Being His Helper

7 Jan 2020 · Letters To My Daughters

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—

2:00

—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.

3:00

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.”

4:00

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.

5:00

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 him to be. It’s far more of a person-building / it’s far more of a relationship-building concept than it is just tasks around the house, which is what we’ve relegated it to.

Bob: The phrase I used—the paraclete—to attach yourself to him and pour life into him.

Barbara: Yes.

Bob: There really is something that a wife can—she can pour life into her husband; can’t she?

Barbara: Oh, absolutely. That’s why I have written about it in this section—about the example that the Holy Spirit is to us because the Holy Spirit does give us life. I think, in ways that we, as women, don’t realize—we give life to our husbands. I think the analogies between the two are great.

Bob: You’re not saying your role is to be the Holy Spirit to your husband.

6:00

Barbara: No. [Laughter] I am not to be the Holy Spirit, and convict him of sin, any more than he is to be Jesus Christ for me. But we model—

Bob: But you can learn; yes.

Barbara: Yes.

Bob: Yes.

Barbara: —he models and imitates what Christ did in His sacrifice—and I can model my helping and being a helper after what the Holy Spirit does for us.

Dennis: Before we talk about what it means to truly be the helper, one of the things you believe strongly that it’s not—is it’s not being your husband’s mother.

Barbara: Yes.

Dennis: Explain what you mean by that.

Barbara: I think what happens is—when we women have children and we become, not just wife, but wife and mother—there are a lot of things that we do, as mother, that are helping tasks. We’re constantly helping our children get dressed, we’re helping learn to tie their shoes, we help them learn to read, we help them with their homework, we help them get dressed, we help them in relationship issues when they’ve got friends and they’ve got problems in elementary school, junior high, and high school.

7:00

We are very much a helper with our children, but it’s an authoritative kind of helper. I’m the one in charge, and my child is to follow me. What happens so often in marriage is—that we wives forget sometimes to switch from being helper as mother to being helper as wife—and they’re very different. I’m not an authority with my husband / I’m not his teacher. For me to help him as if I am his teacher and he is to be my pupil—that’s backwards / that’s wrong. That’s not the kind of relationship that I’m supposed to have with him as a helper.

Bob: And you’re supposed to be able to switch gears on the fly on that kind of a deal?

Barbara: Yes, I think so; but that’s where it gets tricky. [Laughter]

Bob: So what does it look like if it’s not the kind of helper you would be with a kindergartener or a seventh grader? How is it different?

Barbara: It’s different because I have a peer-relationship with my husband—we are equals. I am not a peer with my child—I’m an authority with my child. That’s the fundamental difference.

8:00

For instance, Dennis and I had a conversation not too long ago. I don’t know if you’ll remember this—but we recently remodeled our living room. We got our couch recovered—because the kids are gone, we got it recovered in a very light color fabric, which I would have never done when we were raising kids. Now, that it’s just the two of us—we can handle this.

Not long after we had finished the remodeling, we had gotten the couch back from being reupholstered. We were eating, and Dennis wanted to eat in the living room. He plopped down on the couch—

Bob: I know where this is going. [Laughter]

Barbara: —with his plate.

Bob: Yes! [Laughter]

Dennis: Never happened at your place; has it Bob?

Bob: It wasn’t spaghetti; was it? I hope it wasn’t spaghetti.

Barbara: No, it wasn’t spaghetti—I don’t know what it was. As we sat there, I’m thinking: “This isn’t going to work. This isn’t what I had in mind. I don’t think this is a really good place to be eating our dinner.” We began—we had a conversation; and I said, “What would you think about always eating over there at the table?” He said, “I really would like to eat and watch TV some.”

9:00

Anyway, the point is that we talked through: “Where would be an acceptable place for him to eat, in the living room, where he could watch TV—watch a football game on Saturday afternoon.” We decided the couch is not where he would eat. He would eat over there in the chair—it’s on a part of the carpet that doesn’t stain as easily as the part in front of the couch does.

Dennis: Actually, what she encouraged me to do is run—

Barbara: So are you saying you don’t remember it this way? [Laughter]

Dennis: —run an extension cord outside and eat it in a lawn chair in front of the TV in the yard. [Laughter]

Barbara: Where there is a hose! [Laughter]

Bob: You didn’t put a bib on him or [Laughter] say, “You sit in this chair.”

Dennis: We were just talking about being a mother; were we not?

Barbara: That’s right; we were!

Bob: That’s what—so this is an illustration of how you help your husband? [Laughter]

Barbara: Well, it’s an illustration of how I—yes, how I help him [Laughter] eat like an adult—

Dennis: We worked it out.

Barbara: We did!

Dennis: We worked it out, and it is okay. I do think the point is—if you listen carefully to the illustration Barbara gave, we had a discussion.

Barbara: —as peers.

10:00

I wasn’t telling you that you couldn’t eat on the couch—I said: “Would you be willing to eat over there?” / “Could we work out a compromise?” was the gist of the conversation.

Dennis: What I’d want a man to hear in the midst of this is that he has a very important assignment—to respect his wife, and her opinion, and her values, and what she’s about at that point—not just do what he wants to do. Philippians 2—we’ve quoted that many times, here on FamilyLife Today: “…not merely looking out for your own interests but for the interests of others.”

Bob: Yes.

Dennis: These little confrontations we’re talking about here are a clash of values. They don’t have to turn out and become where the wife ends up being the mother of the husband.

Bob: You tell about, how in your marriage—when you are travelling, back in the days before cell phones—

Barbara: Yes.

Bob: —you used to mother your husband in the airport?

Barbara: Yes. You know what’s interesting about this dilemma for women is—I don’t think we start out with that kind of an attitude.

11:00

I think we genuinely/sincerely want to help. It just sort of evolves into a more parental attitude without even trying.

