In the same way, we all have personal blindspots. We think we see, but there is something very large and very near that we are completely missing. We’re on a collision course, and if we do not proceed with caution, we are going to get clobbered or we’re going to clobber someone else.

Some of our blindspots are those little quirky things that are not sinful. It gives our loved ones something to overlook (or even love) about us. But sometimes a blindspot is a snare that causes real trouble. And often we are guilty of the very same blindspot that annoys us in others. We get bothered when they move their car over without looking, but we are guilty of cutting off cars regularly ourselves, and we seldom notice it.

Let me give you some made-up examples of this kind of blindspot. You get annoyed when someone interrupts you, but you interrupt others. You think your husband doesn’t listen to you, but when he asks you to do something, you forget. You hate it when your mom tells you what to do, but you boss your little sister like crazy. You think your husband is not meeting your needs, and meanwhile, you know nothing of his.

This can be a particular problem in the area of communication. Let’s say a wife is wanting to improve communication with her husband. (Know any women who want to do that?) Nothing wrong with that.  Okay so far. But if she has a blind spot here, her plan won’t include how she can become a better communicator by drawing her husband out, asking him questions, or listening to what he has to say. Rather, it will be more about how he can become a better communicator (which means listening to her),  meeting her need for communication. And I probably don’t need to tell you that this can drive a husband crazy.

The best way to deal with blind spots is to begin by asking God to show them to you. Most of the readers of this blog are probably the kind of women who want to know what their blindspots are because they want to grow in godliness. So ask God first. Pray for wisdom. Then, if you’re up to it, ask your husband. But don’t do this first unless you are absolutely sure you are up to the response. If you ask your husband about a blindspot, and he gives you an honest answer, and then you get your feelings hurt….it’s unproductive. Next time you ask, he’ll think twice about telling you what he really thinks. So ask God to show you, and then take action on the areas that are in front of you. Keep it between you and God.

Meanwhile, be open when others offer unsolicited input. If you get prickly or defensive at such times, then this area just might be one of your blindspots. A wise woman receives correction. Thank the person bringing it and be willing to pray about it.  Blind spots really are blind. We really can’t see them. We have to ask God to open our eyes, and I’m pretty sure that’s a prayer He likes to answer.

1. Don’t lock your knees. (He’s only lost one groomsman in all these years!)

2. Respect the customs surrounding weddings. (In other words, the mother of the groom doesn’t run the wedding).

3. Decorate according to your taste, but stick with what is the established norm. Don’t try to invent a whole new way of having a wedding.

4. Don’t use trumpets unless you have a world-class trumpeter.

5. Don’t make the bride look good by making all the bridesmaids look bad. (Okay, I must add an editorial comment here. My husband really thought for years that there must be some custom of making the bridesmaids look awful. I know, that’s sad, isn’t it? See my point #5.)

6. The attendants always face the bride, where ever she is. She is the crown, the focal point of the coronation.

7. Give mile-markers at the reception, such as, “The bride and groom will be leaving at eight o’clock…” That way your guests have an idea of how long the party will be going.

8. Just an observation here: It’s a lovely custom for the bride and groom to give gifts to their attendants at the rehearsal dinner.

9. Use standard vows; don’t write your own. And don’t be affected by egalitarianism and feminism when it comes to taking your vows. Stick to the Bible.

10. Honor the Word of God at your wedding: have it read, declared, and have your vows based on it.

Weddings are one of the few remaining events in our culture where we dress up and follow traditional rules of conduct. We receive and rsvp to formal invitations, we are seated by ushers and handed programs. We sign guest books and (sometimes) go through receiving lines. A wedding requires incredible planning and requires a lot of its guests. Here is my own little list of ten things a bride should think about while planning her wedding. (I wish I had read this before my own wedding!)

1. Make the invitation clear. Don’t make the invitation so colorful and cluttered that your guests may miss the main details (which are in 3 pt font printed up the side). And remember to write out all the names on those invited, so there is no ambiguity about the children.

2. When you go to buy a dress, keep the context in view. If you’re having an outdoor wedding in July, don’t buy a dress with a train that looks like you’re headed for Westminster Abbey! Stay on task, no matter how elegant everyone says you look in it.

3. Stay in your budget. There is nothing in the world wrong with a reception of cake, punch, and mints. If your parents are offering to buy you a full sit-down dinner for 400 guests, then God bless them, and go for it. But if you are operating on a different kind of budget, no one will mind a simple slice of (delicious) wedding cake and a cup of punch.

4. This is a party in your honor, but you still want to honor your guests, so  when you pick a time for your wedding, consider whether it will work for your family and friends.

5. Be kind to your bridesmaids and don’t ask them to pay $200 for a dress they’ll never wear again. And don’t pick a dress that only one of your ten bridesmaids will actually look good in. Remember that the first view most of the guests get of the dress is the back, so make sure the dress is cute in the back, not just in the front. Not everyone looks good from every angle  in a backless, strapless wonder.

