Apparently, this was the wrong thing to say to my husband.
Which is a sentence I never expected to write.
Cory and I were talking about biblical submission–specifically the part everyone knows.
Wives, submit to your husbands.
Somewhere in the conversation, I said that I choose to submit to Cory.
He did not like that word.
His argument was basically: If you have to choose whether or not to submit to me, then I’m not doing my job as the spiritual leader of our family.
Mine was basically: But…you can’t make me submit to you. I still have to choose it.
We went back and forth for a while.
For context, I am a Type-A woman with opinions, plans, spreadsheets and, generally speaking, a preferred method for how everyone could accomplish something more efficiently.
I am also an eldest daughter.
Not just an eldest daughter, actually. I am the oldest of four children.
The other three are boys.
Cory, meanwhile, is the baby of his family and the younger brother of a sister.
If you know anything about birth-order stereotypes, you already understand that God has a sense of humor.
I came into this marriage having spent most of my life thinking:
It’s fine.I’ll handle it.
Cory came into this marriage having spent most of his life as somebody’s little brother.
I’ll let you imagine how naturally our respective roles fell into place.
Submission does not always come naturally to me.
Neither, unfortunately, does being wrong.
Eventually, after going back and forth about whether biblical submission was something I could choose…
I chose to stop arguing.
The irony is not lost on me.
For the record, I don’t think we ever actually settled the argument.
But I’ve thought about it a lot since.
And the older I get, the more I think we may have been arguing about the wrong thing entirely.
Because marriage may not even be the place where I struggle most with submission.
The Part We Skip Over
When Christians talk about biblical submission, marriage tends to take up a lot of oxygen.
Especially in Ephesians:
“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands…” — Ephesians 5:22
But one verse earlier, Paul says:
“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” — Ephesians 5:21
And Scripture doesn’t reserve submission for wives.
We are told to submit to God.
To governing authorities.
To spiritual authority.
To one another.
Peter tells younger believers to submit to their elders and then immediately tells all of them to clothe themselves with humility toward one another.
Jesus Himself gives us the ultimate picture of surrender when, facing the cross, He prays:
“Not my will, but yours be done.”
Suddenly submission isn’t just something Christian wives need to figure out.
It’s something Christians need to figure out.
Which is considerably less convenient.
Because I can say:
“Wives,submit to your husbands.“
without flinching.
But:
“Submit yourselves, then, to God.”
Well.
Now we’ve gotten personal.
Maybe we’ve spent so much time asking who is supposed to submit to whom that we’ve missed what submission is supposed to produce in us.
Humility.
Trust.
Sacrifice.
Deference.
Service.
A willingness not to get our own way.
And that last one is where things start getting uncomfortable.
Because I really like my way.
I have spreadsheets for it.
Why Choose Matters to Me
There’s a funny explanation for why I am so independent.
Eldest daughter.
Three younger brothers.
Type-A personality.
Case closed.
But there’s another explanation that isn’t as funny.
I learned independence long before it became a personality trait.
I learned very young that the person with authority wasn’t necessarily the person who would make you feel safe.
The person who was supposed to lead could lead badly.
Or sometimes not lead at all.
So I learned to take care of myself.
I learned to pay attention.
I learned to figure things out.
I learned not to blindly follow someone simply because they occupied a position that said I should.
What might look like resistance to authority from the outside wasn’t always rebellion.
Sometimes it was protection.
There was a time in my life when not surrendering control kept me safe.
And I don’t resent that version of myself for learning how to survive.
Those instincts served a purpose.
But survival skills have a funny way of following us long after the circumstances that created them are gone.
Which brings me, naturally, to the 1994 Disney movie Blank Check.
Stay with me.
“Then What Did That Woman Smell Like?”
Blank Check is basically a Kruger-family childhood rite of passage.
We’ve shown it to each of our kids somewhere around five or six years old. And because Cory is Cory, at some point he started trying to convince the boys that he was actually the kid in the movie.
Yes, really.
When he tried this on Cooper, though, he underestimated his opponent.
Coop immediately challenged him.
“Oh yeah?! Then what did that woman smell like?”
The “woman” was the bank teller/FBI agent the main character has a massive childhood crush on.
Of all the possible ways Cooper could have verified whether his father had actually been a child actor in the ’90s, apparently he decided smell was the detail that would crack the case.
Cory did not have an answer.
And Coop was not convinced.
It’s ridiculous.
But the more I think about that exchange, the more I realize Coop accidentally demonstrated something I’ve spent much of my life trying to put into words.
Trustdoes not require the abandonment of discernment.
Cooper trusts his dad.
He loves his dad.
He recognizes Cory’s authority as his father.
But when Dad made a claim that didn’t make sense, Cooper didn’t shut off his brain because an authority figure had spoken.
