A wise man once defined a classic as a book that no one wants to read, but everyone wants to have read. In the same way, submission is something that everyone wants to have done, but no one wants to do. As the old blues song puts it, “Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.”
Once there was a woman who desperately wanted to “have been” submissive to her husband, but she never wanted to actually submit. Whenever he came to make a decision, she wanted to explain to him just “one more time” why his idea was no good. When he gave up in frustration, she was frustrated with him, because she wanted him to be a strong spiritual leader—as long as he led in the direction where she wanted to go.
Not surprisingly, she was eager to wear the badges of submission—she read and recommended the right books, she talked about submission to her friends (as though it were a good thing), she dressed in manner sure to irritate feminists, and she made her husband go along with all sorts of things that he had no real desire to do. Soon she became a leader among a number of the women, and they became submissive in the same way she was—which is to say, not very.
Her husband was the opposite of what she was pretending he was. He was an abdicating wimp, and he knew it, and it bothered him greatly. Unbeknownst to her, he had been silently repenting for some time, and had finally sought counsel from a wise friend. The friend had told him that he needed to make a real decision, he needed to make it soon, it should be over a relatively unimportant matter, and it needed to be something that he knew that she would absolutely not want to do.
And so, after praying about it for two weeks, along with practicing his breathing exercises, that is exactly what he did. And I am afraid that her lack of submission could be heard three houses down.