6. Make certain if you invite five hundred that you actually have five hundred seats, not four hundred fifty.

7. Keep the reception moving so your guests can actually stay until the end. If you plan a lengthy reception, you’ll necessarily lose some of your guests. It’s always better to have everyone wishing it would last a little longer than have them wishing it would end, and fast.

8. Beware the open mike. It’s always better to ask a few very specific individuals to offer the toasts or wedding speeches. It is something to prepare for, not something to be given off the cuff.

9. Let go of the details, once it’s planned. If the bows on the aisles are not exactly what you had hoped for, don’t worry about it. Look over them to find the eyes of your groom.

10. Be sure to thank your parents and kiss them goodbye.

In a godly marriage, a wife is living in a respectful and submissive manner with a husband who is living in a loving and sacrificial manner. Both are sacrificing for one another, laying down their lives for one another, and they do this all the time. They may not even notice because it is such a pattern of life for them. Submission is an attitude of the heart, and it is a frame of spirit. So a wife could be living submissively day-in and day-out and never really be identifying it as “submission.” But it is.

I don’t want to give the word submission a bad rap by giving the impression that it is only applicable when it’s hard. It is sometimes hard. When Jesus submitted in the Garden of Gethsemane, it was very hard. But when He was doing the will of His Father day-in and day-out while on the earth, He was living in a submissive manner. God’s will was Jesus’ will. They agreed. And in the Garden, Jesus made the Father’s will His own.

So God has shown us how to submit when it is hard, and He has shown us how to live submissively all the time. Both are good. Both are required.

The second way women fail to grasp their position in Christ is to cower and “submit” to a man who has forfeited his authority over her. In the first instance, I suppose the man should send up a flare for help. But no one really feels sorry for the husband who gets walked all over. After all, he’s the guy and should know how to stand up for himself. But when a woman gets walked all over, she should also stand up for herself. She is a free woman in Christ. Sometimes a Christian woman should be what some might call “unsubmissive.”

Now before you gasp and think I’ve gone over to the dark side, let me just clarify. Authority is a good thing. Moms have authority over their kids, teachers have authority over their students, the head of the company has authority over his or her employees. The husband has authority over the wife just as Christ has authority over the church. This is a sacrificial authority.

In a good and godly marriage, both husband and wife are submitting to one another out of love for Christ all the time. The only time that a wife is called to be submissive in a particular way is when she disagrees with her husband. In other words, the only time she must obey God’s command to submit to her husband is when she doesn’t want to. But in a good marriage, her husband has sought her  input and counsel before he makes a decision. If he has to make a decision contrary to what she is wishing, he knows God holds him accountable. This is a grave thing.

Submission is found in the Godhead, for Christ submitted to the Father, showing us what submission looks like. It’s not easy, but it is holy.  But now back to my earlier point. Human authority is real, but no human authority is absolute. When should a wife refuse to submit to her husband? Here are a few scenarios where  a husband’s authority is trumped by God’s.

1. When her husband forbids her to worship God.

2. When he tries to convert her to a false or idolatrous religion.

3. When he forbids her to teach her children about the Lord.

4. When he wants her to lie or cheat or steal or break any of God’s commands.

5. When he forbids her to read her Bible.

In these cases, a wife should refuse to go along with her husband. She should cheerfully decline. And then she should look for help. She should call her pastor (which is another good reason to be a member of a church). She may feel that by calling someone for help she is betraying her husband or being disloyal. But our loyalties are always to God first, and His authority is the only absolute authority.  Sometimes being unsubmissive to her husband is exactly what the situation requires in order to be submissive to God. We would call that a godly unsubmissiveness.

Women shouldn’t  just try to be as pretty as Abigail. They should try to be as shrewd as she was as well.

When a wife is carrying a burden of responsibility that is simply too much for her, her husband is the one with the responsibility to notice. He is supposed to protect her from her own rash commitments. In fact, somewhere in the OT law there is a verse about how if a husband hears of his wife’s vow on the same day that she made it, he can overturn it. That’s a good one, and I fully approve. Three cheers for the husband who says, “You said you’d do what? Are you crazy? I don’t want you to do that!”

Wives tend to underestimate the impact they have on their very own families, and, at the very same time, they also overestimate their own ability to carry far more weight than they were designed by God to carry. (Did you follow that?)  A wise husband will blow the whistle.

I remember when (and I know this may be a pitiful example) my husband stepped in and blew the whistle for me. When our kids were little, I had many women calling me to babysit their kids every week. I seldom said, “No,” and most of the time it was just great. But sometimes it really interfered with the how the household was running and how I was running. And I remember when Doug said that he really didn’t want me doing any babysitting for a while. It was so kind of him. Such a loving interference. I still bless him for that one. That’s what husbands are for. They are supposed to step in and call it quits on behalf of their wives.

