HER OWN PERSONAL WORTH

I made a personal phone call a few days ago that went kind of like this:
“Hello, T~ This is Sue Moore.”
“Oh, Hi, Sue! How are you?”
“I’m okay but we’re having some family issues right now. Is D~ around?”
…and the lovely lady with whom I seldom have contact, went to call her husband to the phone.
Because of her husband’s work, I wonder how many times this particular woman is looked right past as people move directly on to greet her husband effusively. She has to have a pretty positive self-image or her life/their life will be one of many unhappy moments.
When I was young and foolish, I thought I would enjoy being the wife of a minister. My husband was capable of bringing lessons from the pulpit but I was woefully unprepared for being a minister’s wife. Thankfully he chose a different occupation, but even so, I was unprepared for dealing with much of what attracted me to him in the first place. As a student, the youth who became my husband was a class clown. In the classroom, he drew laughter from faculty and students alike. While students were left shaking with laughter, teachers were left sitting at their desks shaking their heads in an effort to clear them of the wonder of what they had just witnessed as that particular student left the room he had commandeered during the recent few moments. How blessed I felt when Mr. US Navy returned on leave and chose me, Miss Mousy Goody Two-Shoes, out of that whole class of the 226 members to be his date and later his wife. If the online dating-mating had run our personality tests, I suspect they would have run us out as totally incompatible. After we married there were times I began to think so, too, until I made the decision to be all that I could be. No, I didn’t decide to join the Army! I had simply come to the conclusion that to stay in a quiet corner while he was getting all the attention meant I could continue that way, or I could learn from him and become a personality who also gathered people. And gather people I did…and I grew…and I liked it, and me! The blessing is he found the new me fascinating and not only likeable, but lovable, so the monster he created continued to grow under his tutelage.
I still was not ready to be a minister’s wife, however, nor do I think I ever will be. The wife of a minister of any kind (pulpit, youth, counseling) has to be a very special person, because as I stated at the beginning, folks often pass right by her as though she were invisible in an effort to get the attention of her husband. Think about it: have you ever done similarly to what I did a few days ago?
The personality of the man who used to garner the attention of whole high school classrooms hasn’t changed all that much. He still draws a crowd and I still stand by the sidelines at times. Sometimes people see me, sometimes they pass right by, and I understand. I suspect that is how it is with the wives of these ministers. I hope so, because I really did “see” you that day on the phone, T~.
© Marilyn Sue (Libby) Moore 3-17-2010