For instance, in the airport, when we used to travel before cell phones, Dennis would always want to make good use of his time. He’d walk across the area to another gate—wherever there happened to be a pay phone—and he would start making phone calls. I would sit in the waiting area and watch as every last passenger boarded the plane. They were about to close the door, and he was still on the phone.

Initially, I remember thinking: “He must not know that they’re boarding the plane. He must have not been paying attention.” I would get up and go over, and motion at the gate, and motion at my watch. He’d go, “I know; I know.” He’d get off the phone, and we’d get on the plane. Then the next time I would do the same thing. After a while, I started to become irritated because I thought, “I have to remind him all the time.”

Dennis: How many flights have we missed?

Barbara: Well, that’s the point! We never missed a flight because you were on the phone! [Laughter]

12:00

But initially, I genuinely thought he didn’t know what time it was and that he didn’t—he was so engaged in the phone call that he didn’t realize they were boarding. I wanted to help so that we didn’t miss the flight. Over time, it became more of a parental attitude on my part.

Dennis: I was going to say—I was going to say that—parental.

Barbara: It really was because I thought: ‘What’s the deal? Why can’t he get off the phone, and we can board with everybody else?” Then I started becoming critical.

So my point is—is that I think what we struggle with, as wives, is not necessarily starting out with a condescending attitude or a parental attitude. We really, genuinely want to help from our hearts; but it just sort of goes downhill sometimes.

Dennis: Let me take that, as an illustration though, and just ask this question: “How can a wife, in a situation like that, be a true helper?” The point here is—you’re not going to answer that question in the heat of the moment. You do it some other time when you’re not travelling.

13:00

The wife just simply says to her husband, “When everybody’s boarding, what would you like me to do?”

Barbara: Exactly—which is what I finally did.

Dennis: “Would you like me to come over and let you know, or am I to just trust you with that?” At that point—

Barbara: Yes.

Dennis: —it is two peers respecting each other—and the husband feeling like he’s being trusted.

Barbara: Yes.

Dennis: He may—as I did—he may want her help.

Bob: Yes.

Dennis: Okay? That’s good! You’re working as teammates at that point. I think, at critical times like this—we allow these little rough spots like this to become major disagreements—at which we have a big argument and it ends up ruining the trip.

Bob: As I read through this part of the book, I have to confess to you that I think one of the challenges that I think a lot of wives / a lot of women struggle with is the issue of control.

Barbara: Yes; definitely.

Bob: “I want to be in control of my environment. I feel safer if I’m in control of things.”

Barbara: No question; no question.

14:00

Bob: So this impulse to want to be a helper—sometimes is not, “I want to help my husband,”—it’s: “I want to manage my husband—

Barbara: Yes.

Bob: —“and control my husband because I feel more comfortable.” You’re waving and saying, “Everybody else is boarding,”—not because you’re trying to help him—but because you’re getting nervous, and you’d like to get on the plane.

Barbara: Yes.

Bob: And he needs to hurry up and get on there with you.

Barbara: No question.

Bob: It’s not helping—it’s controlling.

Barbara:And that’s why I’m saying it’s a difficult thing because 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 is that we, as women / we, as wives, need to be aware—that that shift happens—and to recognize when it does and to say: “Oh yeah; I’m being his mother, not his partner.

15:00

“I need to be his friend—we’re peers, we’re equals, we’re teammates—and we can work this out together rather than letting it become this great obstacle.

Dennis: So for wives—as they look at the subject of being a helper to their husbands—here’s the question I would encourage every wife to ask her husband: “Sweetheart, how can I be a better, customized helper to you?” because I really believe, Bob, if we could somehow zoom back and look at an individual marriage through God’s eyes—I believe He’s made the husband and the wife for one another. He made them with differences—with unique strengths, and abilities, and weaknesses—so they need each other and so they complement each other. I think many couples can live a lifetime and never ever understand how the wife— specifically: “In what areas / how can she be a customized helper for her husband?”—

16:00

—and then take good notes at what he says.

Barbara: Well, and that’s what I—one of the points that I really am hoping will come across in this book to my daughters—I want them to see the beauty that God has made in marriage—that the way I help my husband is different than the way Mary Ann helps you, Bob—

Bob: Yes.

Barbara: —different than the way my daughters will help their husbands because my husband needs something different than you would need. That’s the wonderful thing about marriage. God gave us very few rules for marriage—He gave us some guidelines to run on / some very specific things in Scripture—but He didn’t give us a hundred things to do in marriage. He gave us very few. Within that wonderful definition of marriage that we get out of Scripture, there is endless ability to be creative because we are two unique people. God wants us to design a unique relationship between the two of us.

17:00

Bob: Okay; I’ve got two questions. The first is: “There are some wives who are hearing this and going, ‘Well shouldn’t this thing work both ways? I mean, why am I the helper? Shouldn’t he be the helper to me too? Aren’t we supposed to help one another?’” You’re talking about teammates—so you’re the helper, but he’s the helper too; right?

Barbara: Yes; I think Dennis should answer that, but I think the real bottom line is—is that God has called men to serve. In that serving—of the husband serving the wife—that’s how he helps. He’s not given the title of helper, but he’s given the title of servant-leader. That’s how he would help his wife.

Dennis: Yes, I think Barbara mentioned the key term there—servant-leader. A husband is given the title, in Ephesians 5, “head,”—he is the authority. The buck does stop with him. He has responsibility to deny himself, to love his wife as Christ loved the church, and to be—as Barbara said—a servant-leader of her and meeting her needs.

I don’t think a husband—in the sense of what we’re talking about a wife being a helper—is to be his wife’s helper.

18:00

I think he’s to be—the servant, the lover, the leader, the nourisher, the cherisher of her soul, and to look out for her best interest, and her horizons, and maximize her life—but he’s got a different assignment—

Bob: Yes.

Dennis: —with her than she has with him.

