mean you want me to submit?”
Mom wanted to make him say it, but I guess that in the time it took her to realize he wouldn’t, she decided she’d rather die in the act of submitting to my father than to go on living without him.
Of course, my existence is a testimony to the fact that Mom and Dad made it down the mountain unharmed. When they reached the bottom, their car slid gently into the parking lot of Winters Motel, a run-down establishment that did remarkably good business in the months between Christmas and Easter. They walked to a nearby gas station to get dinner, called their coworkers in Salisbury to let them know they’d be coming in late on Monday morning, and watched the Steelers beat the Cowboys in Super Bowl X while the snow accumulated outside.
There are three New Testament passages that instruct wives to submit to their husbands (all quoted from the UPDATED NIV):
• Colossians 3:18—“Wives submit yourselves to your husband, as is fitting in the Lord.”
• 1 Peter 3:1–2—“Wives, in the same way, submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.”
• Ephesians 5:22–24—“Wives, submit to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is 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.”
Of the more than thirty thousand verses in the Bible, two of these passages are listed on the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood Web site as being among the five “key texts” useful in understanding the relationship between men and women.1 The belief that the womanly submission described in the epistles of Peter and Paul is normative, extending to all women everywhere, has led many conservative evangelicals to conclude that gender relationships are inherently hierarchal, that men must always lead and women must always follow.
“A man, by virtue of his manhood, is called to lead for God,” wrote Raymond Ortlund in Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood. “A woman, just by virtue of her womanhood is called to help for God.”2
John Piper describes the spirit of submission as “a disposition to yield,” and defines biblical femininity as “a freeing disposition to affirm, receive, and nurture strength and leadership from worthy men.”3
According to Piper, a woman’s obligation to submit extends beyond marriage. In Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, he provides a continuum along which Christian women can plot the appropriateness of various occupations along two scales: (1) the degree of authority the woman has over men, and (2) the degree to which the relationship between the woman and her male coworkers is personal. A city planner who indirectly leads men by designing traffic patterns, Piper concludes, exhibits influence that is non-personal and is therefore “not necessarily an offense against God’s order.”4 However, a woman in military leadership or a woman acting as an official at a sporting event is overstepping her boundaries.
“Biblical submission” according to the CBMW requires that women yield to their husbands as the primary breadwinners, defer to them when making decisions on behalf of the family, look to men as the spiritual leaders in the home and church, and avoid pursuing careers that place them in a position of authority over men.5
“A situation in which a female boss has a male secretary,” wrote J. I. Packer, “or a marriage in which the woman (as we say) wears the trousers, will put more strain on the humanity of both parties than if it were the other way. This is part of the reality of the creation, a given fact that nothing will change.”6
When Dan and I got married back in 2003, we began our marriage with the assumption that I would submit to him because the Bible told me to, that, while I had a voice in our decisions as a couple, Dan held the reins. We just assumed that when push came to shove, we’d stick to the traditional gender roles emphasized by our religious community. Dan would bring home the bacon, and I would fry it. He would lead, and I would follow.
And then life happened.
When you find yourself running two businesses and a household together, tasks tend to get assigned based on efficiency rather than gender. And when you share a common goal of avoiding the nine-to-five lifestyle in order to make a living as creatives, you don’t care who brings home the bacon so long as it’s enough to pay the Internet bill. And when you realize that faith is not static, that it is a living and evolving thing, you look less for so-called “spiritual leaders” to tell you where to go, and more for spiritual companions with whom to travel the long journey. And when you learn that marriage is a slow dance, not a tango, you worry less about who’s taking the lead and instead settle into the subtle changes in each other’s movements, the unforced rhythms of each other’s body to life’s music.7
Life happened, and Dan and I quickly realized that we functioned best as a team of equal partners. Sure, we argued from time to time, but we never encountered a situation in which Dan had to invoke some kind of God-ordained gavel strike in order to get his way. It just didn’t feel natural to us. It didn’t seem necessary.
In fact, it was Dan who began celebrating all our successes, great and small, with a high-five and a lively declaration of “Team Dan and Rachel!”
Upon the completion of a long road trip—“Team Dan and Rachel!”
Upon signing the papers for our first house—“Team Dan and Rachel!”
Upon beating another couple in Wii tennis—“Team Dan and Rachel!”
Upon a particularly fun romp in the hay—“Team Dan and Rachel!”
By the time we changed our minds about gender roles and submission, we’d been living in an egalitarian marriage for years. Team Dan and Rachel was doing just fine.
But this year was different. In deference to Commandment #1, I’d been trying to submit to Dan as his subordinate.
This meant relinquishing control over the Netflix queue, giving him the final say in restaurant choices, asking for permission before I made plans to go out with friends or start a new project, and tr
ying to remember to do all those annoying little things he always pestered me about, like keeping track of business-related receipts and not putting lit candles next to the curtains. In turn, Dan replaced “Team Dan and Rachel!” with a playful, Family Guy–inspired dictum—“I have spoken!”—which he mostly invoked when telling me to stop working so late and watch Saturday Night Live with him instead. (He’s a pretty okay boss, actually.)
Our biggest argument in relation to submission occurred at Christmastime. I was swamped with work, we had friends staying at our house for over a week, I still hadn’t finished all my Christmas shopping, and yet I got it in my head that I wanted to throw a big, last-minute Christmas party for all my high school friends who were in town for the holidays.
“Absolutely not,” Dan said. “You’ve got too much to do, and it will just stress you out.”
“But I want to!” I protested. “It’s our only chance to all get together.”
“Can’t you get together at someone else’s house . . . or at a restaurant or something?”
“We’ve got the best space for it, and I don’t want to burden anyone else. I’m sending the Facebook invitations now—”
“Uh, hon. I don’t think you can do that.”
Under normal circumstances, Dan would have let me self-destruct, as he has in the past when it comes to my tendency to overcommit.
But this year was different. This year, Dan got his way.
I was mad because this was the first time my will had been usurped on something I really wanted, so I threw what you might call a fit, before realizing this whole embarrassing episode would end up in a book, so I’d better stop acting like a little kid.
Clearly, I needed to work on the virtue of submission, so I decided to devote the month of June to exploring what it means to submit to one’s husband, and to see if a strong-willed, liberated woman like me could truly cultivate a “disposition to yield.”
A Year of Biblical Womanhood Page 21