By Dennis and Barbara Rainey
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FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
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Praising the Positive
Guest: Barbara Rainey
From the series: Letters to My Daughters (Day 2 of 2)
Bob: Barbara Rainey has some advice for wives. She says, when you’re husband messes up—and, by the way, he will—when it happens, how you respond may determine whether he learns anything from his mistake or not.
Barbara: If you rail on him, and if you criticize him, and you tell him how stupid it was that he made that decision, he may not learn the lesson that God wanted for him; and he may have to repeat it again. The best thing that a wife can do is trust God, even when it’s hard, and ask God to use it for good in their life and that God would use it to grow him in that area where he just blew it royally.
Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Thursday, April 28th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. The words you say have profound power in your marriage relationship. We’ll examine that subject with Barbara Rainey today. Stay tuned.
1:00
And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. Have you ever stopped to just ponder who you would be: (A) if you had been single all your life or (B) if you’d married somebody other than Barbara?
Dennis: Yes; I guess I have because I tried to marry a young lady from SMU before Barbara and I started dating.
Bob: You proposed?
Dennis: She didn’t want to marry me. No, no. It wasn’t at that point.
Bob: It was clear enough that you didn’t—
Dennis: But there was a DTR—a “define the relationship.”
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: How she defined it and how I defined it—[Laughter]—“Thumbs down, baby!”
Bob: Okay.
Dennis: “Thumbs down!! You’re out of here!” [Laughter]
2:00
It was good because—it was okay because I wasn’t in search of a myth. I wanted a real relationship with a real person.
Back to the previous part of the question, though, Bob: “Have I ever thought about who I would be if I hadn’t married Barbara and was single?” I have. I don’t visit that picture very often because that’s a horror film. [Laughter]
Bob: Pretty ugly; huh? [Laughter]
Dennis: She’s laughing really hard because she knows what happened behind the curtain. [Laughter]
Bob: Are you saying, “Amen,” to that? Is that what—
Barbara: No, I just think that’s funny that he said it would be a horror film because I don’t think it would be that bad.
Dennis: Well, I don’t know what you would compare marriage to—that teaches you how to love, that instructs you in how to sacrifice for another person, to care for, to cherish, to nourish, and to call you away from yourself and force—
3:00
—I mean, if you’re going to do marriage God’s way, it is the greatest discipleship tool that has ever been created in the history of the universe. It demands that both a husband and a wife pick up their cross, follow Christ, deny themselves, and ask God, “Okay, God, what do You want me to do in this set of circumstances?”
Bob: And that’s true. It works both ways—for husbands and wives—but our focus this week is on the responsibility a wife has—the privilege she has / the assignment she has—from God to be the helper that He’s created her to be.
Barbara, we’re talking about some of the themes that are found in your book, Letters to My Daughters, which is just out. We’re getting a lot of great feedback from women who have gotten copies of this book and started reading it.
Some women recoil at the idea that they’re called to be helpers—it sounds demeaning to them. Your book affirms that it’s a noble thing that God is calling wives to.
4:00
Barbara: It is a very noble assignment that God has given us. It’s equally noble, I think, to the calling that God has put on a man’s life too. What makes it even better is that, together, marriage is a high and holy calling—it says that in Scripture. It also says that it’s a mystery. I think that’s the part that we wish God hadn’t said about it because it would be nice if it was a little bit more black and white / more obvious.
But God says it is a mystery. God is an artist / God is an author—God didn’t make robots. So figuring this out—this uniqueness / this relationship that Dennis and I have that’s unlike anybody else’s relationship on the planet—just as your marriage with Mary Ann is unlike anybody else’s on the planet—the ingenuity of God to create these little duos all over the planet that represent Him / that are a picture of Christ and the Church—all of that mystery is profound and baffling.
5:00
We wish sometimes that marriage was a whole lot easier, but it illustrates that marriage is a very high and noble calling. We think it is drudgery / we think it’s dispensable—and it’s not.
Dennis: Yes. In the book that Barbara has written, called Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife, you quote Mike Mason. Speaking of mysteries, he wrote a book called The Mystery of Marriage. This comes from that book—he says this: “Love convinces a couple that they are the greatest romance that has ever been, that no two people have ever loved as they do, and that they will sacrifice absolutely anything in order to be together.” Then I love the conclusion to the statement. It says, “Then marriage asks them to prove it.”
Well, that’s what’s at stake. You’ve got this noble relationship that wasn’t created by man—it was created by Almighty God.
6:00
His image is stamped all over a marriage that seeks to follow His blueprints for what He wants us to do. He’s trying to teach us how to love—how to love sacrificially / how to give up our lives on behalf of another. You’re never going to be able to do it if you try to have it your way.