Bob: Well, in fact, I was meeting with a group of guys recently. We were talking about this designation of servant-leader. We all kind of agreed that maybe it would be better to refer to husbands as shepherd-leaders than servant-leaders because the servant idea can—can almost make it sound like: “As long as your wife’s happy, you’re doing what you need to do.” That’s the trap I fell in, for years—was to think, ‘As long as Mary Ann’s happy—

Barbara: Yes.

Bob: —“then I’m—I’m being what God wants me to be.” It’s not necessarily her momentary happiness that I should be focused on—

Dennis: No, it’s not.

Bob: —it’s the shepherding and leading of her—wisely, gently, carefully, feeding, guiding, caring for her.

19:00

Dennis: —protecting.

Bob: That’s right. So it was a—it was a helpful metaphor—

Barbara: Yes.

Bob: —to say: “A man should be a shepherd-leader and a wife should respond and should help in that process.”

My other question, though, for you is for the wife who would say: “If I went to my husband and said, ‘How would you like me to be your customized helper?’ he would say, ‘Get off my back and leave me alone! Just let me do what I want to do.’”

Dennis: But that’s not a good answer.

Bob: So does she tell him that?!

Barbara: Well, I think she frames the question a little differently. I think she says, in a particular situation—like, when Dennis and I were travelling, I could have said to him, “Is there anything I can do to help you so that we can get on our flight on time?” rather than some generic question that he might not be able to put words to. It’d be much better if she said, “How can I help you when we are…” or “…when this situation happens?” or “How can I encourage you when you’ve had a bad day at work?” If she will be specific, then she might get a more specific answer that would be easier for her to perhaps know what to do with.

20:00

Bob: But if he says, “Just leave me alone,” how does she respond to that?

Barbara: I think she needs to say: “What do you mean by leave you alone? What do you want me to back off on?” I think—if she really, genuinely wants to be a better helper—then she needs to ask some follow-up questions / find out: “What does he mean by that?”

Bob: Yes.

Dennis: I think, over a lifetime together, this is a great question to interact about. In fact, we’d been married for 38 years before the thought ever occurred to me. I was talking to Barbara about her book—just to explore a little bit: “What have we learned in our marriage about how you are a great helper to me?” One of the areas she is—is she’s a wise counsellor.

Bob: Yes.

Dennis: She gives me the perspective that I most count on for my life, from a human perspective. Now, I go to the Bible for my guidance and to guide in prayer; but she’s my closest friend—knows me well, looking out for my best interest in multiple ways.

21:00

I go to her for her advice, her counsel, and her perspective. She is a great—

Bob: Yes.

Dennis: —helper in that area. I think, for a man, if he can just pull back and ask—if you’ve been married 10 years: “How is your wife a great helper to you? How do you see her having been designed by God to help you?”

Another way for Barbara is—and I told her this—she brings great beauty to my life. She’s an artist—she likes design / she notices things years before I do. [Laughter] Then she points them out and I enjoy them. Because of her in my life—not only is she beautiful—but she brings beauty to my life and an appreciation for the aesthetics that God has created.

Bob: She keeps the sofa looking beautiful, too, by assigning you a place to sit. [Laughter]

Barbara: Now Bob, I didn’t assign now—

Dennis: —in the yard!

Barbara: —we agreed!

22:00

Dennis: —in the garage, with the hose! [Laughter]

Bob: The thing is—this is a part of the reality of marriage that you guys have, after more than 40 years of being together—you’ve figured out how to make all of this work. Barbara—now for you to be speaking into the lives of younger women / younger wives—I’m really excited about the book that is now available: Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife by Barbara Rainey. You can go online at FamilyLifeToday.com in order to request a copy of the book, or you can call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, the title is Letters to My Daughters by Barbara Rainey. Order, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or call us at 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.”

By the way, I should have you give the shout-out today to some friends of ours, Keith and Mary Kirkland, celebrating their 15th wedding anniversary today.

23:00

They live in Montgomery, Alabama—listen to WLBF. Mary is a big fan of the resources you’ve created for homes in the Ever Thine Home collection. They’ve got the Easter banner, they’ve got Adorenaments, they’ve got your “Behold the Lamb” resource—I mean, she’s got a bunch of stuff in her home, and they’re friends of this ministry. They’ve helped support the work that FamilyLife Today is doing. If it weren’t for friends, like the Kirklands, FamilyLife Today couldn’t do all that we do. We’re listener-supported, and your donations make this ministry possible.

During this month, we are hoping that God would raise up, from among our listeners, 20 new families in every state—who would be brand-new Legacy Partners—monthly donors, supporting the ministry of FamilyLife Today. We’d like to ask you to consider being one of the families in your state helping to keep FamilyLife Today on the air in this community.

24:00

You can become a Legacy Partner by going to FamilyLifeToday.com. Click the link that says, “DONATE,”—the information’s available there—or call 1-800- FL-TODAY and say, “I want to become a Legacy Partner.” We hope to hear from you.

We hope you can join us back tomorrow when we’re going to talk about what’s at the heart of being a godly woman. Priscilla Shirer is going to join us, and we’ll talk about a godly woman’s priorities tomorrow. Hope you can be here for that.

I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.

FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas.

