Let Me Be a Woman by Elisabeth Elliot

Let Me Be a Woman by Elisabeth Elliot

Author:Elisabeth Elliot [Elliot, Elisabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Life / Women, RELIGION / Christianity / Christian Life
ISBN: 9781414327259
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers
Published: 2013-10-17T16:00:00+00:00


redecorate your home

from the cellar to the dome

and then go on to the enthralling fun

of overhauling you!

You don’t marry him with the idea of a complete renovation. When asked for advice for women contemplating marriage Mrs. Billy Graham said, “Marry somebody to whom you are willing to adjust.”

If you are a very generous wife, you may perhaps allow that you husband lives up to 80 percent of your expectations. The other 20 percent you may want to change. You may, if you choose, pick away at that 20 percent for the rest of your married life and you probably will not reduce it by very much. Or you may choose to skip that and simply enjoy the 80 percent that is what you hoped for.

You marry this person. He may be the person who was, ten years ago, the “Big Man on Campus.” You were attracted to him because he was a football star or the president of the student body or the most articulate leader of campus protests. But life settles down to the humdrum. Marriage is no house party; it’s not a college campus or a stimulating political row or an athletic contest, and the man’s having been a spellbinding orator or a great halfback somehow does not seem terribly significant anymore. But you ought now and then to remember what he was, to ask yourself what it was, really, that caught your eye. Come now, you will say to yourself, you didn’t marry him because he was a great halfback, did you? No, you married this person. Whatever the inner qualities were that enabled him to do the things he did then are still a part of this person that you go to bed with and eat breakfast with and wrestle over the monthly budget with. He is a person with the same potentials he had when you married him. Your responsibility now is not merely to bat your eyelashes and tell him how wonderful he is (but breathes there a man with soul so dead as not to be cheered by a little of that?) but to appreciate, genuinely and deeply, what he is, to support and encourage and draw out of him those qualities that you originally saw and admired.

I had been a widow for thirteen years when the man who was to become your stepfather proposed. It seemed to me the miracle that could never happen. That any man wanted me the first time was astonishing. I had gone through high school and college with very few dates. But to be wanted again was almost beyond imagination. I told this man that I knew there were women waiting for him who could offer him many things I couldn’t offer—things like beauty and money. But, I said, “There’s one thing I can give you that no woman on earth can outdo me in and that’s appreciation.” The perspective of widowhood had taught me that.

Some years ago there was a series of letters to columnist Ann Landers on the subject of men who snore.



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