Bob: I would love for you to expand on something that I just had to stop and ponder for a second. You said what a wife believes about her husband is the starting place for everything she says or doesn’t say about her husband.
Barbara:...
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
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Building up Your Man
Guest: Barbara Rainey
From the series: Letters to My Daughters (Day 1 of 2)
Bob: See if you can spot where the challenge is here: You’re a wife and a mom who wants things to go right. Marriage and family is messy, and your husband isn’t perfect. You see how that can be a problem? Here’s Barbara Rainey.
Barbara: One of the things that is true about us, as women—I had a conversation with my daughter just yesterday on the phone about this—is that it’s so easy for us because of our emotional makeup to get very overwhelmed by the circumstances of life. So a woman, who is married and is discouraged by her relationship with her husband—she can get so overwhelmed to the point where she just doesn’t see clearly.
Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Wednesday, April 27th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. What do you do, as a wife, when you get overwhelmed / discouraged by all that’s going on? How do you deal with that? We’re going to talk about it today with Barbara Rainey. Stay tuned.
1:00
And welcome to FamilyLife. Thanks for joining us on the Wednesday edition. We’re diving back into a rich field of ore today. I mean, there is some good stuff that we’re going to be digging into.
Dennis: We have some pretty fair guests on FamilyLife Today from time to time.
Bob: We do; yes.
Dennis: Max Lucado, Tony Evans, Crawford Loritts, Mary Kassian, Nancy Leigh DeMoss Wolgemuth—a lot of, really, pretty fair country guests.
Bob: Pretty good communicators with some pretty good biblical knowledge.
Dennis: Yes; this one is a cut above.
Bob: Somebody who is—
Dennis: —just a cut above.
Bob: —kind of your favorite?
Dennis: Definitely my favorite—my bride of 43 years.
2:00
Sweetheart, welcome back.
Barbara: I don’t know if I can live up to all of that.
Dennis: That’s pretty strong; wasn’t it?
Barbara: Very strong.
Dennis: Well, our listeners love you. We were with some friends here this past weekend and ran into a number of listeners. They came up and talked to Barbara about her books and Ever Thine Home®—all the resources she’s creating for wives, and moms, and women to be able to display their faith in their homes. It was kind of fun to watch them come out of the woodwork—out of a large gathering of people—come by and say, “Hi,” to Barbara and say, “I appreciate you.”
Bob: Well, and a lot of buzz around your new book, which has just been out now for a few months. It’s called Letters to My Daughters. This really didn’t start as a book; did it?
Barbara: It absolutely didn’t. When our oldest son was engaged to be married, his fiancée came to me and said, “You know, I would really love to hear some encouragement from you about being a wife.” And I thought, “Wow!”
Bob: She just opened the door; didn’t she?
3:00
Barbara: I know. And I thought: “Wow. She opened the door. Then I’m going to gently and cautiously walk through that door.” And so I wasn’t sure exactly how to go about doing it because we all lived in different places. It wasn’t possible to take her out for coffee and have a conversation. So I decided I would start writing some letters—just to share some of the lessons that I had learned over the years in being a wife / just by way of encouragement and, “Here are some things that I learned, and maybe this will help you.”
Bob: Did you write them one-on-one to her or did you copy everybody else when you started?
Barbara: I copied all three married girls. So our oldest, Ashley, who was already married, and then our son, Samuel, had married the same summer. So it went to three married girls.
Bob: Then you expanded it out as this snowballed and continued?
Barbara: We traded about—I sent—I’ll rephrase that—I sent about a dozen emails total. I don’t know how much of it was that they didn’t know me that well—so there wasn’t a lot of response—
4:00
—which I understood—I mean, you know—we’re talking about subjects about marriage and this is your mother-in-law. What do you say?
Bob: Yes.
Barbara: So I didn’t get much feedback—so they kind of dried up. Then, when our daughter Rebecca got married in 2005, I went and dug them all up and sent them to her kind of as a batch / a couple of them at a time. And that really was the end of it after that—the email version.
Dennis: I think what’s interesting about this is the whole idea came from a couple of sources. One was a book that was famous and very popular, back when Barbara and I were college students, by Charlie Shed. It’s called Letters to Karen. It wasn’t Letters to My Daughter, it was—although, was Karen his daughter?
Barbara: Karen was his daughter.
Bob: Because I also got Letters to Phillip, which was the follow-up, which he’d written letters to his son—both of them around marriage subjects, right?
Dennis: Exactly; exactly.
5:00
But there was another kind of—I don’t know—birthplace of this idea of sending letters that was a part of Barbara’s family.
Barbara: When I was growing up, I remember my mother used to anxiously look for this large legal-size envelope that would come in the mail probably every couple of months. She had married my dad and they had moved two or three states away from where she grew up. It was a place where she knew no one. Although she developed friends, there were no family members anywhere near. She, and her mother, and some other relatives in the family, and friends had this exchange of letters, that were all handwritten, that went by the postal service. It was called a round robin.
