Chapter 31: A Vocation
A VOCATION
FINALLY, and I think most importantly, marriage is a vocation. It is a task to which you are called. If it is a task, it means you work at it. It is not something which happens. You hear the call, you answer, you accept the task, you enter into it willingly and eagerly, you commit yourself to its disciplines and responsibilities and limitations and privileges and joys. You concentrate on it, giving yourself to it day after day in a lifelong Yes. Having said Yes to the man who asked you to marry him, you go on saying Yes to marriage.
This is easier for a woman to do, I think. Speaking from my own experience, even a woman who has a career when she marries finds it easy to make marriage her primary task, to lay down the career “with hallelujah” as Ruth Benedict said, in order to let her husband have first place. Perhaps, in the plan of God, she does not actually lay down this career. She must continue to do the work to which she was first called. I was a missionary before your father asked me to marry him, and when I married him I was still a missionary, not just a missionary’s wife. The second time I married I had entered another field of work, writing, and I was not released from that job in order to become a wife, although in both cases it was clear to me that my primary vocation was marriage. If I had not been willing and eager to enter this vocation with its disciplines, responsibilities, limitations, and privileges then I ought not to have married. That seemed self-evident to me. There may be a few exceptional women who successfully combine career and marriage, but to give full attention to both at the same time is an impossibility. If a woman wants her career to have priority she will do better to stay single, for the simple scriptural reason that she was made to adapt to a man (made “for him”) if she has a man.
Perhaps I am making it sound too easy. There was for me before I married the first time a long period of thought and prayer as to whether in fact the missionary calling might not actually preclude the possibility, in my case, of marriage. For some it certainly does. For Amy Carmichael it apparently did. She knew that the call of God to missionary work conflicted with her own desires to marry, and she chose not her way but His. I wondered if I was being asked to make the same kind of choice. You know my temperament, so easily convinced that the will of God is whatever I don’t want to do.
But at last, in unpredictable but to us unmistakable ways (some of which I’ve told you about elsewhere) we knew that marriage was our vocation, and as such required (what an agreeable requirement!) our commitment.
Later, however, as the demands of being a missionary or being a writer occasionally got in the way of being a good wife, I had to wrestle with the fallacious assumption that the easier or more pleasant task, that of wife, was nothing more than an evasion of responsibility. “But it is also my responsibility to be a wife,” I told myself, and immediately answered back, “But you’ve got to go down there and teach those Indian women to read,” or “When are you going to get that translation of Luke checked?” When I was both a writer and a wife I was sorely tempted to do nothing but housework because I love housework and I especially love doing it in order to make a home for a husband, but there were times when I had to tear myself away from the kitchen and get down to the study to do the harder job first, to “eat my spinach before I could have my dessert.”
This is a conflict that any married man who takes his marriage and his work seriously is going to face. I said that I think it is easier for a woman to accept her marriage as a vocation because the burden of financial responsibility rests on her husband. Even in cases where a wife’s income is necessary, which it was not in my case, the husband is the provider. Scripturally, he is responsible for his family. A woman I know says to her husband, “I am your wife, but you are my life.” A woman is never a man’s life in the same sense that a man is a woman’s life, and this is the way it was meant to be —“Woman was made for man, not man for woman.” But this is why it is not easy for a man to see marriage as a vocation. And if he does not see it as such, he will not take seriously its implications.
You would like a simple formula, wouldn’t you, for sorting out the priorities? We all would, and no one is going to give us one. God alone, who calls you to your task, will help you to know where the balance lies as you weigh your responsibilities before Him and pray and trust. “The just shall live by faith” is the rule of marriage as in all other spheres of life, and there is no other rule that covers all the vicissitudes.
Marriage is not the sole task to which any of us is called. Women who have no career as such are certainly called to a variety of tasks besides marriage. Parenthood is a task and one which, like a career, all too often eclipses the vocation of marriage so that a couple forgets that they have been called to each other and thinks only of the family. As a minister’s wife you will have tasks in the church which demand time and attention. Every task requires faith. All must be recognized and accepted or rejected by faith, believing that the God who orders all things can order and direct your life so that it is not a selfish one lived “in flowery beds of ease,” nor one so cluttered and hectic that the peace of God cannot rule.
And the word selfish brings us to the principle of sacrifice. Let’s settle it forever —if a Christian life requires sacrifice, a Christian marriage requires sacrifice, the laying down of your life for the other, which is the central principle of Christianity. But laying down your life every day for your husband is to me not the most difficult kind of sacrifice. It doesn’t usually feel anything like sacrifice. It doesn’t often hurt. But when the two of you must together sacrifice yourselves for others it can feel more like it. After all I’ve said about your responsibility to each other, about the seriousness of this vocation of marriage, about the necessity of taking up your task, I still must remind you that the principle of the cross enters into the heart of marriage. Paul wrote to the Corinthians that because “the time is short” those who had wives should live as though they had none. Plenty of married men manage to live this way —with a blithe and thoughtless disregard for their wives and families. This is not what Paul had in mind. He was writing about the need to live life under God. He speaks of the inevitable tensions —“the unmarried woman or girl is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please her husband.” Paul does not favor anxiety —“Have no anxiety about anything,” he told the Philippians. But his reason for mentioning these things is “to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord.” That devotion may at times require the laying down of your lives together for the sake of others. At other times your devotion to your husband will be accepted as devotion to the Lord. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” —Jesus’ words are proof that the way we treat other people (including, don’t ever forget, your husband) is the way we treat Him and is accepted as that.
So marriage is a vocation. You are called to it. Accept marriage, then, as a God-given task. Throw yourself into it with joy. Do it heartily, with faith, prayer, and thanksgiving.