Honor in Plain Sight

My wife is the most beautiful woman on the planet. That is not a nice thing I say on anniversaries. That is a settled conviction that shapes the way I move through every day of my life.

A husband's most foundational responsibility — beneath the finances, beneath the leadership, beneath everything visible and measurable — is this: his wife must feel secure. Not comfortable. Secure. She must know, not hope, not wonder, but know that she is first. That she is seen. That the covenant they made together is not a document filed away somewhere but a living reality he wakes up and chooses every morning.

Security in a marriage is not built in grand gestures. It's built in the thousand small decisions that nobody else notices. And nowhere is this more true than in the boundaries a husband sets around his relationship with other women.

I am never alone with another woman. That is not a rule I follow reluctantly. It is a boundary I established intentionally, communicated openly, and have maintained without exception for decades. It predates GPS. It predates smartphones. It has existed long enough that the people close to me simply know it to be part of who I am.

Billy Graham is often credited with this kind of boundary, and rightly so. Whether his practice directly influenced mine or simply confirmed what I already believed, I cannot say with complete certainty. What I can say is the why matters more than the origin. I don't observe this boundary because I distrust myself, or because I live in fear of what might happen. I observe it because my wife's security is worth more than any momentary convenience, and because a boundary that only applies when things are difficult isn't really a boundary at all.

Has it created awkward moments? Absolutely. I have declined to give a woman a ride home when circumstances changed and my wife couldn't be present. I have waited outside a building rather than step inside alone with a female colleague. There have been situations where I knew the other person didn't fully understand what was happening, and I had to be at peace with that.

But there is one moment that captures why this boundary is worth every awkward second.

We had committed to giving a woman in our community a ride to church. At the last moment, my wife was unable to join us. Rather than cancel or make an exception, I called my son and asked him to stay on the car speaker for the entire drive. He didn't know why at the time. The woman didn't know why. But I knew. And when we arrived, I immediately found her son and made him aware of the situation — not because anything inappropriate had occurred, but because transparency is part of the commitment.

My son figured it out. And without a single speech or lecture from me, he had a living picture of what a boundary in service of a covenant looks like.

That is the other thing about intentional boundaries that often goes unsaid: they teach. The people watching you — your children, your community, the ones who are quietly trying to figure out how to live — they are reading your choices like a map. When your boundaries are visible, consistent, and traceable back to a love you've clearly decided to protect, they become something others can learn from.

I also want to say clearly that I have never genuinely struggled with this particular temptation. That honesty is important. I'm not describing a hard-fought daily battle. I'm describing a decision I made to protect something precious long before the stakes were ever tested, and the freedom that decision has created. My wife doesn't wonder. I don't monitor myself in a state of anxiety. We live in the open, and the openness is its own kind of peace.

That peace is available to any disciple willing to make the decision before it's needed.