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Speaking to your husband like an enemy

By Bishop Charles Ighele
16 April 2017   |   3:45 am
“You are going out now o. I told you that there is no garri in the house; there is no rice, no beans, no palm oil or vegetable oil in the house. No meat, no fish, nothing...

Ighele

“You are going out now o. I told you that there is no garri in the house; there is no rice, no beans, no palm oil or vegetable oil in the house. No meat, no fish, nothing, nothing! I told you to give me N10, 000 for me to see how I can manage it. This is outside the N1, 000 I need to buy medicine for two of our children, who are sick. All you have dropped is N2, 000, come back o come back o. If you do not come back and drop enough money, there will be no food for you, when you come back home. I say come back o.” The man hurries away and enters the next available “okada” (motorbike used for transport in Nigeria). This narrates what goes on in a typical average Nigerian family.

Sometime ago, my wife Carol had to intervene before a woman started providing food for her husband. She said the husband was not worthy to eat in the home because he did not provide enough to meet the family needs. She hated the sight of her children not being well fed, and she poured the anger on her husband.

The first example is typical of how some women speak to their husbands as enemies under the guise of the man not providing enough. What the man did by dropping N2, 000 and leaving the woman alone to sort things out is not good at all.

A man should be a leader financially, during good or tough times. The quality of a great leader or husband mostly comes out when things are tough. It is lazy of a man to run away from the problems on the home front. That man should have given hope to his wife and children, in addition to the N2, 000 he dropped, but this does not mean the wife should speak to her husband like an enemy.

2 Kings 4:8-37 tells us about one of the most careless husbands married to one of the most patient wives. Due to the woman’s kind-heartedness, they had the miracle of the birth of a son due to the ministry of Elisha. When the child was grown, he went to his father’s business premises, where he had a severe headache “and he said unto his father, my head, my head.” And the father told a young boy “carry him to his mother.” The next verse tells us that the child died that afternoon. And when the woman requested for a means of transport in which to take the child to Elisha, the man of God, the careless husband replied “why are you going to him today? It is not new moon or Sabbath. But she said, it shall be well.” The man behaved like an enemy in the way he handled the sickness and death of their only child. But the wife restrained herself from talking to her husband like an enemy. I guess she might have known that respect is one of the greatest needs of a man and that men do not like to be disrespected, whether they behave childishly or not. Instead of talking back at her husband like an enemy, she decided to focus all her energy on solving the problem i.e., the death of her only child, “she stooped to conquer.” No wonder 2 Kings 4:8 refers to her as “a great woman.”

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