Since having to Etta Catherine, it has been quite difficult for me to read a book. I am a book lover, and I have wanted to want to read a book, but my attention span or something has gravitated to magazines and blogs instead. Now, I feel like I may be out of my slump, thanks to rereading a book I thought I could really benefit from at this particular season of life. Feminine Appeal: Seven Virtues of a Godly Wife and Mother by Carolyn Mahaney is actually a book I read with the Ole Miss Crusade staff women back in 2004 when I was single. This book is based on Titus 2:3-5 which reads, “Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.” I have been soaking up the wisdom in this book!

The motives of these virtues is laid out for us in Titus 2:

• that the word of God may not be defiled v.5
• so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us. v.8
• so that in everything (we) may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior v. 10

I am inspired thinking about the behavior of godly women adorning the gospel! What a privilege for us as believers, to adorn the gospel, and to bring glory to Christ! 

Last Saturday I helped host a wedding shower for Carmen Rae, and some of us in attendance offered her some marriage advice. I paraphrased this quote from Elizabeth Elliott in Love Has a Price Tag, but I wanted to properly quote it here, as it is wisdom I love! 

• A wife, if she is very generous, may allow that her husband lives up to perhaps eighty percent of her expectations. There is always the other twenty percent that she would like to change, and she may chip away at it for the whole of their married life without reducing it by very much. She may, on the other hand, simply decide to enjoy the eighty percent, and both of them will be happy.

Isn’t that great advice? Yesterday we bought Tim Keller’s new book, Kings Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus. I’m hoping my book reading streak continues.