My mother would write her letter, put it in the envelope, and send it on its way, where the next person would read my mother’s letter and all of the other letters that were in it. She would take out her origina...
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
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Facing the Storms
Guest: Barbara Rainey
From the series: Letters to My Daughters (Day 1 of 1)
Bob: To be the woman and the wife that God created you to be, you have to know how to walk by faith on the good days and on the dark days. Here’s Barbara Rainey.
Barbara: Most people who have been through suffering—whether it’s shallow, small things or really deep, tragic things—can say, on the other side, “I didn’t enjoy it / I didn’t like it, but I knew God better as a result.” I’ve heard so many people say that. I would say it’s true about us too. We’ve learned more about God in the valleys than we have on the high places and hills in the sunshine.
Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, April 11th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. We’re going to spend time today exploring how a husband and wife can draw closer together and become one when they’re walking in the valley in the path of suffering. Stay with us.
1:00
And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. Anybody who has ever been to one of our Weekend to Remember® marriage getaways knows that, on Friday night, as we are getting underway, we spend some time talking about the common potholes that derail/destabilize marriage relationships. There are some things that are pretty standard / pretty common that can cause a marriage to wobble at high speeds.
Dennis: And we begin the conference with a message that is really about five threats to your oneness—five threats to your marriage / five threats to your marriage going the distance over your lifetime.
2:00
Bob: One of those threats is a failure to anticipate the unexpected trials that come into a marriage. It’s not a question of whether unexpected trials will come into a marriage; but “How do you respond when they do?” because all of us are going to hit them; aren’t we?
Dennis: Well, if you think about it—the vows are built / the traditional vows: “…in sickness and in health / in financial success and in also being poor.” I mean, the basis of what we promise, when we establish the marriage covenant, is that we’re going to take the storm head-on. We don’t know what it will be; but we’re pledging to one another to not quit, but to keep on loving, keep on believing, and make our marriage go the distance.
Bob: And we are taking some time this week to talk with your wife Barbara. Welcome back to FamilyLife Today.
Barbara: Thank you, Bob.
3:00
Bob: We’re going to talk about some of those valleys and dark places that the two of you have walked together in 40-plus years of marriage and how you’ve not quit in the midst of that.
Dennis: And what Barbara has done is—she has taken the past—almost ten—years to complete a book to wives called Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife that is designed to be what it is. It’s an older woman stepping into the life of a younger woman with sage advice / with seasoned advice—with the advice that comes after four decades of marriage. I love what you’ve done here because, honestly, there are a good number of books out there about being a wife—and there is a lot of fluff / it’s kind of “How to…”—but not really tied into the reality of what women are facing today.
The way this book is constructed—you end it with this subject that Bob’s talking about here—the subject of suffering.
4:00
I guess I’d have to ask you: “Is that because of what you and I have been through in 40/ almost 44 years of marriage?—because we have been through some dark valleys together.
Barbara: Well, that’s why it’s in there; because it has been an integral part of our marriage relationship. It’s in there because I think most brides / most young women get married with some of what I call “fairy tale theology.” They get married thinking that: “Everything is going to be great for us. We’re not going to have difficulties. Yes, there will be some uncomfortable moments, but we’re not going to really have hard stuff. We’re going to be great. We love each other, and everything’s going to be great.”
For those who are Christians—like you and I were when we got married—we also start our marriages out thinking: “You know, we believe in God. If we do it God’s way, it’s going to all be good. We’re not going to have any hard things.” That was how I started our marriage—thinking: “A plus B equals C.
5:00
“If I obey God and I do these things that are in the Bible, then God, therefore, will give us an easy, nice life.”
Bob: So, do you have a new equation now if it’s not “A plus B equals C”? What would you say to a young wife, who says, “If it’s not that, what is it?”
Barbara: There’s a lot of algebra! [Laughter]
Bob: Some calculus—[Laughter]—a little geometry—
Barbara: And I don’t know algebra very well; so I can’t even give you the formula! [Laughter]
Dennis: And we’re laughing, but it’s the hard stuff of life. This is a broken world. There is a heaven, and it’s not here / it’s not now.
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: God came, in the person of Jesus Christ, to give us an abundant life now and help us face these hardships; but it’s like the funeral you and I participated in earlier this year—a dear couple that we love greatly, who buried the body of their 15-year-old son. It’s unthinkable—
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: —the grief of losing a child!
6:00
No couple—standing at the altar, about to say their vows to each other—can even fathom the grief, the loss, the agony, the darkness of the valley. And yet, there are a lot of our listeners—who are in it right now, or who are about to go in it, or who have been in the valley and they’ve come out the other side—they’re nodding their heads.