He asked a question.
A very, very weird question.
But a question nonetheless.
And somehow my child had stumbled right into the middle of a theological argument his parents had already been having.
Recognizing authority does not mean surrendering your ability to discern.
Because human authority has limits.
Nobody Gets a Blank Check
Scripture repeatedly calls believers to submit to human authority.
But Scripture also gives us examples of people refusing human authority when obedience to that authority would require disobedience to God.
When the apostles were ordered to stop teaching in Jesus’ name, Peter and the other apostles answered:
“We must obey God rather than human beings!” — Acts 5:29
So submission cannot simply mean:
Aperson in authority told me to do something; therefore God requires me to do it.
A husband doesn’t get a blank check because he’s a husband.
A parent doesn’t get one because they’re a parent.
A pastor doesn’t get one because they’re a pastor.
A government doesn’t get one because it’s a government.
Human authority remains human.
Fallible.
Limited.
Accountable to Someone higher.
Even in the passage most often used to discuss submission in marriage, husbands aren’t handed a blank check.
They’re handed a cross.
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” — Ephesians 5:25
That isn’t leadership modeled on getting your way.
It’s leadership modeled on laying yourself down.
Biblical leadership isn’t getting your way.
Biblical submission isn’t losing your voice.
But there’s another side of this that I find considerably less comfortable.
Because if I’m not careful, discernment can become a very spiritual-sounding word for:
I’llobey as long as I agree.
And that isn’t submission either.
The One Who Does Get the Blank Check
Human authority has limits because human beings can be wrong.
God isn’t.
And suddenly I’m back at James:
“Submit yourselves, then, to God.” — James 4:7
There goes my loophole.
I can’t use discernment as an excuse to determine whether God is worthy of my obedience.
I can’t call it wisdom every time His way interferes with mine.
I can’t pray “Your will be done” and quietly add:
provided You’ve checked the spreadsheet.
And maybe that’s why marriage was never the hardest part of this conversation for me.
Cory doesn’t get a blank check.
God does.
That sentence is easy to type.
Living it is something else entirely.
Because there was a time when holding tightly to control protected me.
There was a time when questioning authority was wise.
There was a time when I’ll handle it myself was more than stubbornness.
But the God I claim to trust is not another human authority I need to evaluate from a safe distance before deciding whether He has earned the right to lead me.
And maybe that’s where one of my greatest strengths can become one of my greatest spiritual struggles.
I know how to handle things.
I know how to make a plan.
I know how to anticipate what might go wrong.
I know how to take care of myself.
And God keeps asking me to trust Him anyway.
Not because thinking is wrong.
Not because questions are wrong.
Not because discernment is wrong.
But because eventually faith reaches a place where I have prayed, questioned, searched, planned and thought through every possible outcome…
and His answer still isn’t mine.
Then what?
A Will Worth Surrendering
Maybe this is why I still can’t let go of the word choose.
For years, I thought Cory and I disagreed about that word because I was protecting my independence.
Maybe part of me was.
But I think there’s something else there too.
Submissionisn’t the absence of a will. You cannot surrender a will you don’t possess.
Jesus didn’t pray in Gethsemane because He had no will of His own.
He prayed:
“Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” — Luke 22:42
There was a will to surrender.
That’s what made it surrender.
And suddenly choice doesn’t seem like the enemy of submission at all.
It may be what makes submission meaningful.
God isn’t asking me to become less intelligent.
Less discerning.
Less capable.
Less myself.
He’s asking me what I will do with all of those things when my will collides with His.
Will I trust Him?
Will I loosen my grip?
Will I follow when I cannot see where He’s taking me?
Will I still say Your will be done when His will isn’t the one I would have chosen?
That’s biblical submission.
And suddenly arguing about whether wives should submit to their husbands feels like the easier conversation.
Because I can talk all day about who should submit to whom.
It’s much harder to ask:
Whatam I still refusing to surrender?
I Choose
For the record, Cory and I still haven’t settled whether saying “I choose to submit to you” somehow undermines the entire concept.
Eventually, I chose to stop arguing about it.
Which means I either proved his point or mine.
We have wisely chosen not to investigate further.
But I think I finally understand why the word matters so much to me.
I know what it feels like to follow because you don’t believe you have another option.
That’s not surrender.
Surrender requires something to lay down.
A preference.
A plan.
Control.
Pride.
The need to understand.
The need to be right.
A will.
Maybe biblical submission was never primarily about figuring out who gets the final word.
Maybe it’s one of the ways God teaches us, over and over, that the final word was always His.
I still have questions.
I still have opinions.
I still have discernment.
I still have agency.
And, Lord help us all, I still have spreadsheets.
But I also have a choice.
And when it comes to the only One worthy of a blank check, maybe that’s exactly the point.
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