Ep38 - audio - How to Laugh at the Days to Come When Your Life Is Falling Apart
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[00:00:00] Before we get started, I wanna share something really exciting. If you believe God has a better marriage for you than what you can see right now, you don't wanna miss out on being at the Wise Wife Conference, September 12th to 13th, 2026 in Atlanta. You'll work with me personally as we break through the barriers blocking your peace, wage war for your legacy, and discover what it truly means to be clothed with strength and dignity regardless of your current circumstances.
You can find out more at wisewife.co, and I am really looking forward to meeting you
Your dignity is not on the table. It cannot be taken from you by your husband's choices. It cannot be stripped off by a season of standing or hardship. It cannot be lowered by how anyone treats you, because it was never given to you by them in the first place.
That's the woman who can laugh at the days to come. Not because her circumstances are easy, not because she knows how it all turns out, but [00:01:00] because she is wearing a strength that is not her own and a , a dignity that has, that nothing in her life has the power to remove.
Welcome back to the Wise Wife Podcast. Last week, we asked a question that I think a lot of us are afraid to sit with. Are you ready for restoration? Because as I shared, God is never waiting on you per se. He's working and really just actually waiting for us to be ready for what He's got cooking. Okay, but here's what I found after walking with women through some of the hardest seasons of their lives.
Being ready for restoration isn't about having it all figured out. It's not even fully about finally feeling strong or finally having peace about the outcome. While all of those things are great, it's actually more about how you carry yourself through the waiting, the posture that you hold while God does His work behind the scenes and within you.
And that's exactly what I wanna talk about today. Because there's a verse that so many of us have glossed over [00:02:00] in the famous Proverbs 31 woman, and I have come to believe that it holds the key to wisdom for every situation a woman will face. It's a short one, just a few words, but those six words are the difference between a woman who's white-knuckling her way through the wait- And the anxious and the gripping and the dreading of tomorrow, and a woman who can actually laugh at the days to come.
That's right, Proverbs 31:25. Y'all know it's my favorite. So today we're slowing down. We're going to unpack what those words really mean all the way back to the original Hebrew, and I'm going to show you how they create a biblical framework that can bring peace to even the most tumultuous decisions or the most difficult seasons that you could be walking through right now.
So let's get into it. First of all, if you are watching on YouTube, please hit subscribe. If you're listening on your favorite podcast app, please follow the show. It means a lot to [00:03:00] me, and I love hearing from you guys, so please also reach out. I'm on Instagram @wisewifeco. In the nearly 20 years of helping women stand for better marriages, I have come to realize a powerful truth, that the words of Proverbs 31:25, which like I said, we tend to just gloss over , they actually hold a lot of wisdom to how to handle situations.
And I am getting asked all the time, "How do I handle this? How do I handle that? How do I handle this?" She is clothed with strength and dignity. She can laugh at the days to come. Proverbs 31:25. If you've been around me for any length of time, you've heard me come back to it again and again. But today I wanna slow down.
I wanna really unpack what those two words mean and how this creates a guiding framework that can bring you peace when you're faced with difficult decisions or difficult situations that you have to navigate. So this verse has a promise that when a woman operates in strength and dignity, she will be able to [00:04:00] laugh at the days to come.
No one is laughing when their life is so jacked up that tomorrow freaks them out, never mind all the days to come. So I'm sure all of us want to be able to laugh freely at the days to come, and I wanna explain how this verse is actually going to help you, guide you in your day-to-day decisions and what it promises.
Here's the thing about this verse. In English, strength and dignity can sound really soft, like almost decorative. It's like a kitschy comment embroidered on a throw pillow at Hobby Lobby. But when you go back to the Hebrew, these words are anything but soft. The phrase is Oz ve-Hadar lavasha, strength and dignity are her clothing.
