Being Faithful in the Little Things in Marriage
By Lynette Kittle
“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will be dishonest with much.” - Luke 16:10
My husband is a collector of items discarded by others. To his credit, he is remarkable at fixing, restoring, and repurposing stuff, in seeing their possibilities and potential.
But recently he brought a castaway coffee mug home from work with a cartoon chef painted on the side it. It’s definitely not a mug I would pick out and not one I want to keep around the house. My approach in dealing with it was to sit it unwashed by our kitchen sink, hoping my husband would just forget about it.
But wouldn’t you know, although we have dozens of mugs in our house, my husband seemed fixated on using this one, looking for it each morning in our cupboard. After a couple of weeks, he realized I was ignoring it and not ever planning on washing it and adding it into our mug rotation. After a brief discussion between us, I learned that he likes this mug and wants to keep it regardless of my dislike for it.
Although my plan was to quietly dispose of this mug, Ephesians 5:24 kept running through my mind, “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”
Everything. Hmmm. Guess that means ugly coffee mugs, too.
Plus, Colossians 3:18 kept reminding me, “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.”
So, what’s a wife to do in such a seemingly unimportant, trivial issue like this? Surely it doesn’t matter to God whether or not I keep or discard this ugly mug?
Yet, God does care about the condition of our hearts, of our willingness to yield to Him. Scripture instructs wives to respect their husbands (Ephesians 5:33). He calls us to be willing to surrender to His will, to respect our husbands even when it comes to what we might consider a tasteless choice in a coffee mug.
Our hesitation to do so reveals a deeper issue of the heart, on a reluctance to obey God in the everyday little issues in life. Issues that we don’t think matter to God, where we feel we can pick and choose, and decide for ourselves based on our own outlook, understanding, and will.
Unlike the world that says, “don’t sweat the small stuff in life,” Luke 16:10 explains that God does look at how we handle the small stuff. Being trustworthy in very little things is an indication to Him of whether we can be trusted with bigger stuff.
As life goes, the cartoon chef mug seems to be one of my husband’s favorite mugs to use. So although my fondness for it has not grown, every time I place it in the dishwasher or see it sitting on our kitchen counter, it serves as a reminder to obey God even in the little things that may seem insignificant in my marriage.
Lynette Kittle is married with four daughters. She enjoys writing about faith, marriage, parenting, relationships, and life. Her writing has been published by Focus on the Family, Decision, Today’s Christian Woman, iBelieve.com, kirkcameron.com, Ungrind.org, and more. She has an M.A. in Communication from Regent University and serves as an associate producer for Soul Check TV.
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Originally published Monday, 09 October 2023.
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