A Wife's Part: Part 2...What is the True Ideal?

I told you all after the Part 1 of the 'A Wife's Part series' that as soon as the Part 2 is out you would not be left out.

For those who missed part 1: http://somtospeaks.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/a-wifes-part-part-1.html

Part 2:

It is hard to find "the true ideal" of a wife around us.  She isn't on TV or in the movies.  Once, the ideals of a godly wife were passed from one generation to another.  Perhaps you are blessed with that reality.

But many are not.

Too many wives of our day have exchanged the privilege of building an eternal legacy for their own, temporary pursuits. Builders--that's what we are.  ("A wise woman builds her home...") And what happens when the builders throw away the Grand Architect's plans, lose sight of the masterful design that is too hard or seems to be taking too long, and walk away to pursue temporary, easier, and more immediate accomplishments?

(Alexis de Tocqueville (1830's) wrote of American women: "I have nowhere seen woman occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked...to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people [America] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.")

And by his logical deductions, when "the superiority of their women" falters, the prosperity and growing strength of America becomes poverty and atrophy.

In The Family, Miller writes, as he introduces "the true ideals of a wife":

"What is the true ideal of a wife?  It is not something lifted above the common experiences of life, not an ethereal angel feeding on ambrosia and moving in the realms of fancy.

In some European cities they sell to the tourist models of their cathedrals made of alabaster, whiter than snow.  But so delicate are these shrines that they must be kept under glass or they will be soiled...so frail that they must be sheltered from every rude touch, lest their lovely columns may be shattered..

So there are ideals of womanhood which are very lovely, full of graceful charms, pleasing, attractive, but which are too delicate and frail for this prosaic, storm-swept world of ours....One day of actual experience in the hard toils and sore struggles of life would shatter their frail loveliness to fragments.

The true wife needs to be no mere poet's dream, no artist's picture, no ethereal lady too little for use, but a woman healthful, strong, practical , industrious, with a hand for life's common duties, yet crowned with that beauty which a high and noble purpose gives to a soul."

"Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come."  Proverbs 31:25