Respected at the City Gate

My husband and I were both fortunate enough to be raised in households filled with love and strong marriages.  I am so grateful that I have a mother who is a wonderful example of an excellent wife whom I was able to watch, up close, for eighteen years. 

Now, I am far from excellent or wonderful, but I have made it a priority to try to glorify God in how I display love and respect for my husband even when I am not around.  One way I have found to be a blessing to him in this way is by making his lunches in the morning each day, including a note with something I appreciate about him, am praying for him about, or just simply reminding him that I think he is pretty darn swell.

This simple act of sending a lunch with him each day has caught notice of several teachers he works with in ways I could never have expected.  On a number of occasions, they have taken notice of something he has brought in for lunch and have been really surprised to find that his wife makes it for him each day.  Last week, one of them exclaimed, "Your wife still makes lunches for you?  How long have you been married? ... More than two years?  Oh."  The fact that I can show his co-workers that he has a wife who loves and supports him, in even menial ways, is such an encouragement to me that God can do so much with so little.

Proverbs 31:23 says, "Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land."  Until recently, I never understood this verse's place in the the Proverbs 31 poem. Verse after verse touts "she is... she is... she is..." and then all of a sudden there's this shout-out to her husband's reputation.  My response was always to gloss over that because, frankly, I didn't get it.  It hit me this morning though that it makes sense to read this as "she is a reason her husband is respected at the city gate..."  He is respected by others because they see that he is respected by his wife.  That is what I aspire to give my husband-- respect of others by how I display respect for him, even in the simple act of tossing some food and an ice pack in a bag each morning.