I loved the chapter titled "Two by Six" in Doug Wilson's book "How to Exasperate Your Wife". I want to share a couple of highlights from the chapter and add some additional comments.
When building a house, 2x6s are normally used to construct both interior and exterior walls and provide the essential structural stability of the building. Speaking specifically of the exterior walls, these framed walls define the boundaries of the house. These walls define the difference between inside and outside. These walls provide support for the trusses, which support the roof, and thereby maintain the difference between wet and dry.
These walls have two sides to them, the outside which is exposed to the elements and therefore fixed with sheathing, housewrap, and siding; and the inside, which is covered in sheetrock and painted. This perimeter wall which defines the house is filled with windows.
The two by sixes we addressed originally provide most if not all of their value completely out of sight. Husbands are like these two by sixes. Their value is often not seen from the outside and this is natural and good. They are to cultivate the beauty and glory of their family, not of themselves.
They have a responsibility to define the boundaries of the family - they establish the difference of inside and outside - their duty of protection and provision is fundamental. Because of the support the walls give to the roof, children in the home are warm and dry instead of cold and wet.
"A husband has two sides, just like the exterior wall. The side of the wall that faces his family is very much like the other walls of the house. The sheetrock is the same, the texturing is the same, the color of the paint is the same, pictures are hung, and so on. This means that the man of the house is to live with his family as family. The face he presents to them is conducive to the warmth of life together. But unlike the other walls, six inches away from the warmth of the living room is the hard snow or cold rain. And he has to deal with this at the same time. He presents a wall of protective siding to the world and one of warmth to his family."
Many men struggle with the correct ordering of these two very different sides. Some have the hard protective siding facing both ways - they are hard against the world, and hard against their families. I have worked with many men like this in the military, they have become so indoctrinated into their job, they forget that the reason they began to fight in the first place was for their family. They succeed at work, but they lose the reason why they began that work in the first place. They retire and are amiss as to why their families seem as strangers, having been neglected all the while.
Another type is the modern sensitive male who has sheetrock on both sides. This sheetrock doesn't weather well. These men fall apart during the first storm, and in life there are and will be many storms. His family is left to fend off the elements with little help from him - but at least he is a nice guy right?
The worst however is the man who completely inverses the correct order. He places siding on the inside towards his family and sheetrock against the elements. He is susceptible to every temptation the world will offer him and yet he is resistant to every need and desire of the wife and children to which he has been given responsibility. He protects his own interests FROM his family, and is in love with the world. One often wonders why he ever married in the first place?
Back to the point on the windows in these perimeter walls. Husbands and Fathers are required to teach. The windows in the walls enable those who live within, the pleasure of seeing the world. These windows must allow the family to see the world and what goes on in it, but they must retain the same protective function as the wall they are in. This is something that requires much wisdom - explaining the world to children without exposing them to it.
Some men under the guise of protecting their children will remove the windows altogether. This is the typical bad example of a homeschooling family doing it wrong. Things are hidden rather than exposed, topics are avoided rather than explained, sins and temptations and deceit are treated as if they don't exist rather than being illuminated by truth.
Other men let their kids deal with the world without protection and direction, and these are not windows but simply holes in the wall. This is what a family who sends their kids to public school with an outsourcing mentality might fall into. All teaching is outsourced to their teachers, to their peers, to the internet, to social media, and to the whims of modernity.
The 2x6 man does all of the above rightly and wisely. He provides structural stability to the family, he protects the family from the harsh outside, and provides warmth and love for them. He teaches, filtering the world through the lens of scripture. He is the wood that is meant to be nailed, meant to be fixed, meant to be cut. "And when a saw runs through this kind of wood, the smell - an aroma of sacrifice - is one of the sweetest smells on earth"