Bob: And one of the things I’ve heard you say before, Barbara—is knowing that those valleys are ahead—you don’t know when they’re coming / you don’t know where they are—it could be months / it could be years before you head into one—but the time to prepare your marriage and the time to get ready to walk through the valley is not when you find yourself in...
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
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Embracing the Differences
Guest: Barbara Rainey
From the series: Letters to My Daughters (Day 1 of 3)
Bob: Engaged couples often look at one another and think, “We’re so much alike!” Then, after they have been married for a little while, they look at each other and think, “Who are you?!” Here’s Barbara Rainey.
Barbara: What happens when we’re engaged—we tend to think: “Oh, we’re so much alike. We love each other so much—we’ll never have clashes.” I think one of the first difficulties for most young couples is they’re caught off guard by these differences. They don’t know what to do with them—they go from being cute and attractive to being downright ugly or frustrating. All of a sudden, what was cute isn’t so cute anymore; and you think, “Now what do I do?”
Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, February 15th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I’m Bob Lepine. So what advice would you give to young wives and their husbands about the adjustments we make in marriage? We’re going to hear what Barbara Rainey has to say about that today. Stay with us.
1:00
And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. I am really enjoying learning lots of new things about you, Barbara.
Dennis: You’re eavesdropping.
Bob: Well, it’s legitimate eavesdropping because of what your wife’s been writing about. This has been so much fun to read. [Laughter]
Dennis: I think I want to welcome her to FamilyLife Today—Sweetheart.
Barbara: Maybe we don’t; huh? [Laughter]
Dennis: This is my bride, and she has plenty of stories to tell.
Bob: And she has just recently—by the way, welcome, Barbara—nice to have you here.
Barbara: Thank you, Bob.
Bob: You’ve been collecting these stories, not to share with the world your stories, but really to mentor—you’ve become an e-mentor; haven’t you?
Barbara: Yes. I’m really writing this for six women / six young women, who happen to be my four daughters and two daughters-in-law—to share with them the lessons that I’ve learned over all these years of marriage in hopes that it will encourage them, and give them hope, and help them—help them persevere for the long haul.
2:00
Dennis: But it actually started—back to Bob’s point about—from an e-mentoring standpoint—really started on the internet—
Barbara: It did. That’s right; I had forgotten.
Dennis: —as you were writing emails to your daughters and daughters-in-law so that you’d be able to coach them / encourage them in the process.
Bob: Did you start doing this right after Ashley got married?
Barbara: No; actually, it was after our two boys got married. They got married the same summer—the summer of 2001. One of those two girls asked me if I would give her some advice on being a wife. I thought: “Wow! She really wants my advice?” I thought, “If she cracked the door open a little bit, I’m going to just walk right on through while the door’s open!” I said, “Sure, I’d love to!”
I began writing a series of letters in the fall of 2001 to my two brand-new daughters-in-law and to my daughter, Ashley, who, by then, had been married four years.
Bob: A lot of—a wife will hear you say that and they’ll think, ““Boy, if somebody asked me, I wouldn’t know where to start or what to say.”
3:00
But it sounds like you were ready to dive right in with wisdom.
Barbara: Well, I don’t know that I would say it that way, but I was ready to dive in—in the sense that I felt like, “Now was the time,” because all new brides are extremely teachable—they’re eager, they want to learn, they want to do it right, they don’t want to make mistakes—they really love this guy they just married. They’re most teachable and most coachable in those early years. I wanted to begin by sort of exploiting that—in a sense, in a good way—by saying: “Here are some things that I learned / here are some lessons I learned along the way. Here are some stories of what we went through / what I’ve learned from it. Perhaps, it will be helpful.”
Dennis: Over the years, we’ve—who knows how many hundreds of Weekend to Remember® marriage getaways have been held by FamilyLife—we’ve looked into the eyes of those in attendance.
4:00
It does seem that the engaged couples and the newly-marrieds are, not only on a steep learning curve, but they’re much more teachable and kind of spongy in terms of soaking in the truth.
What we wanted to do—and what I encouraged Barbara to do with this book—is take advantage of a window into the soul to speak a lot of relevant truth that she’s learned, as a woman from the Scriptures and from other older women who have coached her, and really help these young wives get started on the right trajectory.
Bob: They didn’t ask you about a specific subject. They just said, “Help me be a wife.” How did you know, “Okay; I’ll start here”?
Barbara: Well, what I did is—I just thought back to those early days in our marriage and tried to remember: “What were the lessons that I learned? What did I do right? What did I do wrong?”
Bob: Like that early romantic date that Dennis took you on?
Barbara: Yes, like that one.