And I want you to notice something before we even define these words. Both of these words, strength and dignity, these are the words that the Bible uses to describe God Himself. [00:05:00] Oz is the word for God's power. Hadar is used in the Psalms to say God is clothed with splendor and majesty. So when this woman gets dressed in strength and dignity, she's putting on garments pulled straight out of God's own wardrobe.
This isn't her producing something from inside herself, okay? That's the New Age promise that everything is here inside of you. It's a lie. That's her wearing something that belongs to Him. When we put on strength and dignity like this verse is saying, we're putting on what belongs to the Lord, and that matters with how we understand this verse.
So let's break this down. When we hear strength, we picture a woman who holds her ground, who doesn't budge, who white-knuckles her way through the storm and refuses to let go of anything. We think oftentimes that strength means grip. And I just wanna offer you a different picture here. You know, because while we think that [00:06:00] strength means holding on, I believe real strength is the power to let go of what you have every right to keep because you trust God has something better.
Okay, let that sink in for a second, because anyone can f- clench a fist. Anyone can cling. That is not strength. That's fear wearing a costume of strength. But real strength, the kind that the Proverbs 31 is talking about, is the woman who can open her hands without fear, who can lay down the very thing she has the right to keep.
Her version of how this should go, her timeline, her need to be proven right, her desire to defend herself. We can hold on to all those things, but when we release it because we believe God has something better on the other side, now we're operating in strength. Now, let me be clear. Real strength is not sitting there and letting someone annihilate you in their own anger and in mistreatment.
Real strength is [00:07:00] not found in being a doormat, okay? Any weak-willed woman can snap back in anger or do the ice queen treatment, and any weak-willed woman can make herself small and let someone take out their anger on her. Neither of those are strength. And as we're going to get l- get to this later in the episode, neither of those are anything close to having dignity But let's focus on the situations where your dignity isn't at stake, okay?
In other words, your husband is not lashing out at you in a way that requires a boundary of self-respect. Um, but strength is sometimes having the self-control to walk away without getting the last word. Strength is sometimes refusing to punish him in other ways for the way that he's acted, like taking it out on him.
And sometimes true strength is actually letting go. Because here is the really hard truth. Most of the time, the thing that we are gripping isn't even serving us. We hold tightly to something [00:08:00] that isn't sufficient. Either it's, it's an imagination, a story of how things are gonna go, a strategy, the need to be right, the desire for vengeance, a wall we've built to protect ourselves.
Whatever it is, we're gripping so firmly to it, not because it's working, but because we're afraid of what happens if we let it go. So fear masquerades as wisdom. It's telling us, "Don't release that. You'll lose everything." But often what we're protecting is the very thing keeping us stuck. So the strong woman lays it down, not because she's naive, not because she's weak, not because she trusts that- This is just going to keep the peace.
No, she trusts that God, who sees the whole picture better than the small thing she's guarding with both her hands, is there for her. Now, I want to be honest here. This kind of releasing doesn't happen by accident or some like, God's just gonna make it happen one day. You don't just wake up [00:09:00] one morning being able to lay it all down.
This requires discipline. To not be controlled by our fears, we must be surrendered to the Lord, truly trusting Him that He has our best in mind, and that takes discipline of our flesh. See, our soul, in other words, our mind, our will, our emotions, will always wanna take over and manufacture our outcomes. We can have, I know I can, full-blown arguments between our soul and our spirit.
Okay? Your flesh nature, the soul, wanting to control and keep that grip so tight while your spirit wants you to trust the Lord fully because your spirit knows that you can and wants you to lay down the fleshly desires and the fears. So you can have this argument happening between the two. So the release I'm talking about, the laying down of fear, the opening of the hand, that's- that's not a feeling, it's a discipline.
It's a training. The woman who can let go has practiced letting go. She has told her fear no over and over. She has disciplined her soul. This is when David says, "Quiet my soul within me." In those [00:10:00] small moments, she was able to keep disciplining her soul so that when the big moments sh- happen, she knows how to let things go.
