"You’re left-eyed." He made the statement in passing, like
I knew what he was talking about, and would be glad to finally lay the age-old
mystery to bed. The fact was, I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.
But since it was about me—and my eyes—I thought a follow-up question
was in order.
It was my first eye exam since I was an elementary school kid. I’d been
getting headaches when I read a long time. I blamed it on the small print and
the way they were deliberately blurring it. Darcy thought otherwise and had lined
up the appointment. The doctor was old school. He didn’t use all the smoke
and mirror equipment they use today. He used the old method with a long narrow
room with eye charts at the other end. There was a piece of paper with a black
dot printed on it hanging on the wall next to the charts. The first thing he
had me do when I sat down in his examination chair was to overlap my hand making
a hole between my fingers, hold them away from me, and then look through the
hole at the black dot on the paper. When I did that, I closed my right eye. That’s
when he announced that I was left-eyed.
So I asked the obvious question. "Left-eyed? What does that mean?" I
wasn’t quite ready for the way his answer would hit me.
"It’s this way, Tim. You have a leader-eye, or dominant eye, and
a submissive eye. If you want to look up, the leader-eye looks up, and the submissive
eye just follows. You want to look to the right, the leader-eye looks to the
right, the submissive eye just looks over there with it. You know that eye problem
some school children get where letters turn around on the page or completely
disappear? In laymen’s terms, that’s both eyes fighting for who’s
going to be the leader."
After his little lesson in the inner workings of the eye, he proceeded to
put the equipment in front of me and have me call out letters on the chart. But
the whole time he was examining me, I was thinking about dominant and submissive
eyes, and how their give and take helps them see better. My mind tumbled through
the writings of the Apostle Paul and landed in the fifth chapter of Ephesians.
The three verses that kept running by me were:
22 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the
head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is
the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit
to their husbands in everything. (NIV)
These verses often surface in counseling. They are standard for weddings,
and they are also guaranteed to get a rise out of women. Read them as you officiate
a wedding and you’re sure to get ambushed at the reception. Usually, the
woman has to get loosened up with a couple glasses of champagne before she’ll
approach me. But when she does, it usually has something to do with me reading
that "stone-age passage that no thinking person actually believes in."
I’ve been in the crosshairs because of that passage more times than
I should have. And usually it’s some lady who’s either been abused
by some jerk of a husband who thinks that verse was put in the Bible as his personal
sledge hammer to use on his wife, or she’s seen her mother get the short
end of the stick because of it. It’s too bad, because it’s a great
verse. It’s great for women, and it’s an overwhelming responsibility
for men. If marriages functioned more like healthy eyes, I think most couples
would see life more clearly.
But too often, both spouses are fighting for the leadership position. In the
process, the issues blur out of focus, facts disappear, and everyone ends up
with a headache. God designed marriages to work harmoniously. It wasn’t
so much that He left the husband in charge as much as it was that He left the
husband responsible. He holds the husband accountable for the health and harmony
of the marriage. That’s why Paul goes on to say in verse 25:
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself
up for her. (NIV)
As tall an order as it is for a wife to submit to her husband’s leadership,
it’s an even taller order for the husband to love his wife the way Christ
loved the church. The last time I checked, I recall that Christ died for the
church. So a loving husband has to be prepared to give his life for his wife.
The good news is that very few men will literally have to die for their wives.
But the wife has to have the confidence that if it ever came down to that, he
wouldn’t hesitate to give his life for her. There’s a daily way men
can show their wives that they’d be willing to die for her—and that’s
by daily living for her.
Real servant leaders do that. They consider it a privilege. But that still
doesn’t take the edge off of some women when it comes to the biblical mandate
of submission. Maybe they need to take some advice from my wife, Darcy. She says,
submission is simply ducking, so God can hit your husband!
When the exam was over, the doctor handed me a prescription for glasses. But
he’d saved the best part of the illustration for last. It turned out that
my right eye didn’t need any correcting, it saw perfectly. It was my left
eye that was out of focus. I thought of Darcy at that point. She sees so much
of life more clearly than I do. She weighs in with the highest IQ, and usually
brings the most to bear on big decisions. But she submits to the position of
accountability I’ve been given by God, and in the process, life looks a
whole lot better. Once we all get our egos out of the way, it turns out the Heavenly
Father does know best.
On the Home Front with Darcy Kimmel
It has happened, and I must admit that I have handled it pretty well. I haven’t
been too hard to live with, and I have only shed a few tears. The week before
classes started at Arizona State University, we moved Karis into her dorm room – lock,
stock, barrel and kitchen sink. I have never seen so much stuff fit into a dorm
room, but then again her bathroom is larger than my entire dorm room was when
I went to college.
It still seems unreal that our firstborn is in college. We all miss her terribly;
her spot at the dinner table looks so lonely. Reality of her new address hit
hard when after stopping by the house to visit us after Sunday night church,
she announced that it was getting late and she needed to get home. I wanted to
remind her that, until she got married, our house would always be her home, but
I refrained so as not to diminish her excitement of having her own place and
making her way in the tangled world of college life.
We are so proud of her, and the courage and enthusiasm with which she has
approached this whole new adventure called college. Please pray for her with
us. Daily she is faced with opportunities to live out what she has been taught
for the past nineteen years. I thank my God in all my remembrance of you,
always offering prayer with joy in my every prayer for you, …For I am confident
of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until
the day of Christ Jesus. Phil. 1:3,4,6
Here’s to tender transitions and indispensable intercession.
