National Prayer Breakfast 1978

In 1978 Kay was asked to speak at one of the seminars at the National Prayer Breakfast.  An author in Kansas City was given a copy of her remarks and since he was writing a book on Equality and Submission in Marriage, he asked her if he could use her thoughts in the book.  Her remarks became the illustration of the ideas the book presented, and he used them as the closing part of the book, followed by his: AMEN! AND AMEN! 

Here is her article:

All my life I wanted to be married. From the time I was in kindergarten I was positive that my boyfriend of the moment, whether he knew it or not, was the one I would marry.  My idea of marriage was, of course, juvenile and romantic and unrealistic.  Not having a close relationship with my father, I was seeking for total security and male attention and felt sure that marriage would provide these.

When at age 21, I actually married, I was in reality as much in need of a father as a husband.  Having become a follower of Christ in my teens, I was determined to be a Christian wife, and in my mind that meant one word—support.  To support my husband in whatever he chose to do, to do whatever he asked of me as well as I could, to create a serene atmosphere in which he could develop as a man of God, to be hospitable to his friends, etc., and etc., but above all, NEVER to argue.  An admirable example of wifely submission, you might say.  And so it went—he went about the business of being God’s man, and I tried to cooperate with all his plans.

Then one day, came a disturbing incident.  He asked my opinion about something, and I gave my usual response, “Whatever you think, Honey.” And . . . he got mad! It seemed that he wanted, and had been wanting all this time, my honest participation in thinking something through with him, and I resisted doing that because I wanted him to bear all the responsibility.  My concept of submission and a peaceful home had been wrong, it had been a total cop-out for me.  My husband did want my support; but more than this, he wanted a partner who would share the responsibility for the decisions that needed to be made.

As you might imagine, this situation couldn’t change overnight.  In fact, I’m still struggling with the challenges of becoming a partner.  Both of us have learned a few things in this adventure called marriage and are conscious that there is much to learn.

The first thing to be recognized and dealt with was my well-hidden but very real spirit of competition with him.  It was my sense of inferiority that kept me from being a partner.  After all, he was so much better and stronger and more disciplined than I, what could I offer a partnership?  But God said “the two shall become one flesh,” and I have come to discover that this implies being thankful for my deficiencies because they can be filled by another’s sufficiency.  The marriage is an experience of the body of Christ in which each member needs the other.  Each of us have been supplied with something the other lacks, and I have begun to learn that rather than bemoan my deficiencies, I can rejoice that my partner is strong where I am weak, and he can discover in me strengths I didn’t know I had.  This realization can enable us to share our weaknesses, even our garbage, with each other because we are not in a goodness contest.

And we have begun to learn that we can call out each other’s gifts—that we can see qualities in each other because of our intimacy that others can’t readily see, and we can encourage the development of these.  The recognition of gifts plus the greater sense of being together frees us to sometimes step out of our roles.  It’s no longer inappropriate for Kent to prepare a school morning breakfast, nor is it inappropriate for me to recaulk the bathtub.

We have learned that married people can minister to each other better than anyone else.  We are uniquely qualified to see what each other needs.  The difficulty is allowing this mutual ministry to take place, because it means trusting each other to deal with our weaknesses gently and to not use them against each other.

And finally, we are enabled to minister together in a way that continually surprises us, because we complement and modify each other and each of us sees different aspects of a problem others might have.  Our pooled perspectives allow us to be more helpful to another couple or individuals than we could be alone.

As to the mechanics of how the partnership works, it’s best seen, I think, in our decision-making processes, whether this is planning our calendar for the next six months or deciding what to pray for our children.  The calendar has been a real point of tension for us.   A major part of shifting from supporter to partner is, for me, to become willing to struggle with the planning of our time.  I used to be in a dilemma about this.  I hated planning future involvements because it was so overwhelming I didn’t want to think about it, which left Kent in the position of having to do the planning alone.  Then, when the various commitments had to be honored, I would be resentful because they were his commitments, not ours.  Obviously, I couldn’t have it both ways, so now we periodically sit down with our calendar and submit to each other all our ideas and desires, and we don’t do anything unless we both feel right about it. 

The most obvious benefit in making decisions together is the freedom from guilt about our individual involvements.  Because we decided together that I would serve on a board of the church, I don’t need to feel guilty about the time spent in board meetings.  And because we decided together what trips Kent will take, he doesn’t need to feel guilty about being away from home.  In fact, we experience a real sense of each other’s spiritual presence in our individual involvements because of having spent the time it took to come to agreement on these things.

Our prayer life has been revolutionized too.  We are trying to operate on the principle of “agreement” as set forth in Matthew 18:19, where Jesus said, “If two of you shall agree about anything, . . . it will be done. . . by my Father.”  Agreement is hard work; it does not mean capitulation—and I am a very experienced capitulator.  Not capitulating sometimes means doing something I formerly abhorred and feared—arguing.  But there is a difference between destructive and constructive arguing.  Destructive arguing is full of despair and constructive is full of hope.  The hope comes from the knowledge that we will keep working on an issue until it is resolved.  Our procedure is to set aside certain periods of time during which we think and talk together about our desires for various people and situations until we feel we have a handle on what God wants to do about it, and that becomes our prayer.  It is sometime easy to do this and sometimes hard to come to agreement, but it has the result of bringing us together on the important issues of our lives and enables us to discover the mind of the Lord concerning the things we care about.

Sometimes I think there is no more demanding relationship on earth than the marriage relationship, but it is never boring.  A few years ago I felt momentary panic when I thought maybe we had experienced all there was—that we had plateaued.  But almost immediately there were more mountains in front of us. The process of two people finding out what it is to become one is never finished, but then no one wants to be finished with something that’s fun!

Kent: Kay wrote this nearly 50 years ago.  The truths she communicates are ones we have been living in our marriage ever since with increasing understanding of how to live a marriage of mutual submission and agreement and it just gets better each year.