And Hebrew backs this up. Okay? That word for strength, oz, shows up earlier in this very same chapter. In verse 17, it says, "She girds herself with strength." Same word, oz. And the construction there points to this ongoing action. She clothes herself in it again and again. It's not a one-time event. It's a garment that she puts on every single morning.
The same way Paul talks about training in 1 Corinthians 9, right? Disciplining yourself every single day because we drift- Into apathy. We do, we do not drift into strength. Okay? We train, just like our bodies, we train into strength. So this is the sanctification journey and why life with Jesus is never boring, because He's always training you at the level that you're ready for, like a good trainer.
He's not gonna train you in a way that hurts you, but you've gotta be ready for more, and I know you guys are ready for more. So if we leave it there, at strength [00:11:00] only, we're not really a well-rounded person, 'cause we don't want strength alone. The verse instructs us to operate in strength and dignity. So let's talk about that second garment, dignity.
And here's where I think we really lose things in translation with the Hebrew. I, I study Hebrew. It's amazing. When we hear dignity, we tend to think of composure, posture, a woman who holds her head up and keeps it together, especially in public. And that is part of it. In fact, if, if women could just manage to operate in that simplistic understanding of dignity, the world would be a much better place.
But I digress. So the Hebrew goes far beyond just that meaning of dignity. The Hebrew word is hadar, and hadar is a big, almost extravagant word. Like, it means splendor, glory, honor, majesty. It's the same word the Bible uses for the splendor of God. So when Proverbs says this woman is clothed in dignity, it's not saying she's just polite It's saying that she carries a weight of [00:12:00] honor that radiates off of her.
And here's the part I really want you to hear. Hadar is not external. It's not about status. It's not about how things look from the outside. Dignity in this verse is the radiance of a woman who is secure in her worth, not because of her circumstances, not because of her marriage, not because of what anyone has done or failed to do for her, but because of who she is on the inside, whose she is.
So do you understand what that means for the woman in a hard marriage? Your dignity is not on the table. It cannot be taken from you by your husband's choices. It cannot be stripped off by a season of standing or hardship. It cannot be lowered by how anyone treats you, because it was never given to you by them in the first place.
It was given to you by God, and it is yours to wear [00:13:00] regardless of what is happening around you or to you. Now, how we operate, how we respond, that is up to us, but it is not for anyone to take. And why this matters so much in the framework we're building is that strength is what lets you open your hands and release what you're gripping, and dignity is what keeps you standing tall while your hands are open.
Because the temptation here is when we let go of the thing that we're clinging to, which has given us a false sense of comfort and security, we now feel exposed. We're vulnerable, like we've lost our footing. And the enemy will rush in and whisper that letting go made you weak, made you a doormat, made you less than, m- made you miss out on what God had for you, whatever the lies are.
But the woman clothed in Hadar knows better. She can release the thing and still hold her worth. She can lay down her right to control the outcome and not lay down her dignity to do it. I just wish that we could get this. You don't have to and should [00:14:00] never lay down your dignity to stand for restoration.
Now, we're gonna get to this in a second about why it's important how we define dignity because Jesus certainly laid down His dignity in the world's view for us, okay? So what I'm saying, though, is that with a biblical definition of dignity, we should never have to lay that down in order to stand for a marriage.
So- The open hand and the lifted head at the same time. That's the picture. That is how you can let go of holding on for dear life and let bad things happen within your husband's life. Like, all these times I'm getting these messages. Should I... My husband wants to do this, my husband wants to do that.
Should I... What should I do? What should I... And it's like, what can you do? He has to do his own life. You are not his mother, his keeper, his [00:15:00] accountability, his conscience, his Holy Spirit. So how can you navigate this th- this decision he is making while maintaining your dignity? That's an open hand and a lifted head at the same time, okay?
So remember, just like strength, dignity is a garment. The Hebrew word here, levushah, means clothing, something you put on, which means dignity, too, is a choice. On the mornings you don't feel honorable, on the days you feel small and embarrassed by where your life is, or afraid with how the future's going or what it's gonna do to your kids, you can still put it on.
