We’ve talked here at S.U.M. a lot about being the spiritual leaders in our families since our unbelieving husbands can’t be. At least not yet, right?

Well, I’ve recently learned a lesson about myself in this area. I think early on I took this to mean that since my hubby wasn’t a believer, I couldn’t trust him to lead our family at all. That and the control freak that took early residence in me from a young age out of necessity deemed it important that I stay at the controls at all times.

Over the last several years, I’ve slowly relinquished control of many areas, because God has this way of showing me my way isn’t necessarily the better way. Our finances were the first ones to get handed over. Color me surprises when hubby managed the money better!

Then it was grocery shopping. Seriously, my husband does a better job and spends less. That’s okay. I can live without control there. I don’t like grocery stores much anymore anyway.

Lately things have been pretty tough with our daughter, as you know. Physically, she’s fine, but we’re still battling some emotional and anxiety issues. I was doing my best to listen to what the doctors were telling me my daughter needed and all of it seemed even more serious at times than her first diagnosis of a brain tumor.

How had the situation become so difficult to where I actually felt the first days of surgery and treatment were easier?

Let me stop right here and give you a little backstory, which my fiction writer side is screaming is a big no-no, but this is real life (yes, life is stranger than fiction). Besides, it’s my post.

At the beginning of this year during our fasting and praying week, God gave me a word for my family.

Rebuild.

I sensed when I heard it that God would be doing a lot of restructuring in my family this year, and that a critical part of my role was to submit since my personal word for the year was “submission.” What I didn’t expect is that I would be in a critical place that would require me submitting to my husband’s judgment and leadership with our daughter. I was SuperMom. The kids were always my territory…

From the outside, many would caution me to rethink this direction and several health care professionals did. But in the moment this decision was presented to me by my husband along with the onset of the panic I would refuse to show, I started praying.

This was a big move—to completely change direction from what the therapist and NP were recommending, but I remembered the word God had given me and listened. And in the briefest of moments, God’s voice broke through.

“Trust him.”

Rebuild. Submission.

I obeyed God. I’ll admit, I was scared. Lynn can tell you about the conversation we had that evening and how she reassured me I was doing the right thing. It was time, she said. And she was right.

Our daughter is doing better. I won’t go into the details of it all—that’s not the point of this post. What I want to share is what I’m learning…

I’m learning that even though my husband isn’t a believer, God has worked through him to help our daughter, to help our family, and I’m guessing, to help my husband at some point to recognize God.

I’m learning to truly allow my husband to take the lead of our family and to trust him. To trust God in yet another place in life I hadn’t let go of.

I’m learning another way I can show my husband respect and affirm his role in our family.

We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but I shudder to think what about the direction the situation would have gone had I not listened and not submitted. I may have thought at the time that I was doing the right thing, but it wouldn’t have been the right for our daughter.

This isn’t an easy step, let me reassure you. The health care professionals involved didn’t approve, but it was a decision between seeing and treating our daughter as healthy or still sick. And as a friend so aptly said, “They don’t know what our God can do.”

She is so right. Our God is so much bigger than we realize and even when we see Him work, it seems like we so easily forget it! I know I have. Yet here again is an opportunity that God is using in my life to teach me just how great He truly is. And can be.

So here’s my über-big realization…when God calls us to let our unbelieving spouse be the leader that means God’s working, that we can trust Him and our spouse, and that mighty things are and will happen. 

Because inevitably, God’s the one in control. And He’s no freak!

Praying and believing,
Dineen