Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 04:2 (Fall 2022)
Article: Leading With Who You Are: The Misunderstood Calling Of The Submitted Wife
Author: Rosaria Butterfield

Eikon 4.2 (Fall 2022) p. 80

Leading With Who You Are: The Misunderstood Calling Of The Submitted Wife

Rosaria Butterfield

Rosaria Butterfield is a pastor’s wife, homeschool mom, and author of The Gospel Comes with a Housekey (Crossway, 2018) and Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age (Crossway, forthcoming 2023).

When I first started to read the Bible, twenty-five years ago, I had a deep fear of it and of God’s people.1 I knew the Bible could change me. I was a lesbian feminist activist professor and I was not interested in change.

The church I first attended was pastored by Ken Smith, a Reformed Presbyterian pastor who was in his mid 70s. I was in this church because I trusted him. Our friendship was two years in the making at the time I stepped foot in church.2

In a Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, there is no way to dodge the word of God. There was never a Lord’s Day where the pastor took some time off to let the interpretive dance group use their gifts. Not even in worship music can you find reprieve: the word of God was surround-sound, not only in the expositorily preached word but also in song, where Psalms are sung a cappella and exclusively. I learned later that something called the Regulative Principle of Worship maintained this faithful consistency.3

Eikon 4.2 (Fall 2022) p. 81

The first time I heard Psalm 113 was in church. I took great offense to it, and because God used my offense for my good, this Psalm became a turning point in my life. It was 1999, and I was sporting a butch haircut and extra piercings in my right ear — because back in the day, left was right (straight), and right was wrong (gay). I stood in a pew in the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church seeking a God who would accept me as I was. Floy Smith, the pastor’s wife, stood at my side. Floy, a woman who could bridge worlds, brushed me with her shoulder before we started to sing. “God is making you His beautiful trophy, my dear,” she whispered in my ear, the one with the extra piercings. My reflex was recoil. Pastor Ken Smith told us to open our Psalters to Psalm 113A. From his open Bible, he read the Psalm through once, so we could get a lay of the land.

Like many things that have caught me off guard, this Psalm started on what I perceived to be safe ground. A song of praise to a God who must stoop to examine his creation: he lowers himself to survey the stars, the moon, and the sun. He makes no bones about his authority over creation, and then he makes dead bones live. He...