Because it's not a feeling that you're generating or faking till you make it. It's a robe God has already handed you. And when we begin to see ourselves in this light, where our strength is no longer dictated by controlling our outcomes, and our dignity is no longer dictated by how others treat us, we can more [00:16:00] easily navigate other people's sin.
So when your husband is binge drinking and stumbling into bed wanting to have intimacy with you like you're some kind of accoutrement to his drunken stupor, you can ask yourself, "Is this dignified?" No. No, it's not. Now, how we move forward from there in my next, how do I deliver this? Well, is it dignified to talk to someone who's drunk?
I, I, I know some of you have no idea what that's like. You've never dealt with that. That's not part of your marriage story. For so many women who reach out to me, this is a big part of their story, their husband using alcohol to cope, okay? Or other drugs. So no, I don't argue with demons, and drunk people are fully given themselves over to the enemy.
That is my belief and my understanding. That is my experience. When someone has given themselves over to drunkenness, they are a pawn of the devil. And [00:17:00] so I don't talk to someone who's drunk. I just don't. There, there's just... That is like you might as well be talking to the pit of hell directly. So in that moment, where it's not dignified for me to just, like, let my body be used as some kind of pressure release valve to someone who has no respect for me whatsoever in that moment, that's not dignified.
But then also how I communicate that, there's a way to do that in a dignified and strong manner. Okay? So we don't just stop at like, "Well, that's not dignified. I'm not gonna sleep with you." Don't... Please do not twist my words to weaponize them against your husband who's struggling with his own brokenness, just like you also struggle with your brokenness in different ways.
Let us not forget the, the parable of the unforgiving servant. We are no better. We are no better. Left to our own devices, we are no better than the prodigal in the pig pen. Let us not forget. But as I stand in dignity, there is a way for me to [00:18:00] keep, keep that question going. Is this the dignified way of turning him down?
Is this, okay, well, it's not probably gonna happen right now because there's no way to actually have a cohesive and sane conversation with someone who's drunk. But tomorrow I can have a loving conversation where I'm not upset, I'm not angry. And I'm telling you guys, *some of your husbands have never known you in strength and dignity.*
*They've only ever known you in two operating modes, right? Like, either, like I say, do it scared or you're gonna do it angry. They know you in compliance, where you just sort of keep your mouth shut, and they know you when you snap and you're angry. And if you only have those two operating modes, when you start to operate in strength and dignity, he will not know what has happened to you.*
He will not know what is going on. Okay? It will be very foreign to him. So, [00:19:00] all right, it's not dignified to be used, right? That's a spirit of usury when someone who's drunk comes in and says, "Well, you're my wife, and we need to be intimate." It's like, mm, actually We ain't going there, right? Um, so it's dignified in saying no.
It's dignified in the way you say no. It's dignified in saying, "I'm sorry, but I don't have conversations when you are drunk." That is a boundary that I have come to that is my boundary. Like, I am not willing to have conversations with you while you're drunk because they're hurtful, and it is not... It's just not a wise or healthy thing for me to do.
I'm not telling you how to live your life. You wanna go get drunk, you wanna just waste your life, you wanna go do stupid stuff, go do it. When it starts to come into my space, I have a say about what I think is okay and not okay for my personal life, for me. So no, I don't- no one can force me to talk, okay?
This is what I tell you guys all the time when you reach out with these questions. So dignity, right? It's dignified. Uh, being angry, snapping, [00:20:00] losing your mind, that is not dignified, okay? Ice queen treatment, not dignified. So another example. He, he's... Let's just ta- Let's just have an example that's not as extreme.
I mean, the drunkenness one is actually not that extreme. That's what's really so terrible about how many marriages are in so much turmoil, that that example is, like, tame. So if you're like, "Well, that's a tame example," don't worry, you're not alone. Don't let the devil convince you that you're n- that you're alone.
