my wife: a better Christian than i
i love my wife dearly; of the many choices i’ve made over the years, marrying her is indeed the smartest moved yet, well, except for accepting Christ, but there are those who argue He chose me first, and on and on, so let’s just avoid that whole mess. the fact is, she brings far more to my life than i to hers, and i am amazed so often when confronted with just how much better she is than i. case in point, the other morning. we were discussing the need to buy computers for our oldest two children, as we had decided to home school them this year, and the curriculum my wife would be using ( i say my wife because even though as a team we may be homeschooling, it is she who will be doing the lion’s share of the work; again, she’s so much better than me) involved a lot of computer work. It would be impractical to teach third grade, kindergarten, and preschool all from one computer alone. as such, being the master of all things technological in our home, i set about finding the perfect laptops within our budgets. Once we had agreed, i added them to my cart on amazon and was about to pay for them. In going over our options, we agreed it made the most since to use my amazon store credit card, as we are trying to improve my credit score (again, of course, hers is way better than mine), plus we would get 6 months of 0% interest which is always a great thing even when you do have the money on hand. i went to pay, but since this would be the first time since our move to Kentucky that i was using said card, for security purposes amazon wanted me to put in the card info all over again. here's the problem with that: i threw the card away. why? we were moving, and i didn’t feel like finding the holder i use for storing all our cards, plus my reasoning was i only ever use it for amazon, as it is only able to be used on amazon, and all my info was already stored. my wife, being the incredible intellect she is, warned me against such action. she cautioned that i should keep it, but of course i ignored her. now if the reverse had happened, say like how i had warned her to fully charge her computer before we moved, and now she has a dead computer while she waits to find her power cord, then i would berate her for a few minutes, as i had in fact done prior to the revelation of my shortcoming; but my wife is a better Christian than i. there’s a section in 1 Corinthians 13, commonly referred to as “the love chapter” in Christian circles, that lists the more common attributes of love. Patience, kindness, selflessness, and not delighting when things go bad or boasting when you’re right or even insisting things should go your way. ouch. i'm far slower than people give me credit for, so it took me an hour or so before i began to appreciate what took place. my wife did not brag about how right she was; she did not get mad, or lecture me, or even get frustrated that we would have to wait a week for me to get a new card before i could get the supplies she needed to start our children’s education. she merely accepted the situation for what it was and moved on.
my wife has been many things over the years, but through every stage and change in life, she is a shining example of the sort of person i hope to be one day. until then, i'll have to settle for getting to be in her presence.