More Thoughts On Being a Helper

I just finished the chapter on How to Raise Feminine Daughters by Susan Hunt in Biblical Womanhood of the Home, and as Hunt focused on the ways to raise daughters well, she highlighted the characteristics we mothers need to have in order to train our daughters to be godly, feminine women. (I don't have a daughter yet, but if the Lord chooses to bless me with one, I'm eager for the challenge.)

In Hunt's discussion, she touches on these points in relation to women as helpers:

"The helper design of the woman brought a completeness to the garden home [Eden] that received God's pronouncement, 'It is very good.'"

Hunt also mentions several references to 'helper' in scripture ...

• Exodus 18:4: God as Moses' Helper
  
• Psalms 10:14, 72:12 and 86:17: God is the Helper of the victim, the fatherless, the needy, and the afflicted
• Psalms 20:2, 28:7, 33:20: God is referred to as our Helper who is our support, strength, and shield.

Hence, these references to 'helper' do not depict the word as one of fragility, but one of defense, comfort, and compassion! (Here's a few more practical ways to understand what it means to be a helper.)

And finally, Hunt explains that in Psalms 146, the words help (ezer) and hope are linked together. And she says, from an excerpt from her book, By Design:

Help apart from hope is superficial and temporary....The woman who can give authentic help is the one who has come to a place of hopelessness in self that drives her to God's Word where she finds her 'help is the God of Jacob,' and her 'hope is in the Lord.' She is qualified to help others because she has an eternal relationship with the Lord and she is SATURATED (emphasis added) with His Word. She points them to the only viable Object of hope by directing them to the only veritable Source of hope. This is authentic help.

Can you imagine if we were to help our husbands in this way? Like I mentioned the other day about how we should help our husbands to Jesus like the men did with the paralytic in Mark 2:1-22 ... what if we did it with such humility and confidence in the Lord that everything in us 'points them to the only viable Object of hope'? How awesome would that be? (Hunt's example and explanation of helper encompasses our helping ability toward our husband, but also to others around us too, but for the purpose of our ongoing discussion of how we can be a helper to our husband, I'm going to keep the focus on our husbands.)

And ultimately, as Hunt explains further, the woman that she explains above is the REDEEMED helper. The woman who will "defend her family and the covenant family [fellow believers] on her knees ...." So, one additional quality of a helper, a redeemed helper, that we need to add to our ongoing list of helper characteristics is that of a prayer warrior!