Bob: Tell our listeners about—[Laughter]
Barbara: You like this; don’t you? [Laughter]
5:00
Bob: —how ““Prince Charming” swept you off your feet. [Laughter]
Barbara: Yes. While we were dating in the summer of 1972, which was of course in the dark ages—one Saturday / it was probably on a Friday afternoon Dennis asked if I wanted to hang out on Saturday afternoon. I said, “Sure.” He picked me up in his—
Bob: Now, let me interrupt you just so we get a context.
Barbara: Okay.
Bob: You guys had been friends for years—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —sin...
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
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Leaning on God
Guest: Barbara Rainey
From the series: Letters to My Daughters (Day 2 of 3)
Bob: Barbara Rainey says there’s a lesson that every couple needs to learn really early in their marriage. The lesson is this: “You can’t do this on your own.”
Barbara: The bottom line is going to be the same for the rest of your life; and that is, when God brings you to a place that you realize you cannot do this thing called marriage, you can’t do this thing called mothering, you can’t even do the Christian life on your own—that you come to Him and you say: “I give up. I surrender—Your will, not mine.”
Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Tuesday, February 16th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. We’ll find out today just how important it is to have a spiritual foundation poured in your marriage if you’re going to try to build a home on top of it. Stay tuned.
And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. I’m curious—did you think, when you and Barbara, in the summer of 1972—I guess September of ’72 / late summer; right?
Dennis: Right; right.
Bob: That’s when the two of you stood and faced one another and said your vows.
Dennis: It was still summer in Houston.
Bob: Did you think, “This is going to be a breeze,” or did you think, “I know there will be some challenges”?
Dennis: I just didn’t think. [Laughter] Honestly! I was in love. I was committed. I was ready to get on with life with my new bride and my new love. Honestly, I didn’t do a lot of cost-counting; but I did make a commitment.
Bob: We heard your wife laugh as you said, “I wasn’t really thinking.” Barbara, welcome to FamilyLife Today.
Barbara: Thank you.
Dennis: Were you thinking, Barbara?
Barbara: Not much more than you were.
Bob: But were you confident?
Barbara: Yes, I really was.
Bob: Did you start marriage, thinking, “I can do this”?
Barbara: Yes; I really did because I had grown up in a good home. My parents were not divorced. I had seen them work out their marriage and—though there were things I wanted to do differently—I felt like I could do this. Added to that, I was doubly confident because I was a Christian and my husband was. We were not just pew-warmers / we were committed Christ followers. I thought: “This is guaranteed to work because we’ve got the right ingredients: We love each other. We love the Lord. We are going to do this the right way. We’re going to follow the instructions in the Bible—A+B=C. It’s going to work out great!”
Bob: The reason we’re exploring this is because you’ve been spending a lot of time, recently, working on editing a series of letters—actually, emails that grew into letters.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: Letters that you’ve written over the years to your daughters and your daughters-in-law, where you’ve just offered counsel from your own life and experience about getting married.
Barbara: Yes. I started writing this series of letters the summer that both of our sons got married. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to teach them—and I was invited to do so by the way—I didn’t do this without an invitation. It was that I wanted to encourage them by sharing some of the stories of things that I had learned so that they would know that: “Oh, it’s normal to have disagreements. Oh, it’s normal for this to happen or that to happen,” so that they would understand the long view of marriage and the big picture of marriage.
Dennis: One of the things that had occurred in our marriage that I think really pointed out the importance of perhaps Barbara doing this—early in our marriage, she had kind of run into the differences between us and how that was impacting her. Someone told us—and I don’t remember who—but said, “You really ought to go spend some time with an older woman who has experienced more of life and been around the barn a few more times than you have.” Just to spend some time and to know that what you’re going through is normal.
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: I think couples start out their marriage together and they get isolated. They don’t realize that what they’re going through is what everybody else is dealing with. But if they have someone who is seasoned / who’s authentic—and not going to create some kind of pie-in-the-sky approach that’s: “A+B=C, and you’re going to have all your problems solved by sundown tonight,”—if you’ve got somebody who’s real and helps you understand that it takes a lifetime to work out this thing called marriage. That’s what really fueled Barbara in writing our daughters and our daughters-in-law to be able to enter in to these first months and years of their marriage.
Bob: Barbara, one of the issues you felt like you needed to mentor your daughters and daughters-in-law in was this issue that we talked about—your confidence that you could be the wife and mom that God called you to be—that, at some point along the way, you kind of woke up and went, “This is harder than I thought it was going to be.”
Barbara: Yes. I think that realization was an on-going realization. What I’ve realized, as I look back over my life, is that, along the way—from those early months of our marriage all the way up until the present—God has been saying to me, over and over again, “You can’t do this on your own.” Now, my initial response is, “Oh, yes; I can.”
Bob: Yes.
