Are We Good Enough?
There are a lot of women teaching other women that they are “good enough” and if their husbands cheat on them, it’s not their fault. It’s purely the husband’s fault. If a man breaks up with them, it’s not their fault for they are the “pearl of great price” and “worthy of more.” Yes, I have read these things being written by women lately. Are these women good enough and the pearl of great price? Is there never any fault of their own?
No, most of us aren’t good enough and usually it takes two to destroy a relationship. (The pearl of great price isn’t us by the way, but is Jesus and the salvation He offers. Whatever lady believes she is the “pearl of great price” needs to understand the Bible better.) There isn’t one woman that I have mentored who had a cheating husband who didn’t confess to the sins she was committing against her husband before the affair. When something bad happens to us in any relationship, it’s best to examine our own behavior and actions instead of trying to make us feel that we did nothing wrong and it was all the other person’s fault.
Yes, a man who cheats on his wife is wrong, but so is a wife who lives in rebellion to her husband’s leadership, disrespects him, and treats him with indifference. She began the tearing down of her home long before her husband had the affair. I have yet to mentor a woman who was a godly, submissive wife and was kind, respectful, and did what she could to be the best help meet to her husband that she could be yet have a husband who had an affair. Can it happen? Of course it can but generally, there is something that pushes a husband away from his wife to want to cheat on her. But there are some men who are simply evil and perverse. I am not writing about them.
When I mentor women who have been cheated on, I don’t tell them that they are “good enough.” No, I encourage them to get to work by winning their wayward husband without a word and becoming the godly woman that the Lord has called them to be. Telling them that they are good enough isn’t going to help anything. None of us are “good enough” without Christ and even when we are in Christ, it is Him who is good enough, not us. We should all want to grow in the wisdom and the knowledge of the Lord every single day. We will all have work to do on ourselves to become more like Christ until the day we die.
We need to be continually examining ourselves to make sure that we are in the faith and producing good fruit.
Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?
2 Corinthians 13:5
10 thoughts on “Are We Good Enough?”
During the last months of my last pregnancy I knew something was very wrong. In labor I remember not wanting my husband in the room. I was embarrassed to be laboring in front of him. Things did not improve from there. They gradually got worse.
My husband was distant, critical of me, cold, stayed away from home a lot. And I hated him. One day I couldn’t take it anymore. I told him how much I hated him, how dirty and used he made me feel during intimacy. I told him how selfish he was. How I could never do anything right to please him and I was sick of trying. We didn’t speak for a day or two. He’s a quiet man who talks a lot about superficial things, but not things of the heart.
Then on Sunday we went to church and God stirred my heart. God convicted me to do something nice for my husband, confess to my husband all the sins I have committed against him and ask for his forgiveness. So I did. We cried and shared. He forgave me and things were better for a while. But I kept feeling a wall between us. I remember loving our new intimacy and then panicking that it would all disappear because I knew there was something else. I just didn’t know what that something else was.
What I didn’t know was during that time my husband was addicted to pornography. In the middle of the night he knelt by me while I was sleeping and cried out to God for help. He was hopeless and broken. Then God sent me on a search for my husband. I remember having a sense of needing to go and look at things on the computer and just knowing where I was supposed to go online and exactly what I was looking for. These were places I didn’t know existed, but God revealed to me what my husband was viewing. I remember my hands trembling and my body going cold. And then I tried really hard to come up with every possible excuse that would make my husband innocent. But there was none. So I prayed. I asked God to show me how to handle this. I approached my husband with love and asked him about porn use and he lied to me. So when he lied I did something nice for him. Then in the middle of the night I asked him again and he confessed to what he had been doing. I sobbed. So many emotions: shock, hurt, disgust, anger. I remember sobbing on the bathroom floor, then getting up, drying my eyes and looking at my husband and deciding to do something loving and nice for him. He wept. He did not want me to treat him so lovingly.
I can see how God set us on a path to the truth.
We are walking the path to restoration. My husband who never wanted to read the Bible reads it to me every night. My husband, who didn’t pray, prays with me every night. My husband who never wanted to share feelings, or pain is starting to open up to me. We are beginning to trust God and each other more.
I reached out to you Lori and you told me to pray hard for my husband as this is a spiritual battle, love him, and read 1 Peter over and over. And that is what I have done. Not perfectly. I have days where I let my emotions get the best of me. I am working on that. I have also found a support group of women who are walking a similar path and it has been comforting to know I am not alone.
So no I was not good enough for my husband. But God is.
