“Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands.” Proverbs 14:1
We have spent the first half of this series considering how a foolish woman can tear down her house with her hands, which has made me think about the other woman in this verse, the wise one whose hands are every bit as active, though the work she leaves behind is something living.
I picture her hands in the soil.
There is something wonderfully ordinary about planting because very little of the work provides immediate satisfaction.
You prepare the ground, push something tiny beneath the surface, cover it back over, and for a while the earth looks exactly as it did before you began.
A woman spends much of her life doing this.
She puts things into the soil of her home without knowing exactly when they will appear again.
The words she uses become part of the atmosphere her family breathes.
The way she loves her husband settles into the children’s understanding of marriage.
Her response to disappointment teaches something about God before she ever announces that a lesson is being taught.
Her relationship with Scripture, her willingness to repent, the way she treats people when they cannot benefit her, all of it disappears beneath the soil of ordinary family life where roots are forming beyond her sight.
Deuteronomy 6:7 describes this kind of work in a way I have always loved:
“And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”
There is very little ceremony in that verse.
God placed spiritual formation right in the middle of everyday life, where people are sitting and walking and going to bed and getting up again tomorrow.
I think sometimes we make discipleship in the home more complicated than God did.
There should certainly be deliberate teaching, opened Bibles, memorized Scripture, and family prayer, but some of the deepest things our children learn are absorbed while nobody realizes a lesson is happening.
They watch long enough to discover whether the Bible their mother reads actually changes the way she behaves when she is angry.
They learn whether forgiveness is something Christians discuss or something their family practices after somebody has behaved badly.
That kind of planting takes years.
Marriage has its own soil, and I have become increasingly aware that whatever I continually sow there eventually becomes part of what grows between us.
Twenty-five years gives a husband and wife plenty of opportunities to discover this.
The Things We Have Wrought: 25 lessons in 25 years of marriage, parenting, ministry & life
There have been seasons when I became so accustomed to my husband’s faithfulness that I stopped noticing it properly.
The things he had done consistently for years became expected, while the thing that irritated me that afternoon received all my attention.
That is poor gardening.
A marriage needs to have good things deliberately put back into it because familiarity can make us careless with what was once precious.
Respect, affection, gratitude, friendship, and simple enjoyment of one another require tending, especially after years of bills, children, responsibilities, disappointments, and all the other things that gradually crowd around two people who once could spend an entire evening talking about nothing.
What we plant matters because eventually somebody lives beneath what grows.
Our children do.
Our spouses do.
We do.
And this is where the garden imagery becomes uncomfortable for me, because I know I have planted things I later wished were weeds I could simply pull.
There have been words I would take back.
Fears I allowed to spread.
Attitudes my children probably learned partly because they watched me carry them.
That knowledge could become a place of tremendous regret if grace did not allow us to put our hands back into the soil.
We can plant again.
Perhaps the ground in your marriage has been neglected for years.
Perhaps your children are older and you see more clearly now what you wish you had given them when they were small.
Perhaps the atmosphere of your home has grown critical, anxious, materialistic, or spiritually thin, and you recognize your own fingerprints in some of it.
Start putting better things into the ground.
Do not spend so much time grieving yesterday’s garden that you neglect today’s seed.
Paul wrote, “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.” 1 Corinthians 3:6.
I need that verse because women who care deeply about their families can begin believing we are responsible for producing the harvest.
We aren’t.
We are responsible for faithfulness with the seed God has placed in our hands.
There are things I planted in my children when they were little that I did not recognize again until they were adults.
There were conversations I thought had disappeared entirely until years later one of them mentioned remembering exactly what had been said.
There were prayers whose answers arrived after I had almost forgotten praying them.
That is the mystery of planting.
Much of the important work happens underground.
The wise woman of Proverbs 14 is building her house with her hands, and I think some of her finest building may look very much like gardening.
She tends what God has entrusted to her.
She notices what has begun growing.
She pulls what should never have been allowed to root.
And then she reaches into her apron, takes another handful of good seed, and puts her hands back into the soil.
The harvest belongs to God.
But the planting is ours.
What are your hands planting today?
Biblical Womanhood
ATTENTION:
In February when we announced our memoir—“The Things We Have Wrought” quite a few of you invested a $5.99 deposit towards that work when we finished it!
It is DONE now!
If you paid the $5.99 deposit in the past few months please reach out, or check your email and spam folder for an email from me with a special link for your discounted price!
Everyone else can:
The Things We Have Wrought: 25 lessons in 25 years of marriage, parenting, ministry & life