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Episodes

Praising the Positive
7 Jan 2020· Letters To My Daughters
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete.
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: Yes.
Bob: And what you believe about Dennis is the starting place for everything you say or don’t say about him.
Barbara: Correct.
Bob: Unpack that for me.
Barbara: Well, let me explain something about photography that I think will help answer your question for you. Anybody, who has ever used a 35mm camera that has a lens that you turn so you can focus, understands the principle that the person who is holding the camera chooses what’s going to be in that image.
7:00
You can choose a broad panorama and you can get as much in that frame as you can get, or you may choose to tighten that zoom lens and focus on somebody’s eyes only. You’ve got great choice, as the photographer, in what you’re going to get in that lens of the camera. And the same is true in marriage. I have complete control over what people know about my husband. If I’m talking about Dennis and I talk about his faults, or I talk about how crummy it is that he just doesn’t ever do this and I think it’s terrible that he doesn’t ever do that, anybody who hears that description that I just made of him will think of him that way. When they think of him, they’re going to remember that.
But, on the other hand, if I choose to leave that out of the description, and instead, I choose to describe him for my friends, or my small group, or wherever I am talking about him, and I say: “You know, one of the things that I appreciate about Dennis is that he really makes our family a priority.
8:00
“Yes, he travels. Yes; sometimes he has to say late and work / sometimes he is gone on the weekends, but I know that his heart is to make our family a priority.” That’s focusing the lens of my camera on what is good and what is right about my husband. If he knows that I’m saying that about him, he’s going to want to live up to that expectation.
Bob: So some wives will hear you say that and say: “You want me to airbrush my husband. You want me to just brush away and pretend like all those flaws that are there just don’t exist and just pretend like he’s better than he is.”
Barbara: Okay. And I would say to her: “How does God see you? Is God pointing out to you the hundreds of things that you do wrong every day? Um, I don’t think so. He’s very gentle and very gracious, and He shows us one thing at a time that we do wrong.”
9:00
I just think: “Okay, you want to call it airbrushing? Alright, I’ll take that—it may be airbrushing—but I would rather focus on what he does right than what he does wrong because—when I focus on what he does wrong, and I have done that—all I can see are the things he does wrong. They grow and they just become these huge things. I become obsessed with everything that’s wrong and everything he’s not doing that’s right. And that’s not fun! I don’t like that about me!
“I don’t want him to be focusing on all my weaknesses and all my flaws. I don’t want him talking about my weaknesses and flaws to other people because I don’t like them / I don’t want to be known for what is wrong with me. I want to be known for what I do well and what I do right. So the same is true for him. So, yes, I airbrush it—I don’t talk about the things that he does wrong, or his weaknesses, or his flaws. That’s for him to deal with before the Lord. That’s not my business—that’s his business.”
Bob: You’re not living in denial about those things?
Barbara: No; no.
10:00
Dennis: That doesn’t mean that the airbrush doesn’t get turned off at a point.
Bob: And the flaws are exposed? [Laughter]
Barbara: Well, or that I talk about them with him from time to time.
Dennis: Yes.
Bob: And you’re not being unrealistic about the nature of your relationship.
Barbara: No.
Bob: But I think what I hear you saying—and this goes back to where we started—what a wife says about her husband is going to begin with what she’s thinking about her husband.
Barbara: Correct.
Bob: And she can choose—
Barbara: Correct.
Bob: —whether to dwell on all of his flaws or whether to set her mind on those things that are his virtues.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: And every husband’s got at least a couple of them; right?
Barbara: Well, if he doesn’t, why did you marry him? I mean, all of us got married because we admired something about this man that we fell in love with. So focus on those things. I remember, years and years ago, when we were in a new church that we were a part of—it was a fairly small church—and we had this community group of other couples that we met together every couple of weeks.
11:00
I remember standing in a small group of maybe three or four of us. This wife started talking about her husband—she was talking negatively about her husband. I’ll never forget that uncomfortable feeling that all of us in that little, tiny circle felt. We just felt kind of: “Ouch! Oooh! That hurts! I don’t know that I want to hear that about your husband.”
And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him, standing not that far away. I think he had heard what she said. I have just never forgotten that picture, even though it was probably 30 years ago / maybe 20 years ago—but it was a long time ago—because I saw what the power of her words did. I saw what it did to me—it made me, as a listener, uncomfortable. It made me wonder about him, as a man. And then, when I saw that he heard, it was like an ice pick to his heart. I realized how powerful our words are as wives.
12:00
So my whole intention in what I share in this chapter about this is to help women understand that your words are very, very significant. Those who hear them are going to be influenced by what we say.
Dennis: There’s a proverb that is so applicable here—Proverbs 18:21: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.”
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: So you literally have the opportunity to use your tongue like a paint brush to paint a positive picture, or like an ice pick to tear another person down. To the woman, who is listening to us—or for that matter, a man, who may be listening in right now—if you’re a critical person / if you’re negative, you need to ask God to do a work in your soul.
13:00
You know, no one wants to be in the corner of an attic with a cranky woman or a cranky man, who is bitter, and negative, and all they can do is find fault. That’s not who you want to grow old with. What you need to ask—you need to ask God to do a work in your soul and to help release you from being critical of your husband or your wife and find a way to begin to focus on—as Barbara is calling women to do here—to focus on that which is positive in their spouse / why you married them in the first place and what you like about them. Brag on your wife / brag on your husband in front of the kids.
Bob: One of the things Dennis has shared over the years—you’ve heard him say it—your belief in him has been massive in terms of his confidence in doing what God’s called him to do. I’m just wondering: “Was that just natural to express belief in him? Was that just something that came instinctively to you; or were you conscious and deliberate about saying: ‘I need to verbalize to him. I need to express confidence in him’?”
14:00
Barbara: The answer is, “Yes,” to both because I think most of us women, when we first get married, we marry this guy because we believe in him—we think he’s the greatest. Most women marry with those thoughts, those feelings, and those emotions. I think that what happens is—when we do get disillusioned, and we do find discouragements, and we butt heads because we’re different—that belief can come down with it. Then, that’s when it becomes a choice.
