WISE WOMAN INTRODUCTION

“I’m not in love with my husband anymore.” The beautiful young woman sat in our office with dry eyes and a shattered marriage. She stared defiantly at us as she nervously fidgeted with her large expensive silver earrings. Her long, thick black hair framed her angular tanned face. Sparks of tension filled the air.

 

“Don’t I need to be in love with my husband in order for the marriage to work? We have drifted apart. He’s always working. He has a mistress. It is his job, and he will always choose his mistress above me. He leaves me alone all the time and pays me no attention. We never go out for dinner or to a movie. I am lonely. The love is gone.”  

They had no children and her husband was obsessed with his job. They lived in a lovely home, wore nice clothes and drove new cars. What had happened to this articulate, well-educated, attractive couple? This woman felt she needed to be passionately, romantically in love with her husband at all times, through all circumstances, or the marriage could not be saved. She could not trust that God would restore the love. Had the worldly “Hollywood” philosophy of constant hot-white lust and romance blinded her? She left him, and they divorced. The house crumbled.

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An attractive, slightly overweight young woman with a loving husband and three children quickly started her car and motioned for me to get in the passenger side. “I don’t want to come to the end of my life and have regrets because I didn’t reach my full potential.” 

Her mother was lying in a hospital bed dying of cancer, and this young woman was burning the candle at both ends to meet all her obligations. As a result, her family was teetering on the brink of disaster. She and her husband were a part of our young couple’s small group.  We baby-sat each other’s children. Our husbands were accountability partners.  

  

Cars whizzed along the interstate in the background as we drove through the late evening traffic. Her dark eyes, which normally twinkled brightly above her wide smile, darted back and forth nervously between the rear view mirror, the oncoming traffic and my gaze of surprise. 

“Your mother is dying, your marriage is falling apart, and you are worried about your potential?” I cried out in astonishment. “Get your priorities in order!” My youthful “counsel” was not very tactful, nor helpful. In the ensuing years, I wished I had exhibited more compassion and caring. She did, indeed, have a very promising career in fashion marketing. She was in upper management of the leading modeling agency in a city known as one of the fashion centers of the country. Her star was rising. She was highly respected in her field in this metropolitan area. 

Her mother passed away a few weeks later. Her family eventually fell apart, and they divorced, as she went on to fulfill the need she had to be a successful career woman. Could it be the priorities in this relationship were based on the “wisdom” of the world, rather than on God’s wisdom?

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I sat beside my childhood best friend, as she wept bitter, anguished tears over her husband’s
affair. We were together constantly in our early years—spending the night together, going swimming, learning to dance, meeting at the movies. We shared the agony and ecstasy of boyfriends during high school, staying up late in the night giggling and plotting our strategy for the next time we would see the current heart throb. She was my main encourager when I ran for cheerleader at our high school and nobody else dreamed the poor little girl from the other side of the tracks could possibly win the elections. My tears flowed with hers as I realized now that when she needed encouraging, I could not help her. Her shoulders shook as the sobbing came and went. She fought to gain composure. “I’ve done everything I know to do to keep the marriage together and now this. I simply don’t know what else to do."

They had been married almost thirty years. Her husband made the choice to enter an adulterous affair, and it destroyed their marriage. Had the “feel good” attitude of our secular society been the downfall of this marriage?

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Why were these houses crumbling now? What had been left undone as these Christian couples built their homes? What does it mean for a wise woman to build her house? Each one of these unions professed to be a Christian marriage. Each marriage had committed to make Jesus Christ the head of their home. This study will take a look at what godly wisdom is, what it means to be a wise woman who builds her house, how a woman foolishly tears down her house with her own hands, and what to do to prevent the downfall of one’s family.