Once there was a very submissive wife, at least in her own mind. She wholeheartedly embraced whatever her husband asked of her, so long as she thought it was the right thing to do. She had very strong views on submission, and she pushed her husband regularly to make the right decisions, so that she could submit to them. But of course, when he made the wrong decisions, she regularly thought that God could not possibly be asking her to submit to that.
But lest we be too hard on her, she had learned this convenient trick from her husband. He too was submissive to his boss at work, so long as he agreed with him, and to the church, so long as the church flattered him, and did nothing with which he differed.
Not surprisingly, their five children developed the same traits. They were very dutiful, and they did just what they were told, so long as they agreed with what they were told. In all this, there was a great parade of traditional values submission, but it was not true Christian submission.
Now these people were not so silly as to be unaware of their lack of submission at all these numerous points. And since they had also been rightly taught that no human authority is absolute, and that with every authority—whether familial, civil, or ecclesiastical—a point comes when tyranny must be resisted, the only thing they could do to justify their behavior was to grossly distort the importance of their differences with all their respective authorities.
If the parents wanted the children to clean their bedrooms, this became a dictatorial decree that smoked to the heavens, and blackened the sun. If the husband wanted his wife to spend less time researching herbal remedies, this became a murderous attempt on her life. If the husband’s employer wanted him to become manager of a different shift, this became an unconscionable insult to decency.
Tragically, there have been many such families, and they all consistently share one thing in common—loneliness.