In the beginning, it was really easy for me to believe in him because I just did believe in him—that’s why I married him. But then there come those times, farther into the relationship, when belief becomes a choice. So rather than expressing—and it’s not that I don’t express fear / it’s not that I don’t express anxiety because I express plenty of that—but the bottom line is: “In the end, no matter what, I believe in you. I believe that God is at work in your life and in our marriage. I believe that God is going to see us through this, and I’m going to be with you there to the bitter end.”
15:00
Dennis: And what I’d want a woman to know is—that no matter how competent and confident a man looks, whether he’s young or whether he’s older / it does not matter—there isn’t a man, within the reach of my voice right now over the radio across the country, who doesn’t need his wife’s steady and certain words of affirmation and belief. He needs it. I don’t care if he says nothing to you when you say it. The words are sinking and soaking into his soul because there are not that many people in a lifetime—in fact, I’d ask the question, “Is there anyone who goes a lifetime with you and who believes in you all the way to the end?” The answer is, “Who would it be?”
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: “Who’s going to do that?” That’s the nature of marriage!
16:00
When you say, “I take you ‘til death do us part, for better or for worse, in riches and in being poor,”—wow! It’s the pay-off!
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: It’s not always easy. We’re not trying to paint some kind of rosy picture here, but it is a necessity.
Bob: There has to have been a time—and I don’t know if it will come to mind immediately for you or not—but a time when you were facing a decision and you were thinking, “I think we should do this.” And Dennis was thinking, “No, I think we should do this.” And you said: “Okay, I’m going to trust you. I’m going to follow you”; and it turned out that it would have been better off if you’d have done it your way. I’m just wondering—for a wife in that situation, where she says, “I think this is the right thing to do,” and the husband says, “We’re going this way,” and they go down a dead-end and the wife finds herself, in that moment, thinking, “If he’d have just listened to me, we’d be in a lot better shape right now than we are!”—
17:00
—what does she do in that moment?
Barbara: Well, I can’t think of a specific time; but there have been times like, for instance, driving in the car, when he would choose to go one way and I was thinking, “I don’t think that’s the right way!” And, sure enough, it wasn’t. That hasn’t happened very often, but it has happened. I remember one time, early in our marriage, when we were discussing a financial decision. I don’t remember thinking it was a bad decision at the time; but it was a bad decision, and it cost us financially.
Regardless, it doesn’t really matter—if it’s a big thing or a small thing—because the choice is still the same in the end for a wife; that is: “Even when he makes bad decisions—and he will / when he decides to do things that will cost you—and he will—will you still believe in him? Will you still trust God? Will you put your faith in God’s sovereignty that God can turn this into good in his life?”
18:00
Maybe that’s exactly what he needed to experience to grow in the way God wanted him to grow. 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, because men are going to make big mistakes. It’s how we respond to that mistake that will make the difference in whether he benefits from it or he can’t benefit from it because he’s been beat up by his wife.
Dennis: This is not an easy message for a lot of listeners to hear, but I just want you to comment on why you decided to write a book that is called Letters to My Daughters to call them to the art / the biblical art of being a wife because you’re calling them to a high standard.
19:00
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: These are our daughters and our daughters-in-law.
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: Why did you want to do that?
Barbara: Well, I think our culture has lost the vision for what marriage can be—what it was intended to be. Yes, we have all seen countless examples of marriage done the wrong way, but that doesn’t mean marriage is broken. It means the people are broken who are in it. I want the next generation to understand that marriage is really worth working on—it is transformative, it is redemptive, it is holy. There are so many good things about marriage; but we don’t see those good things, commonly, in our culture—we see all the negatives.
I tell the story of: “What would it be like if you went to the Louvre Museum in Paris, with all these magnificent art works? And what if, while you were standing in line to get your ticket, there was an earthquake?
20:00
“And after you got your ticket, you walked in and half of these masterpieces were lying on the floor. There were still half of them on the wall / there were still statues and all of these magnificent things around—what would your eyes be drawn to? Your eyes would be drawn to the tragedy, to the loss, to the broken pieces lying all over the floor.”
I think that’s a picture of our culture. We see all of these wrecked marriages—we see these abused women, we see these lost men, we see the damaged children—and we just think: “Marriage is hopeless. Why should I even try?” What I want to do in this book is say: “Look at what’s on the wall! Look at what God has said. Look at what God has designed. That is our goal. Don’t get distracted by the broken pieces. It’s tragic, it’s wrong, it’s sad; but the institution of marriage is still worthy. It’s still worth striving for.
21:00
God didn’t make a mistake when He made marriage. We’re the ones who are messing it up.
Dennis: And Bob, I think about what FamilyLife is talking about all this year in our 40th anniversary of doing ministry—calling people back to their anniversary and back to their commitment—around the whole concept of the Proud Sponsor of Anniversaries™. What Barbara is challenging people with is—just because people have failed, don’t give up on what the Bible—the transcendent beauty and model of the Scriptures and what it’s calling us to be, as human beings—to call us away from our selfishness, to call us to the biblical model of following Jesus Christ, and training our kids to do the same.
I’m going to tell you something—there’s a lot on the line in every marriage that is listening to us right now. Generations are on the line—
22:00
—your children! The best picture that they’ll ever see, apart from the Scriptures, of what a real marriage ought to be is your marriage.
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: Even in its imperfections, it can display what Barbara is talking about—the nobility / the grandeur. Your kids will see something—that they are going to say: “You know what? Mom and Dad could have ended it, but they didn’t! They experienced the redemption of Jesus Christ. I want what they’ve got! When I get married, I want one of those! And I’m not going to settle for anything less.”
The way they get it is by absorbing your teaching about Jesus Christ, following Him, and deciding to make their parents’ faith their own. But that means the parents need to have it first.
Bob: Well, and I would say that part of the way they get it, too, is by aligning themselves with God’s design for us—as men and women / as husbands and wives—the unique assignment God has for us.
