She Gives Meat To Her Household

Somebody gave her a card at her wedding shower with a verse from that chapter on it, and she was twenty-two, and she has never got out from under it.

That is not the fault of the woman who gave it. It was a kind gift and it was beautifully made and she still has it in a box somewhere.

But there is a particular thing that happens to a young woman who is handed a chapter about a formidable person on the week she is about to become a wife, and what happened is that it became a specification.

She is fifty-three now. She has read that chapter perhaps two hundred times and she has never once finished it feeling anything other than measured.

She does not rise while it is yet night. She rises at six twenty because the alarm goes. Her candle goes out most nights, in the sense that she falls asleep in a chair with the television on more evenings than she would admit. Her children are lovely and have not, to her knowledge, ever risen up and called her blessed, and if they did she would assume they wanted something.

Thirty-one years of a chapter that has functioned in her life as a report card.

If you have got a card in a box like that, come and sit down. Nothing here is being measured.

What kind of writing it actually is

Here is the verse everybody quotes at women who cook, and then here is the thing about the chapter that changes what it is doing.

She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.Proverbs 31:15

That chapter is an acrostic poem. Twenty-two verses, each one starting with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet in order, from the first to the last.

That is not a decoration. An acrostic is a form used for praise and for memory. It is the form you use when you are singing the whole of something, from A to Z, deliberately covering everything. It is not the form anybody has ever used for a job description.

And notice who it is spoken by. The chapter opens by saying these are the words of a king's mother, teaching him. This is a woman telling her son what to look for and what to honor. It is not a woman telling her daughter what to become.

And then look at the last verse: let her own works praise her in the gates. The gates were the public square. The whole poem ends by asking that this woman be publicly praised, out loud, by other people, for ordinary domestic work.

It is not a standard. It is a national anthem for somebody's mother.

You are looking at praise rather than at a specification, and it was already that from the first letter. Proverbs 31:15 is where that sits, inside an acrostic of praise spoken by a mother to a son, and the same Spirit who moved somebody to write it in that form is the one who takes a report card out of a woman's hands at fifty-three.

What the verse is actually noticing

Now look at the content, because it is more ordinary than thirty-one years of measuring has let her see.

She riseth while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household. Read what is being praised: getting up in the dark and feeding people. That is it. That is the whole of the achievement in that line.

Every mother of small children in the history of the world has done that. It is the least distinguished activity available. And an ancient king's mother thought it was worth a letter of the alphabet.

That is what the poem is for. It goes through a whole life, letter by letter, and it stops on the things nobody would have written down: the wool, the market, the lamp, the hands, the food at an unreasonable hour. It is a sustained argument that this work is worth singing about, made to a young man who might otherwise never have noticed it.

Which means her fifty-three years, including the six twenty alarm and the chair with the television on, are the subject of that poem and not the failure of it.

You have been the thing that chapter is praising the whole time, and you were before anybody handed you a card. He promised it in the same chapter, where the ask is that a woman's own works speak for her out loud in public (Proverbs 31:31), and His Spirit does not read a hymn as a checklist.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it, and it matters especially in an article about a woman who feeds people.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And there is nothing on this site that admires a woman for going without so that everybody else can eat. That is the oldest and most damaging version of this subject and it is not welcome here. If a practice takes anything out of a woman who is already feeding a household, it is the wrong practice, and putting it down is the right move and not a failure.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever else cooks in your house is right and it is basic sense. None of it fails anything.

You are fully inside this, and you were never at the edge of it because of anything your body needs. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God has never once been given out according to what anybody manages in a morning.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.