EPHESIANS 5:25

Keith Miller is the author of the challenging book 'The Taste of New Wine'. But one of the battlegrounds which troubled Keith's marriage in the early days, it seems, was the conflict which erupted over role delineation. When they married, Mary Allen, his wife, assumed that he would empty the pedal bin in the kitchen each day. He, meanwhile, felt insulted by the suggestion. This was woman's work in his view. He refused to capitulate to his wife's demands.

After his conversion to Christ, Keith Miller tried to convince his wife that he had found something wonderful in God, that God was changing her husband's personality. In an attempt to convince her of the strength of this claim he looked for ways of demonstrating this truth by his behaviour.

He goes on to explain how the word of wisdom flashed into his awareness: 'While I was looking around for some ..... way to convince my wife that I had really changed, my glance fell on the waste basket standing full by the back door, "No, Lord," I groaned quietly to myself. "Not the waste basket. Take my income, anything."

After a struggle, he obeyed. He emptied the waste basket. 'Without saying a word I took it out, and didn't even mentioned it to her.'

Mary Allen, of course, took note of this change in attitude. She continued to refuse her husband's invitations to Christian meetings but she did begin to ask a friend penetrating questions about the Christian faith. These discussions resulted, in time, in her own conversion to Christianity. When she retraced the way God had wooed her to Himself she recognised that her husband's gesture that day he emptied the waste basket had been one of the prongs God had used to prod her in His direction.