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Submission

 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones.  (Proverbs 3:5)

 

 Then Memukan replied in the presence of the king and the nobles, “Queen Vashti has done wrong, not only against the king but also against all the nobles and the peoples of all the provinces of King Xerxes.  For the queen’s conduct will become known to all the women, and so they will despise their husbands and say, ‘King Xerxes commanded Queen Vashti to be brought before him, but she would not come.’ This very day the Persian and Median women of the nobility who have heard about the queen’s conduct will respond to all the king’s nobles in the same way. There will be no end of disrespect and discord. (Esther 1:16-18)

 

Once upon a time, a king threw a party that lasted six months. At the end of the party, he threw a party that lasted seven days. On the seventh day of that party, he called his number one woman out to show her off as he had his kingdom. She said “No.”  When the king (as was his custom) asked his friends and advisors what to do, they gave him the advice in the second passage of the day. If she would not submit to his authority, he had to destroy her before her behavior contaminated all the other women in the kingdom.

And we all boo and hiss because he was a wicked man, listening to foolish advice. But the same sort of advice has come down through the ages. Women should submit. Children should submit. Blacks should submit. And if they don’t, society will die of the poison of their arrogance. I’m not condoning what the king, his advisors, or others throughout the ages said. I’m just acknowledging that they said it. That was then.

Today, we’re being told that masculinity, whiteness, heteronormality, religion, law enforcement, conservatism, etc. are the toxic things that must be forced into submission. For if a man, or a white, or a straight, or a religious person, or a cop, or a conservative (or whatever)’s conduct became known to all men, whites, straights, religious people, cops, conservatives, or whatever, they will despise …and will respond in the same way. There will be no end to disrespect and discord.

The word “submit” gets a bad rap, but it’s always incredibly popular. Oh yes, we must have submission. We love submission, as long as we are not the ones required to submit. Submission is great if those other folks, the ones we think are too full of themselves, who don’t live the way we think they should submit. Of course, they should submit. We’re not toxic. They are. But one of the things that the book White Fragility points out is that the very people who pride themselves on how much good they’re doing people of color are racists. Yes, submission is great, as long as the other person is doing it, or as long as we get to feel superior by doing it. “Look how good I am.”

God doesn’t tell us to submit because otherwise, society is going to fall apart. He calls on us to submit because when we do so, He will make our paths straight. When we don’t submit, we tend to wander in whatever direction we think is best at the time. And, when we discover that we’ve gone the wrong direction, we have to double back and find a road that’s going the way we want to go next.

On the other hand, when we submit, our way is directed. It’s as if we have a spiritual GPS. No matter how we get off course, God guides us toward Himself. It might seem to be winding all over the place, but it’s like the switchbacks going up the side of the mountain that lead to the glorious view at the top. 

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