Now I am not saying that men should boss their wives around, telling them they can’t do stuff that they really want to do. Shame on them if they do. What I am saying here is three cheers for husbands who are paying attention. Three cheers for the husband who says, “Honey, I don’t want you to take that on. I don’t want you volunteering for that job. You have enough on your plate. I don’t want a fried wife. I don’t care how much money it will bring in. It’s just not worth it. I’ll take care of it.”

Now I didn’t write this post to make women mad because they don’t have husbands who will do such things. I wrote it so women would not get mad at husbands who do. Bless God for that kind of husband. They don’t grow on trees.

What do I mean by this? A wife is to see that she does something herself. Respect is a behavior that the wife is to display. Here are a few things that characterize a respectful wife.

1. She thinks right thoughts about her husband, contemplating his strengths and godly traits.

2. She shows gratitude to him for his work and provision and abilities.

3. She shows concern for his needs and wishes.

4. She speaks courteously to him.

5. She fulfills his requests, submitting to him in the little things and the big things.

6. She speaks highly of him to others.

7. She is trustworthy.

8. She goes to him for counsel first.

9. She prays for him.

10. She forgives him.

Now some women will say, “I refuse to do that. My husband is not worthy of such treatment.”  Then why did you marry him? Some husbands may say that they refuse to love their wives because they are not lovely or lovable. So why did they marry women they couldn’t love? They are still required by Scripture to love them anyway.

This is why it is so important for women to marry someone for whom they have great respect. Otherwise, this is a very high bar. If you have great regard for your husband, then you married the right guy. And respecting a respectable man is not too difficult after all.

But if on the other hand, you are already married to someone for whom you have little respect, the command is still there, but it will be much more difficult to obey. At the same time, if you begin to treat your husband with respect unconditionally, out of respect for Christ and His Word, it will be good for you and good for your husband.

First of all, the daughter-in-law does not have the bad reputation that the mother-in-law has. All the trouble seems to be on that end, and though that may be a wicked generalization, we should at least acknowledge that the mother-in-law, being the older party, should be the one to roll out the red carpet and do all in her power to make life easy for her daughter-in-law.

For instance, consider that most all of us who are mothers-in-law are also daughters-in-law. That should give us a terrific advantage since we ought to remember how it felt to be the new one in the family, a family with a different name and background than our own. I had a very comfortable transition into my husband’s family since I knew most them before I ever met him, and I was already quite fond of his mother. But for some of you out there, this may not be the case at all. Expect this to take time. Don’t rush it.

I think there are a few weird expectations put on the daughter-in-law, and one of those is that she should feel the same way about her mother-in-law as she does about her own mother. (And by extension, she should feel the same way toward sister as sister-in-law, etc.) Now that is asking for something that is unnatural. You’ve had your own mother for many years, and your mother-in-law is brand new on the scene. So even if you come to love your mother-in-law dearly, she cannot instantly be in the same league as your dear old mom. Of course there may be circumstances where that comes to pass naturally, and that’s terrific and wonderful. But it should not be the unspoken expectation. If it is, then the daughter-in-law may be feeling a lot of false guilt about her inability to crank up the same emotional attachment that she has for her own mother. I think once a daughter-in-law becomes free from such an expectation, free to not worry about it anymore, she will have an easier time getting to know and like her mother-in-law. But if she is constantly hounded by the feeling that she is falling short, or if she is always striving to keep her affections tallied up equally, her connection to her mother-in-law will necessarily be all tangled up with comparisons. And comparisons are odious, as my own mother-in-law is fond of saying.

Many times a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law do become very attached to one another, as in the case of Ruth and Naomi. And of course that is wonderful, a sweet blessing. But the relationship should be able to stand alone, and not be in comparison to the relationship between mother and daughter. Otherwise there is the danger of jealousy and competition on the mother’s part. So you see, there is room enough to sin in just about every direction. In pursuing a good relationship with a new mother-in-law, a daughter should be careful not to slight her own mom. A good and healthy friendship has no room for comparisons or envy or competition. There should be room enough for both mother and mother-in-law without any squabbling.

A daughter-in-law should look to her husband to help her if she is having any trouble navigating this relationship with his mother. She should trust his judgment and follow his lead. He does, after all, know his mom quite well. And he is the one ultimately responsible for the relationship his wife has with his mom. These things take time and we all need to exercise patience. With a little tender care over time, these in-law relationships can become very sweet indeed. If you are starting out with a big deficit, it may take longer for the bonds of love to really take hold. And sometimes it is impossible. If you are in one of those impossible situations, simply take it as it is and press on. You might never be a close friend to your mother-in-law. But you can still pray for opportunities to overcome evil with good. And we serve a God Who delights in doing the impossible.