Barbara: Because I’ve got—especially in the early years—a lot of motivation, a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm—to really do a good job being a wife. Most young women start out that way / most new brides start out that way. We’re highly motivated, highly teachable, energetic, ready to go and be the best we can be; but God knows that, if we really are able to produce on our own, then our confidence is in our self and not in Him.
In this section of the book, I tell lots of stories of how God took me places where I realized I could not do it on my own; and I could not garner up enough strength on my own to see the situation through.
Bob: The book you’re talking about, of course, is called, Letters to My Daughters. It’s your brand-new book. The su...
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
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Being His Helper
Guest: Barbara Rainey
From the series: Letters to My Daughters (Day 3 of 3)
Bob: The Bible calls women to be helpers to their husbands; but as Barbara Rainey points out—sometimes, when you’re trying to help, you’re not helping.
Barbara: I think, in most women’s hearts, we do start out—in the early years, especially—genuinely wanting to help. It switches somewhere, along the line—to becoming a control issue, to becoming a management issue, to becoming a critical issue—where I am being his mother and not his helper. I’m being his parent and not his partner.
I think that is the lesson—it’s that we, as women / we, as wives, need to be aware and to recognize when it does and to say: “Oh yeah! I need to be his friend. We’re peers, we’re equals, we’re teammates; and we can work this out together,” rather than it—letting it become this great obstacle.
Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Wednesday, February 17th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. How can a wife be a helper to her husband?
1:00
We’re going to explore that today with Barbara Rainey. Stay tuned.
And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. I had somebody share something with me a long time ago. I always thought this was interesting—they were talking about the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our life. They were saying that the word for the Holy Spirit in the Bible is the word, Paraclete.
Dennis: Right.
Bob: What they said was: “There’s a difference between a paraclete and a parasite. A parasite is something that attaches itself to you and just sucks the life out of you.”
Dennis: Right.
Bob: “A paraclete is something that attaches itself to you and pours life into you.” I mean, that’s always stuck with me. I’ve thought, “That’s not only true of our relationship with the Holy Spirit—He does attach Himself to us and pours life into us—but all of our relationships tend to be parasite or paraclete relationships”; don’t you think?
Dennis: They do. It’s interesting—
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—that in the Scripture, God refers to Himself as our Helper. I think the Holy Spirit is our Helper.
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: He comforts us / He gives us the power to live the Christian life.
Bob: Jesus said, “I will send another Helper,”—indicating that He had been the Helper. So Helper really—God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit—are all identified as “Helper.”
Dennis: That’s right; but if you go all the way back to the beginning of the Bible, the first use of the word, “helper,” is not referring to God but referring to the woman that God made for man.
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: I know, for Barbara, who joins us again on FamilyLife Today—Barbara, welcome back.
Barbara: Thank you.
Dennis: She’s written a book that is—was first written for our daughters, as they married, and our daughters-in-law as they married our sons. One of the first sections of the book talks about the role of being a helper. You believe that’s important; don’t you?
Barbara: I do. I think that we have come to think of helper in a more negative sense——more as a servant.
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Yet, when you go back to the very beginning—as you were just talking about a minute ago—and realize that God used that term to describe the woman / to describe Eve when He made her. He called her helper before the whole thing broke down and fell apart in the Garden. It wasn’t Plan B—it wasn’t: “Oh, well; now, that you’ve made mistakes, and I’m kicking you out of the Garden, and you’re going to have to start living in a different place—now, you have to be the helper,”—it was helper from the very beginning.
If we really focus on that, and think about that, it means that I was made, as a female, to be a helper—I was built for that, I was fashioned for that, I was designed for that. It’s not a second thought / it’s not Plan B—it’s not an afterthought. It’s intuitive in who I am, as a female, to be helper in the same way that God is helper to us.
Bob: You say, in the book—when you got married, you say, “I was eager to begin being my husband’s helper; but beyond cooking for him and doing our laundry, I honestly had no idea what the concept / the assignment really meant.”
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Barbara: Yes.
Bob: I think there are a lot of women who, when they hear the term, “helper,”—they think, “What is it if it’s not cooking, cleaning, and laundry?”
Barbara: Those things are a part of what each individual couple works out—who does the cooking / who does the laundry. All of that is a creative blend of the two that are in the marriage unit. And often—
Bob: Who does the cooking at your house? I’m just curious—
Barbara: Well, you know, right now, he does! [Laughter]
Dennis: But for the past 35 years, she did! [Laughter]
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: You’ve given—
Dennis: So I’ve got—I’ve got a long time—[Laughter]
Barbara: I delegated! [Laughter]
Dennis: —I’ve got a long time to catch up in this deal.
Barbara: Yes; yes. We have traded places on that one; but the point is—is that, oftentimes and through the centuries, most women have done those tasks in the marriage relationship. That isn’t really what helper is all about. Helper is far greater than that—it’s me completing my husband.
