The Words I Omitted from My Wedding Vows

When my husband and I were preparing for our wedding day nearly twelve years ago, I found myself in the powerful position of choosing the readings. What did I want to say to my husband? What did I want him to say to me? What did I want our guests, our witnesses, to hear? True, as we were marrying in our Catholic church, our options were limited. But, still, we had options. Or, I did, I should say. As with most wedding preparations, my husband-to-be was all too happy to leave these choices to me. And I was all too happy to make them.

So, it was fitting - since I loved holding the power in these decisions and others - that I would not select Ephesians 5:21-33. I considered it briefly, I'll admit, but I quickly passed over it for the equally beautiful and much safer 1 Corinthians 13. Why did Ephesians ruffle my feathers? Well, if you don't have the chapter committed to memory or if you don't have your Bible handy, let me share with you the words that pointed me toward the safer waters of Corinthians.

"Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body. As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything" (Ephesians 5:22-24).

Submit. Be subordinate. And I'm pretty sure the copy I was given to select from included the word "obey". So why would I, a strong, independent woman, for one second ever consider such a passage? Well, because the rest of it wasn't so bad. In fact, the rest of it sounded pretty good:

"Husbands, love your wives even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her," and "So [also] husbands should love their wives as their own bodies" (Ephesians 5:25, 28).

I could go with that. But, could I include the part about wives being submissive just so I could also have the part about husbands loving their wives to death (quite literally, should that be required of them)? In answer, I quickly crossed off the entire Ephesians excerpt on my selection sheet and circled Corinthians, the passage about love being patient and kind and not jealous and never failing. See? Not offensive...to me or my wedding guests.

But, here I sit, almost twelve years later, quite a different woman in many ways. And those ways have to do with my relationship with God (which has grown deeper), my love of my faith (which has grown much stronger), my understanding of marriage (which has grown wiser, I hope), and my attitude toward my husband (which has, I think, grown kinder). Now, I look at these words from St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians and my feathers don't get ruffled. My blood doesn't begin to boil. And I begin to wish I had chosen them for my wedding day.

Because, back then I needed a serious lesson in submission. From the first day I marched into our new home, I fought to make it known to my husband that instead of being submissive in everything, I would give in on nothing. But over the years since that day, God has given me the lessons I needed in learning to lay down my arms, and I'm grateful for them all.

I'm grateful for my husband's honest assessment early in our marriage that my contentiousness and need to control everything was seriously hurting our relationship in a time that should have been our “honeymoon period”. That, in one of our nastier fights, he was even driven to the point of asking me if I was trying to get him to leave me. His words frightened me and woke me up to the very grave repercussions my behavior could have.

I'm grateful for the suffering my husband and I endured when we lost our three babies in pregnancy. I absorbed the very hard lesson that I cannot control everyone and everything, even my own body.

I am grateful for the lessons God teaches me through my two living children. For the times when I would begin to argue with my husband, and my young son would interrupt, "Be nice" or “You two, stop fighting”. Instead of reprimanding him for thinking he's the boss in the family, I learned to listen to and heed his young words of simple wisdom.

I am grateful for the trials my husband and I endured when we tried in vain for over three years to have another child after finally having our son. I learned my most important lesson in those years: that I cannot control God.

Looking back on these moments in my twelve years of marriage so far, I’m most surprised by one continuing truth: that when I learned these lessons in submission, I found peace. I no longer needed to take on the onus for everything. I could let go of the burden of responsibility and let God take it instead. I could even surrender some of my own control and find peace in my husband taking on more.

Instead of feeling oppressed by these changes, I was amazed at what I felt: freedom.

Yes, in all the peaks and valleys of my marriage so far, God has been working to teach me a lesson I didn't set out to learn: that submission isn't about being weak but about having the humility and trust to surrender, and in so doing, finding the joy that awaits us there