23:00
It’s one of the issues you’re addressing, Barbara, as you talk to young wives about what it means for them to be godly wives. I’d just encourage our listeners—get a copy of Barbara’s book, Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife. This is a book that we’re making available this month to folks who make a donation to help support the ministry of FamilyLife Today.
You can go to FamilyLifeToday.com—make an online donation. You can call 1-800-FL-TODAY—make a donation over the phone; or you can mail a donation to us and request a copy of Barbara’s book, Letters to My Daughters. We’re happy to send it out to you as a “Thank you,” for your support of the ministry of FamilyLife. We couldn’t do what we do if it weren’t for folks, like you, helping to support this ministry. So “Thanks,” in advance, for whatever gift you’re able to help with. We’re happy to send you Barbara’s new book, Letters to My Daughters, when you get in touch with us—again, online at FamilyLifeToday.com; or call 1-800-358-6329; that’s 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.”
24:00
Now, tomorrow, we’re going to hear Barbara and a number of other women interacting in a panel conversation that took place a few years ago with a large crowd of women. You were talking about God’s design for you, as a woman, as a wife, and as a mom. We’ll hear that dialogue tomorrow. I hope our listeners can tune in for that.
I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.
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Building Up Your Man
7 Jan 2020· Letters To My Daughters
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete.
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 original letter, and put in a new letter, and send the packet on its way.
6:00
It would just make this circle between these six or eight women that were a part of this group because nobody got on the phone and talked for fun in those days. You only used the phone for emergencies, or business, or important things. You didn’t just get on it to chat. Letter writing was the only way that you really kept up with people who lived far away. They had this letter exchange that they passed around.
I just remember, very vividly, that every time that letter came / that packet—with all those messages from home / touches with her family and friends that she didn’t get to see very often—she would get a cup of coffee and sit down. She relished those letters—she read them and absorbed all that she could out of those communications from friends that she loved, and cared about, and missed deeply. That became a way for her to stay in touch with those friends.
Dennis: You know, it’s interesting, Bob—now, in the present age of social media and having communication so—
7:00
Bob: —tweets, and texts, and emails.
Dennis: —it’s so easy, you know. We have access to so much that the art of letter writing—I mean, a really good thoughtful letter—in fact, I have back on my desk a letter that was given to me by Steve Green, who is the President and CEO of Hobby Lobby, that he’d obtained that was written by Thomas Jefferson, during his presidency. It’s just interesting to have a copy of a letter that’s over 200 years old and to think about the words being crafted—how thoughtful it was. I think there’s a need to recapture that—both personal side but also just the thoughtful side / the contemplative side of: “You’re facing some issues, let me step into your life and provide some guidance in a personal way for you.”
Bob: Not just shoot from the hip, but give some real thought to the response. Some of the letters—because you will print a letter in here—we should say this is not an actual letter from one of your daughters. People shouldn’t read this and try to figure out which daughter was asking this question.
8:00
Barbara: Correct.
Bob: You would take a composite of questions that were being asked of you—subjects that your daughters were asking you about.
Dennis: —and people who were coming up to Barbara at a Weekend to Remember® marriage getaway.
Bob: Right.
Dennis: We have tens of thousands of people, who come to those events. When Barbara speaks, women stand in line to talk to her. These questions that are in the book are really questions that these women had asked Barbara from the Weekend to Remember.
Bob: I’m looking at one of the letters that you respond to in your book. You’re tackling some pretty interesting stuff here. I mean, one of these letters asks this question—it says: “Hey, Mom, sometimes I get tired of being discouraged by all the unexpected things that I have to deal with that come from the way my husband lives life. It’s not just that we’re different—you already wrote me about—that it’s more than that. It’s like I think, ‘If I didn’t have him, sometimes life would be easier.’”
9:00
Now wait a sec! Do wives really feel that way? [Laughter] I mean, I’m starting to feel a little insecure here! Does a wife really feel like sometimes life would be easier—
Dennis: Let me just stop you. What if your wife’s name is on the book—[Laughter]
Bob: You can feel real insecure now! [Laughter]
Dennis: —and you’re on the radio!
Bob: Let me finish this—it says, “It’s kind of nice when he’s out of town for a few days.” This is a wife, who is saying, “Sometimes, I wonder if I’d be happier, more satisfied, more fulfilled if I didn’t have a husband to deal with.”
Barbara: Well, I think there are those moments when women do feel that way because the differences never go away—that’s the first chapter in the book. I write in the book that it’s the first and most lasting adjustment to marriage because the differences never go away. Even though I’m used to things that he brings to our world—his personality, the way he approaches life, and his maleness—
10:00
Bob: His perspective is different.
Barbara: —it’s very different. I think what this question is saying is—that, sometimes, when a husband travels, there feels a little bit of a: “Oh I can do things the way I want to do things. I don’t have to be just thinking about what I would like to do and ‘How’s this going to make him feel? How he’s going to respond to this?’ I can just do what I want to do.”
Bob: You know, I get that because I think, for husbands—I think there’s a similar—
Barbara: I would expect so!
Bob: —to have a break and just to be able to—times when I’m traveling, I’m focused on whatever I’m doing, traveling-wise, and—
Barbara: Or if your wife goes on a women’s retreat, you can just kind of veg and eat pizza all day long and not worry about anything; right?
Bob: Sometimes, those breaks are nice to have; but you wouldn’t want them to go on for very long.
Barbara: No; no.
Bob: In the midst of them, you do have a sense of something lacking, even if you’re enjoying just the pause in the relationship; right?
Barbara: Right. Without question because we are complete in one another, and marriage does complete that which is lacking.
11:00
I mean, God says, “The two shall become one.” There is a sense in which you can relax about some things when your husband or your wife is out of town, but there is that realization that life isn’t the same without him in it. So it makes you miss one another and appreciate those differences / those things that the other person brings that are so very contradictory at times. But it is for good.
Bob: When should a wife start to be concerned if she’s thinking, “I kind of wish he’d go away for a few days because I really like it when he’s gone.” When can she tell: “This is an okay break,” versus “No, this is us drifting toward isolation in our marriage”?