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It’s me—and who I am, and the way God made me, as a woman and as an individual—completing him, making him better than he is on his own or making him more complete / more fulfilled. It’s me helping him, though the years, become all God intended for ...
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
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Keys to a Healthy Marriage
Guest: Barbara Rainey
From the series: Letters to My Daughters (Day 1 of 2)
Bob: Barbara Rainey likens intimacy in marriage to a secret garden—a place that only a husband and wife go together. She says it’s a risky place.
Barbara: It is a place of raw exposure. It is a place of being real with one another. It is the place where we are most transparent in our marriage relationship, so we need the walls of a commitment. Both of us need the security and the comfort of knowing that we’ve got a perimeter around our marriage much like a rock wall around a secret garden. We need that commitment to be in place.
Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, February 6th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey. I'm Bob Lepine. We’ll talk today about how a husband and wife can work together to cultivate the secret garden of their marriage. Stay with us.
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And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. It’s been almost a year now since the release of your wife’s book, Letters to My Daughters. We’re finally getting around to Chapter 6—
Dennis: You’ve got—
Barbara: —which rhymes with—[Laughter]
Dennis: —you’ve got a cheesy grin on your face.
Bob: You—you know, Chapter—
Dennis: The listeners can’t see your face! [Laughter]
Bob: —six!—six. If you replace one letter in “six,” you get an idea of what we’re going to be talking about—
Dennis: Well—
Bob: —today.
Dennis: Barbara’s book, Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife, has flown off the shelf. It’s really doing well. I understand why, because I think this is Barbara’s best book ever. It is certainly a very honest look at our marriage.
I want to welcome her back to the broadcast. Thanks for coming back in, Sweetheart.
Barbara: I’m happy to be here.
Dennis: I know you are.
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: I know you are. Since we’re going to talk about s—s—s—
Bob: Sex. Just say it—sex.
Dennis: Chapter 6.
Barbara: It is not that hard for you to say! [Laughter]
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Bob: You’ve heard him say it before?
Barbara: I don’t think it’s that hard for him to say! [Laughter]
Dennis: I just want to pray for our audience; because as I was preparing to come in here, reading Barbara’s book, I thought: “You know? Oh my! How broken are we as human beings—how many different perspectives we come at this subject.” There are some listeners who’ve been hurt deeply by their past choices and some are in present relationships. I just want God to intervene and minister to—whether they’re single, married, divorced, single parents—I just want to ask God to meet every person where they are:
Father, You made us, male and female. There is no surprise in terms of how we function. You made us to merge together and become one.
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Yet, what You designed, man has degenerated and has twisted. You know that as well.
You know where each listener is, who is tuning in to our broadcast today. I just would ask You to be gentle with each of them. Use these broadcasts, I pray, to minister to them just where they are. Produce some hope, some help, and some encouragement to each person listening.
For the guys, who are listening in, Father, I pray that they might listen with some understanding. We tend to be too quick to judgment on this subject. I pray for all of us just to be wise in terms of what we hear and what we apply. In Christ’s name I pray. Amen.
Bob: Amen.
Barbara this is a subject that obviously is personal—it’s intimate—it really does get to the core of who we are as human beings. It can be threatening for a lot of people.
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I was very interested—as you invited your daughters and daughters-in-law to ask questions about marriage, the first question you got related to this—I’m just going to read it from the book——it says: “So yeah. Sex. You gave me “the talk,” and we had our pre-wedding conversation that was pretty short and hurried. No offense; it was busy. I get it. But now I’m married. And it’s um…different. Fine. FINE. But, well, I have to ask this…what’s the big deal?” I thought that was an interesting question from a daughter to say, “I’m in the midst of it, but I’m not sure I understand why it’s as big a deal as people say it is.”
Barbara: It’s a great question. You know, it was one that I just had to think about a lot. Actually, I had to think about all these questions a lot because, as Dennis prayed, this topic—this part of our marriage relationship—is not easy.
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It’s not simple. It’s not cut and dry / it’s not black and white. It’s very complicated; and even though it’s very good, it’s very complicated.
My short answer to “What is the big deal?” is that it takes a long, long time to understand what God has built into us, as men and women. It takes a while to understand the purpose of sex. It takes a while to undo things that we’ve brought into our marriage. It just takes time. I think, in our culture today, more than in any other generation, we expect instant results in every area of our lives.
We’re so used to having instant access to information. We just don’t know how to wait—we don’t know how to persevere. We don’t know how to have patience.
I think, in this area of marriage, our expectation for change to happen quickly and for results to be mastered fast, is a misplaced hope; because I think, in the long run, the goal of marriage is a marathon—
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—it’s a lifetime race. Figuring out why it’s a big deal takes a lot of time. It’s me getting to know my husband, as a man, and him getting to know me, as a woman. That isn’t going to take place quickly.
