Don’t take that tone with me!”
No, I’m not talking to my teenage daughter. My husband and I are attending a Sunday school class that is using the Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage curriculum.
Within the first five minutes of the first session, the room was alive with laughter. Husbands and wives chuckled both sheepishly and hysterically. Pastor Mark Gungor has a wonderful, light-hearted way of making you take yourself less seriously.
One of Pastor Gungor’s methods of humor involves impersonating the voices of husbands and wives at their not-so-wonderful moments. Gungor adopts a high-pitched, whiny voice, plants his hands on his hips and mimics a nagging wife. A few minutes later, he puffs out his belly, swaggers a bit and pretends to be a stereotypical, clueless man.
Gungor admits that most of his humor plays on stereotypes and is certainly representative of extreme behaviors. It’s not his intent to belittle anyone. However, as I laughed with the rest of the room, part of me wanted to crawl under the table.
How many times has my voice actually taken that whiny tone? How many times have I placed my hands on my hips and flaunted my superior intuition as woman? I never used that tone of voice when we were dating. No matter how much I hate to admit it, unconsciously, I have often played the roll of the stereotypical wife. It must be in my DNA.
Communicating my needs is a good thing. There’s nothing wrong with expressing a dissenting opinion. But who would have thought that the tone of my voice was so important?
Proverbs 25:24 says,
It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop than to share a house with a disagreeing, quarrelsome, and scolding woman.”
So before you have to scold your teenage daughter someday, practice on yourself, “Don’t take that tone!”