Dennis: —or “This is unhealthy thinking.” Here’s what we’re talking about—we’re talking about the very essence of marriage goes back to Genesis, where it says it was not good that man be alone.
12:00
So it says, “For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother; shall cleave to his wife and the two shall become one.” I think we get married because there’s something lacking in our lives and that something is a person. It’s the completeness of a husband and a wife in a marriage relationship designed by God.
The two are asked to deny themselves, and to defeat isolation, and not grow into an unhealthy relationship where you long for the times when you’re going to be separated. You need to keep the relationship alive and not forget why you married the other person in the first place. God brought you together—you need to get on with it, and you need to learn how to embrace the differences.
Barbara: It’s okay to have a break occasionally; but the goal of marriage is being together, and becoming one, and allowing God to do his redemptive work in our lives.
Dennis: Ultimately, what marriage is all about is—about two imperfect people learning how to love one another within the commitment of marriage.
13:00
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: You’re going to school, with God teaching you from the Bible. I’d have to say I didn’t understand that when I enrolled in this course called marriage. But looking back over four decades of marriage, I’d have to say I know more about love because of marriage than any other relationship in my life.
Bob: Some of the wives, who are listening to us have this conversation, are thinking: “The negatives that you’re talking about with my husband—some of these are pretty dark negatives. Some of these are negatives that cast such a shadow over the relationship that it’s hard for me just to hold things together. How do I turn that into a positive? Or what do I do with those negatives? How do I deal with a husband who—man! the negatives—they’re stark, and they’re real, and it’s really challenging?”
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: “I’m not married to Dennis,”—[Laughter]—
14:00
—you know, a wife, who’s listening, is saying: “I’m not married to Dennis, who’s a godly virtuous man, who is pursuing a walk with the Lord. I’m married to a guy who’s marginally interested in spiritual things, and who’s yelling at the kids, and who’s drinking too much. What do I do?”
Barbara: That’s a very complex question because there are so many levels and degrees of what constitute negatives and difficult things in a relationship. So let me answer it two ways. One is: “Any wife has to start by looking at herself and saying: ‘Okay; God, am I accepting the man that You’ve put in my life? Am I giving thanks for him in his strengths and his weaknesses? Am I looking to You to do the transforming work?’” because you even said in your question / a woman says: “What can I do? How do I relate to him and help transform him?”
Well, it’s not the wife’s job. I think we so easily get caught up in thinking that it’s our responsibility to fix him / to change him.
15:00
We do that with our kids—we’re always helping our kids. We talked about that on another broadcast that helping a husband is different than helping your kids. But it starts by her attitude and her perspective, and her belief in God and His sovereignty, and His ability to work. It starts with where she’s focusing her eyes—is she looking at all of the negative in his life to such a degree that she’s totally forgotten all the good that there is? My first challenge is to her: “Are you open to God being at work? Have you totally given up on Him? Are you giving thanks for your relationship the way it is?”
And then the other side is: “If it really is indeed very, very difficult things that are beyond a woman’s responsibility to deal with, you may need to see a counselor, you may need to get a pastor or someone who’s wise and skilled to intervene—to help you, to coach you, to guide you. Find an older woman who can be your mentor to help give you perspective.
16:00
One of the things that’s 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 that she just doesn’t see clearly.
That’s why a mentor is so helpful—someone who can look at it objectively and say: “You know, it’s probably not as bad as you think it is. Let me give you one or two things that you can try—one or two practical suggestions that might make a difference for you,” because we do lose perspective and we do—we just get all out of sorts. It’s very common for us, as women, to get discouraged with our marriages because we’re just discouraged about life in general.
So check your heart.
17:00
Find someone to help you / find a mentor—find another woman who can speak objectively into your life and say, “It may not be as bad as you think it is, and here are some things you can try.”
Dennis: What I’d say to my daughters is—I’d say: “Do you remember when you’d get up in the morning and see your mom reading the Bible? What was that symbolic of? It was that your mom was teachable, that she was trying to meet with God, and ultimately that her hope was in God.”
So the woman, who’s listening to us right now, who has lost hope—she’s got to have a spiritual thermometer check: “How’s your relationship with God?” You’ve got to be reminded of who He is, how He operates in this imperfect world that we live in, and what he’s calling us to do, which is live and walk by faith in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Barbara: I just want to say to the moms, who are listening, who’ve got a houseful of kids—or even maybe one or two kids, but it feels like a full house to you—I did not get up every morning and read my Bible.
18:00
My kids didn’t see me doing that every day. I just don’t want anyone listening to think that I was that woman that got up every morning and read my Bible. There were weeks that I would go by and not read my Bible in the morning. I would talk to God, and I would pray, and I would try to catch snippets of the Bible here and there in different places; but I was pretty overwhelmed and pretty buried with kids and with life.
Yes, I totally agree with what you just said, Dennis, that it is absolutely crucial that your hope is in God and no place else. Your hope can’t be in your husband because he will fail, that’s a given. Put your hope in God, and keep it there, and do all that you can to maintain that. I just don’t want anybody to feel like there’s this standard of: “I have to get up and read my Bible every morning before my kids are up.” If you can do that, great! I couldn’t do that, and I failed miserably many times; but my hope remained in Christ for the most part.
19:00
Dennis: There is a Proverb that I was thinking about as I was thinking about our listeners today, who are going to hear Barbara on this subject—it is Proverbs,
Chapter 4, verse 23—we quote it quite frequently, here on FamilyLife Today—it says, “Keep your heart with all vigilance for from it flow the springs of life.” You may not be able to get in the Bible every day—I’m glad you said that, just to remove this mythical phantom that exists of the super spiritual mom, but your heart needs to know whom it is that you serve / who is your hope—and you need to cultivate that.
I’m glad you mentioned a mentor, or a friend, or even a counselor if things really go south—or to keep them from going south—someone that you can lean into and you can spill out your emotions in safety and talk about it—
20:00
