nnyfan wrote:
Zilla...I just looked up your Ephesians verses...I looked a couple verses ahead and it says in verse 25, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the chruch and gave himself for it to make it belong to God.
You have to understand that this stuff was written thousands of years ago before women went to work and this verse also tells husbands to treat their wives well and love them and respect them. They are to be a team. However, in your friend's situation, she's left alone to run the house while her husband is away working. This poses a problem, I can see. The basis of your verses, to me, says that the house should have a ruler or a boss. If there are two bosses, they will be in conflict. Just like in a job, only one person can be the boss and everyone else has to do what they say.
I think in today's world, it could be said that a wife could be in charge of the family as long as the husband is willing to relinquish the full control to his wife. Military wives, for instance, are the boss of the house while their husbands are out fighting for our country for over a year at a time. It would be stupid and ghoulish for him to come back from war and expect to just take the reigns from the wife and expect her to just sit down and let him take over and change all her rules. My next door neighbors are like this...Bill's gone to war and when he comes back, Rachel has him tiling the floor, cleaning out the garage...she's definitely the boss in the family and he just chuckles about it about it and says that Afghanistan's got nothing on Rachel! It has to be one person in charge, in this day, though, it could be either husband or wife. In my opinion. Does that make sense? When Ephesians was written, it wasn't really heard of for a woman to work or be in charge...but the family works best if ONE person is in charge.
You make a good point, especially about military wives. I think it must be especially difficult to be in charge of everything while the husband is away, and then just slide into a secondary role when he returns.
My wife and I have a joint power sharing arrangement and I can tell you, even though we have been married for almost 31 years, it is very difficult to do. Almost everything is done by committee. It would be much easier if we just had one boss (we just can't agree on who that would be 
), but we are both strong willed people, so everything becomes a negotiation. When it works, it is ideal, but when it doesn't there is strife.
I see relationships where one person is clearly in charge (usually the husband, but sometimes the wife) and from the outside it seems...I don't know the right word...smoother. Still, it is difficult to tell about a relationship from the outside.
Certainly, when the bible was written no one would have suggested anything like male-female equality, but even then there must have been strong willed women who butted heads with over-bearing husbands, hence the need for Paul to offer the advice (command?) about women subjecting themselves to the rule of men.
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