Created To Be His Help Meet, Part 1

A few weeks ago, a book study was started for some of the young married women in our church. We are going to be reading and discussing Created to be His Help Meet by Debi Pearl. I've heard many things about this book over the past year or so, and I was at the very least, curious to see what exactly was said. This book is a biblical view on a woman's role in marriage.

Chapter 1 was discussed several weeks ago. It is a basic intro chapter, but here are the couple of things I really got out of it:

1. "Help meet" is the translation of one Hebrew word, "ayzer", which is found 21 times in the Bible. It is only translated as "help meet" 2 times, and the other 19 times just translated as "help". It means "one who helps".

2. A wife's first calling is to be of service to her husband, then her children, and when time affords, her passion of service will spill over to serving others.

It is funny that this was in the first chapter, because Ryan and I talked about this either right before or right after I read this chapter. I have making a lot more commitments lately, whether to give myself some time away from my family (which is sometimes healthy) or to commit to volunteer work for a worthy organization. I was just doing this as opportunity arose, simply because I have not been able to partake in these kinds of activities the past few years when Ryan was in full-time ministry. I have been working up to the point of being gone several times per week, and with two nights per week also being devoted to church, that didn't leave much time for our whole family to be at home together.

Besides this, I was spending a lot of time away from home during the day, not realizing how little that would enable me to get done at home as my energy was spent on other activities. This obviously effects my family as well.

Ryan gave me a helpful phrase: "Every 'yes' is a no (to your family) and every 'no' is a yes (to your family)." I try to think of this when things come up so that I am able to better evaluate whether it is worthy of my limited time.