Dennis: If you go back to Genesis, as it describes two people becoming one—there was a progression that God declared. He ...
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
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Surviving the Seasons of Intimacy
Guest: Barbara Rainey
From the series: Letters to My Daughters (Day 2 of 2)
Bob: Why does it seem like moms are often not that interested in marital intimacy? Barbara Rainey understands.
Barbara: It’s hard to have a good, healthy, dynamic sexual relationship when you’re tired all of the time. You’re being pulled in a hundred directions by jobs, and kids, and financial stresses, and everything else; and, yet, I would still say that it’s important to keep it a priority because, if you don’t, you’re vulnerable to the enemy / you’re vulnerable to the temptation to find that excitement somewhere else.
Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Tuesday, February 7th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. Barbara Rainey joins us today to talk about how she worked to make intimacy a priority in her marriage when there were six kids still living at home. Stay with us.
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And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. With the season of romance and love in the air—and let me just remind some of the husbands who are listening—Valentine’s Day is coming up. You may want to put that on your calendar or on your reminder list so that you don’t arrive at that day and find yourself empty-handed. I’ve had that experience—it’s not a fun experience when that happens. [Laughter] Do you know what I’m talking about?
Dennis: No. [Laughter]
Bob: Yes; you do!
Dennis: Forty-four years; and I’m batting a thousand, Bob! [Laughter]
Bob: Are you?
Dennis: Ask her! She’s here with us!
Bob: We have an eye witness here. Barbara Rainey is joining us. Is that true? Has he never missed a Valentine’s Day? Has he always had a card, or a gift, or something?
Dennis: I’ve always shown up!
Bob: Showing up is something else! [Laughter]
Barbara: You have been present.
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Although, I don’t know that you’ve always been present on Valentine’s because of travel.
Dennis: Oh, yes! That’s probably true.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: Well, we thought it would be helpful today to discuss the area of sex, and intimacy, and romance, especially since this is something, Barbara—that you wrote about in your book that is now almost a year old—it’s called Letters to My Daughters. Chapter 6 was all about helping your daughters and other young wives understand what’s going on with this aspect of a marriage relationship.
Dennis: And, at this point, I want to read a P.S. that Barbara puts at the end of one of these letters. Now, the book has nine chapters. There’s only one chapter on sex, but it’s a long chapter; and there are like half a dozen letters that pose a question to Barbara that she answers in the book. I just want to read this:
P.S. There are additional unseen benefits to regular sexual relations in marriage.
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Three little facts I learned from one of our FamilyLife Today radio guests:
Number one:
The chemicals oxytocin and dopamine, when released in the brain, increase bonding; the reexpression of love and commitment strengthens mutual affection; and there is a sense of satisfaction in keeping intimacy alive, even if the actual experience isn’t a great one. The last is my favorite, because in our marriage…
Now, this is really interesting for me to read on air; because, Bob, you know, we have people come up to us and they say: “You guys! All you do is present a perfect picture of marriage!”
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: Well, I’m about to dispel that [Laughter] in what I’m about to read that my wife wrote in this book!
The last one is my favorite, because in our marriage, sex hasn’t always been accompanied by fireworks! Among a lot of good-to-great experiences, we’ve also had some pretty lousy encounters…
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Did you really write that in this book?!
Barbara: I did. [Laughter] And I can tell you still don’t like it very much.
Dennis: I don’t; I don’t. [Laughter] I complained about this when I edited it, but you didn’t take it out.
…some pretty lousy encounters…some that left us both either disappointed or hurt. That makes the chemical facts all the more important, because even not-great sex still bonds us together. Nice to know, huh?
[Laughter]
Dennis: Honestly, I really appreciate Barbara’s honesty about our marriage, because I think a lot of people out there are hurting. They think they’re the only ones that ever had a lousy encounter around the sexual relationship.
Bob: When you and Dennis, together, wrote the book, Rekindling the Romance, you talked about seasons of a marriage.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: You talked about early love, and then you talked about, kind of, this middle season—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —where it just can kind of get routine.
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A lot of husbands and wives, in the middle of raising kids and going through things—they hit that season and they think to one another, “This is it?” They’re frustrated and they’re disappointed. They wonder, if they switch partners, if things would get better for them.
Dennis: Or, let me tell you this—Barbara spoke to one group of women who talked about a no-sex marriage, where people just give up / toss in the towel and say, “We’re done.”
Bob: And we’ve talked to couples, who have said, “It’s been two years” / “…three years since we’ve been intimate with one another. We’re committed, and we still love each other; but we’ve just kind of given up on that area of our marriage.”
You would say to a wife, who says, “We’ve given up and we’re content, and it’s working out for us,”—what would you say?
Barbara: I would say that’s ...
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