“Let your
adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a
gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious.” I Peter 3:4
I
believe good definitions help our hearts get to the essence of things. To Adorn: to deck or decorate; to set off to advantage;
to make more pleasing; to display the beauty or excellence of;
We
are called to adornment--We are called to this; as mothers and wives, we
have a calling. Not to making sure Joe
gets to soccer practice and Millie has her homework done and something
resembling dinner is on the table. We
are called to actively pursue adorning ourselves, and the only way to do this,
according to the Truth of Scripture, is by cultivating our hearts.
For
so many years I have felt the need to accomplish the demands of the day: having
young children around, the constant din of “Mommy? Mommy!
Mom!!” Of teaching, and driving,
and counseling teenagers. But the
preeminent thing as a wife and mother is our calling to cultivate beauty first
of all in our lives: in our hearts and inner soul. A gentle and quiet spirit is not a
personality trait. I know women who are
gentle and of a quiet disposition, and they are lovely. I am not one of them. But here we are not called to change our
personality. We are called to live in peace
of soul, despite all that annoys and troubles and angers us, despite all
that frustrates our plans and brings us sorrow, we are called in our inner
spirit to be gentle in our responses to others, to be quiet before the Lord in
the ebb and flow of all our waking hours.
What
have we accomplished? All the fullness
of our days is perishable stuff. It
comes and goes and very little of it is permanent. It is a particular aspect of a woman’s life
that so much of her work is not permanent.
I have found this to be very frustrating. Do you have any idea the shocking amount of
dishes we use that need washing? The
appalling amount of garbage and recycle that must be taken out? The mountains of wash that pile up if we
don’t do a load every 23 minutes? And
whoever is going to fold all that? Over
and over the cycles wash over us with unrelenting familiarity and yet none of
it remains. I do believe it is one of
the reasons why women are in such a hurry to be making a name for themselves
today out of the home, to be working on something out in the workplace that
they can produce and that has tangible value.
Or that they work on in their homes rather than caring for their
home. We all want to actually see
something that we have created that will endure, that has lasting substance. We’re wired for this.
Last
weekend our son kept wanting to go swimming up in the water by Deception Pass. If you’ve vacationed around here, you know
that shock that comes when you dive into icy waters that have come from some
glacial stream. It about knocks the
breath out of you. If we have an
imagination, that’s what this verse ought to do for us. It ought to give us a jolt awake. What do we create that is imperishable? Tangible and lasting and creative,
something that bears our name?
Imperishable beauty. The
imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit. That is our magnum opus, our work of art,
our lasting legacy, that which will bear our name after we are gone. And we do not do this in our own strength,
wisdom, stoic fortitude. We do it as a
product of living hidden in Christ, of walking closely with Him, of residing
in His presence. And we can only do
this by cultivating time with Him, by discussing with Him and sometimes not complaining
to others, what is on our hearts, and by finding constant prayer to be a
way of breathing. We adorn ourselves
with this beauty by knowing more about the character of God, and by
taking on the attributes of being in His presence constantly. Who we are is who God is as lived out
through us; everything we are speaks of something He is because He has done it
in us and through us.
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