My husband is preaching through a marriage series right now, gearing up for an Art of Marriage conference at our church in a couple of weeks. Two Sundays ago he focused more on husbands, and yesterday, we focused more on the wives.

I say “we” because my husband asked me to speak to the wives yesterday. I called my talk (I made it very clear I was not preaching!) “She Brings Him Good,” and we talked about three ways to “bring our husbands good,” by meeting three major needs.

Of course, any blogger worth her salt is going to use material she has already written for future blog posts. 😉 I really covered quite a bit (hopefully not too much!) and I could have talked about each point even more. This morning I realized–I have the foundation for an entire Marriage Minute Monday series. Sweet! This will help me get back in the swing of blogging about marriage again. So….

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She Brings Him Good

Almost ten years ago, when I first began blogging, before Classic Housewife, I had a blog called Bringing Good Home. The name sounds a bit awkward and disjointed but it had special meaning to  me because I pulled it out of a verse in Proverbs that spoke to me. Any guesses?

Who can find a virtuous and capable wife?
She is more precious than rubies.
Her husband can trust her,
and she will greatly enrich his life.
She brings him good, not harm,
all the days of her life. Proverbs 31:10-12 NLT

A resounding groan just echoed across the internet. 

“Oh no, we’re going to talk about HER.”

That darn Proverbs 31 woman, she makes us all look bad. There’s no way we can ever measure up to HER standards. We don’t like to talk about her. So, we won’t. I don’t want to talk about all the wonderful things she did. I want to talk about WHY she did them.

Because the truth is, we aren’t all Martha Stewarts. Some of us are more domestically challenged. (Like me.) I’m creative. Bless his heart, James didn’t realize the stereotype of the Creative Messy was true when he married me. I can pull together a lovely tablescape but I often mess up when it comes to cooking the meal, and I tend to leave a mess behind in the kitchen. 

But you know what I notice about this verse? This verse is given at the beginning of that passage.

Before we read all her wonderful, various, studious accomplishments, we read that her husband trusts her and she brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life. This part is her reason, her motivation for her acts. And those acts are the ways that SHE lived out HER motivation, for HER husband. And how you and I live that out for our husbands will look different.

We live in an age where we can buy bread OR make it. We can buy clothes OR sew them. We can grocery shop OR plant a garden. And I can safely say that James doesn’t care if I buy bread or if I make bread, if I’m being wise about how I spend the money for it.

I can’t sew well and I have a black thumb, but I can bring my husband good things by making sure he has affordable, good quality clothes that fit well, that are kept clean and ready for him to wear, without breaking the bank…or making sure that there is food in the pantry and the refrigerator and meals on the table at a decent time without spending an arm and a leg. 

If I work to meet my husband’s needs wisely, my husband will be satisfied even if I never sew him a single thing.

So even though we can’t do most of the stuff the Proverbs 31 woman could do, we can all have the heart of a Proverbs 31 woman, and any of us can be a wife whose “husband can trust her,” when “she brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life.” It’s not her acts that make her so great, it’s her heart motivation behind it, and her wisdom and discernment and her wise time management–and we can totally do those things, too.

In the coming weeks, I’ll work through three ways that we can work to bring our husband good in our marriages and build his trust in us just as the Proverbs 31 woman did. In the mean time, we can begin focusing our daily decision through the lens of “does thing bring my husband good or harm?”

When we make decisions based on our motivation behind them, and the effect of the decision on our marriage relationship, we can begin making wiser decisions that build our marriage and make it stronger.

Are you more like Martha Stewart or more domestically challenged like me? What are some of you strengths that you use to bring good to your husband?