But I am s- making it as G-rated as possible, okay? So no, um, let's go with maybe a, a more, like, extra G-rated example, just so that we're not in the extremes. Um, and the, the... Let's just, just tame it for a second. Let's just talk about maybe you're in restoration or maybe you, you're not... You know, you have a, an intact marriage, and your husband has a plan for how to get you to the place you're going, but you think you know a faster route, and you wanna correct him because your way is better.
Ask yourself, "Am [00:21:00] I clothed in strength and dignity when I feel the uncontrollable urge to correct my husband on something so meaningless?" Preaching to myself, I have just been as guilty of this as well. You know, it's not. It's not dignified. Or when everyone around you is telling you how to treat your estranged husband, and they've got all this advice in the world for how you should stand your ground, and you're struggling to know which advice is good and which advice is bad, and just ask yourself, "Is what this person is suggesting, is it showing up in strength and dignity?"
And I hope by now that you've seen that we're not talking about the world's view of strength and dignity. God help us if we are falling into that trap. Because the world thinks dignity is throwing a divorce party, hurling darts at your ex-husband's face while all your man-hating lady friends cackle in bitter vengeance.
Hardly dignified. Hardly dignified if you ask me or the Bible. [00:22:00] But this is why Proverbs 31:25 is such a great framework, because no matter what question I get asked, and like I said, I get them all, I always seem to come back to this lens. Is my response clothed in strength and dignity? Because if we want to truly laugh at the days to come, we have to let go of being in control of those days.
Because left to our own devices, we tend to hold on too tightly and suffocate the very things that God has for us. So regardless of your current circumstances, we all have the ability to suffocate our destiny. We do, because we just won't let go. But to be clothed with strength and dignity, oz and hedar, means we are donning garments, putting them on, that are cut from the wardrobe of God Himself.
Strength in the power to open my hands and release what isn't serving me, trusting God has better, and [00:23:00] dignity being the unshakable worth that keeps me standing tall while I do it. And both of them are worn. They are put on by discipline. Clothes just don't magically show up on your body. You have to put them on.
They are chosen every morning, and whether you feel like it or not. That's the woman who can laugh at the days to come. Not because her circumstances are easy, not because she knows how it all turns out, but because she is wearing a strength that is not her own and a , a dignity that has, that nothing in her life has the power to remove.
Right? When your hands are open and your head is high, when you've laid down what you were afraid to lose, and you still know exactly who you are, tomorrow loses its grip on you. And this is how you expose idolatry. Because if I can't lay this down, if I can't truly trust the Lord with the outcome of this, then I am worshiping this thing.
I am worshiping restoration. I'm worshiping [00:24:00] my husband. I'm worshiping marriage if I can't lay it down. But when we know whose we are and believe because our identity is so rooted in what God says of us, 'cause we've done the work, we've done the inner healing, we've done the, the healing from our, the soul wounds and the trauma and, and we're no longer looking to our husband or our marriage to fill the things that they were never meant to fill.
When we do that, tomorrow loses its grip. It's no longer about fear of the future. We don't have to be afraid of the days to come because we're not facing them in our own strength, and, and we're no longer facing them while being defined by other people's views of who we are. Now, we're facing the days to come with God's strength and with the dignity that comes from God's declaration of my worth.
That is the key. Until that day comes, [00:25:00] you must keep disciplining yourself to seek God first. And all of a sudden, sooner than you might even think, you're going to catch yourself doing the thing you , once thought was impossible. You're going to laugh at the days to come. Thank you for being here for this episode.
If it stirred something in you, come to the Wise Wife Conference. That's where we go deeper on exactly this kind of teaching and, and the inner healing I'm talking about, the soul wounds. It, women walk away from this with healing, okay? And, and a real change into their marriages, their homes, and their personal lives.
So join me in Atlanta the weekend of September 12th to 13th, 2026. Find all the details for that at wisewife.co. And thank you again. Until next time, stand firm, Wise Wife.
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