And even now I have the ability to destroy all that God has done. I have the ability to hang onto a grudge, harbor bitterness in my heart. Rub my husband’s face in the mistakes he has made. And I believe some women do. I believe there are men who give their lives to God and allow the Holy Spirit to work in them and make them new and their wives won’t ever allow them to be more than a porn addict. I don’t want to be that wife.
Through my husband’s sexual sin God has opened up a huge opportunity for me to examine myself. To ask myself, who do I want to become? What kind of wife do I want to be? What kind of marriage do I want to have? What kind of wife does my husband need? I pray every day that I don’t squander the opportunity laid before me.
Sorry so long.
My story cont.
Here are sins I committed against my husband:
-Expecting him to come home and jump right into helping me.
-Anger
-Resentment
-Not considering his physical needs like I should have
-Not understanding how men tick, how their mind works, Huge problem for me. I assumed men thought like women. NOPE!
-thinking I was “more spiritual” than him
-thinking I was right all the time
-asking his advice and when he gave it not following through, doing my own thing
-secretly thinking men are dumb and inferior to women
-ungratefulness
-not taking the time to study him like I should have, taking him for granted
-putting the kids first all the time
-never giving him the opportunity to be in a bad mood or have a bad day
– I let bitterness and self rightousness take hold and I stopped praying for my husband.
-not giving him the time he needed to unwind, share about his day, etc.
Oh my goodness and I could go on and on and on!
I basically acted like a spoiled brat.
While I would have liked to come to see things sins of mine without sexual sin in the mix I don’t think it ever would have happened. I thought way to highly of myself to stop and take a hard look at what I was doing. So my husbands struggles have become a blessing to us. I now see what a treasure I have! I am married to a wonderful man and now I see it.
Sorry this has become so long.
Wonderful testimony! Thank you for sharing. Yes, we are only responsible for our own sin and then called to love our husband by bearing all things, believing all things, enduring all things, and hoping all things.
We are not called to hold grudges, be cruel, or try to get back; for vengeance is the Lord’s. As you stated, God’s perfect prescription for a wife in your situation is 1 Peter 3:1-6. Your husband was in deep bondage to his sin and there’s nothing more powerful on other’s lives than that of a transformed life.
Yes, we are to examine ourselves to make sure we’re in the faith. Are we producing fruit that shows we are believers?
I could list most of those sins that I committed against my husband, too, but thankfully, I was convicted and have turned from them thanks to the Lord’s Spirit working mightily within me.
I always saw the whole ‘you are good enough’ idea as reffering to ones physical appearance. ‘He left me for a younger, more attractive woman’. Didnt hink it was necessarily reffering to ones character etc. It may be. But i didnt see it that way.
The term “good enough” refers to character. If they meant looks, it would be “not pretty enough” or “not good-looking enough.” And the way I have read articles about it, it’s all about behavior and not looks.
Men will cheat with women who aren’t as beautiful as their wives many times so looks is rarely the reason a man cheats. It’s his sin alone, of course, but the wife can use this devastation to become the woman that God has called her to become or continue to work on it since this is what God tells her will win her disobedient husband in 1 Peter 3:1.
So very well said Lori!! 🙂
I’ve read many blogs and posts like this more and more the last few years. It seems like women are confusing “grace” with just plain sloppiness and laziness. Yes, taking care of a family is hard work and there are days that it really is impossible to get it all done, however, I am so tired of seeing pictures of messy houses, piles of laundry, dishes everywhere and cereal for dinner and the women saying they deserve grace and that this is good enough. I do not claim to be a perfect wife but I try dang hard to make sure my husband comes home to good food, cleanliness and joyfullness. Some days are harder than others but it’s soooo joyful. I am in a moms Facebook group that I am about to have to leave. A woman put up an article from 20+ years ago that stated ‘how to make your husband happy’ its listed 10 things like; have dinner ready, greet him with a smile and hug, have the house cleaned up, freshen your clothes and makeup. Women went crazy saying how ridiculous this was for a husband to expect this. Thankfully, there were a few women who said they gladly try to do this everyday. Of course they were attacked but I’m glad they had the courage to speak up!
Yes, I’ve noticed the same thing and I feel the same way about it. It took me a while to realize this, because sometimes you just don’t see clearly at first. But I finally realized that women and people in general excuse laziness with “grace”, and other such behaviors as well. They are also the ones to call it “legalistic” when you are trying hard to be obedient and diligent in the work the Lord has given us. It makes me weary but I know to weary not in well doing!
Thank you.