—not just being negative but try to find someone who can coach you out of the ditch that you may be in. That’s what church is all about / that’s what the community of faith—of Christ followers ought to be about. We ought to be meeting each other in our ditches and saying: “You know what? It’s safe. We’re all broken. There is nobody who’s got it all together!” But to maybe dig in with a group of women into a book like this, Bob, and decide: “We’re going to get real with each other. We’re going to get honest, and we’re going to make sure our hope is in the right place.”
Bob: I was going to say—at one level, that’s what this book is all about. It is a mentoring book. It is an older woman mentoring younger women on what it means to be a wife according to God’s design.
Dennis: I would just like to say here—and I know I’m biased—so the listeners—they already know that / they’ve already heard me talk about Barbara in the past—I’m biased toward her. This is not a fluffy, feel-good book.
21:00
This is a real-life book that talks about where you are living, as a woman, wife, mom, grandmother. I think it is life-giving—it’s the words of a wise woman that are bringing life to others because she’s reminding people of the truth. People today need to get away from the culture, and the messages of the culture, and the messages of all their buddies on Facebook® or Twitter®, and they need to dig in deep with someone who’ll tell them the real truth and nothing but the truth.
Bob: If it was just you and this book alone, that would be good for your soul; but if it could be you and three or four other women and this book together, I think that just adds a dimension to where there’s wisdom in a multitude of counselors / there’s life-on-life happening. There’s a support that can happen there.
Dennis: Yes.
22:00
Bob: I’d encourage women to get together with three or four other women and get a copy of Barbara’s book, Letters to My Daughters. We have a downloadable discussion guide that is available so that you and your friends can go through this book together, and then, there are questions you can ask. Again, you can find out more when you go to FamilyLifeToday.com. Order the book from us, online, at FamilLifeToday.com; or call 1-800-FL-TODAY if you’d like to order a copy of Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife. It’s the new book by Barbara Rainey.
Now, we have an anniversary we want to acknowledge today—Rick and Jill Bridges from Whittier, California, celebrating six years of marriage together. “Congratulations!” to the Bridges on their sixth anniversary.
FamilyLife is celebrating an anniversary this year as well—it is 40 years of ministry for us / we started back in 1976.
23:00
Our whole goal with this ministry is to help more couples have more anniversaries. We want to provide you with practical biblical help and hope for your marriage and your family so that you have more years together—more years where you are thriving, as a couple and as a family. We want to effectively develop families, who are anchored firmly in God’s Word.
We appreciate those of you who partner with us in this effort. FamilyLife Today could not exist if it weren’t for friends, like you, who help support this ministry with your donations. Thank you for the part you play in helping to make FamilyLife Today possible.
By the way, if you’d like a copy of Barbara Rainey’s new book, we are making that available to anyone who makes a donation today. You can go online at FamilyLifeToday.com make an online donation and get a copy of the book. Or request the book when you call 1-800-FL-TODAY and make a donation. Or you can mail your donation to us, along with your request for Barbara’s book.
24:00
Our address is FamilyLife Today, PO Box 7111, Little Rock, AR; and our zip code is 72223.
We want to talk more tomorrow about how a wife can stay positive and stay focused on affirming her husband, even when things aren’t going well / even when he’s not doing a great job. We’re going to talk more about that tomorrow. Hope you can tune in.
I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.
FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas.
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Facing the Storms
7 Jan 2020· Letters To My Daughters
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete.
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 it—it’s while you’re still walking in the sunlight.
Barbara: Yes. And I think that it also illustrates that the importance of building your marriage today because we don’t know how many days we have. Our days are all numbered, but we don’t know what the last number is.
7:00
That reminds us that today is the day we need to focus on. Today is the day we need to live—as if it were our last, even though that’s hard to do in a practical way—but we need to focus on making our marriage all it can be today. Focus on getting to know Christ today / focus on growing today so that, when those hard times do come—and they will come—because Jesus said, “In this world, you will have trouble,”—period / done—“…you will have trouble.”
We don’t like that / I never liked that verse—I always kind of wondered why it was even in there. It is because He’s telling us the truth that we will have trouble and we will have difficulty. So the best way to prepare is to live each day on purpose and to live each day with focus and intentionality in your relationship.
Dennis: You don’t prepare for the storm in the middle of the storm.
8:00
I will never forget a Green Beret, who came up to me at one of our Weekend to Remember marriage getaways, way back when we started FamilyLife years and years ago. He came up and said, “Dennis, as a Green Beret, we practice what to do in a crisis over, and over, and over again in training so that, when we were in the crisis, it was second nature / we knew what to do.”
I think what people need to look at is—to look at the Bible as the training manual. We need to know how to live now in light of eternity. As a married couple, you have to know how to live together. We’ve been through some hard things in our family / some difficult challenges. It’s true, Bob, husbands and wives do not suffer the same / they do not process grief in the same way. We’re different, as male and female.
I’m so glad that Barbara has this chapter in her book to coach women to know how to view suffering / how to view the valley in their marriage and not lose heart / not lose hope—but to not give up.
9:00
Bob: Sometimes in a marriage, Barbara, we are plunged into a deep valley, where it’s the kind of darkness we’ve talked about here—burying a child or—I know, for you and Dennis—the loss of a grandchild, years ago, was one of those deep valleys.
For a lot of wives, the valley is not as deep; but it’s kind of a shallow, prolonged valley. You wouldn’t necessarily even call it suffering, but it’s just a general discontentedness about life and where you are. It drags on you every day. If a wife is in that moment, where she’s saying, “This is not what I—
Barbara: —“signed up for”?
Bob: “Just not what I thought life was going to be.”
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: “It’s not what I thought marriage was going to be. I thought having kids would be more fun than this.”
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: What does she do in that moment?
Barbara: Well, first of all, I want to say that that is suffering. It’s just a different kind of suffering because I think that is a common experience for many, many women.
10:00
I think a lot of us go through seasons of life, whether it’s because of hormones or it’s because of the season that our kids are in. I remember a season like that for me, in the late teen years, before we became empty nesters. I remember being so exhausted every single day. I think there’s a cumulative effect that a lot of mothers feel—it just kind of builds—so that by the time you’re in your 40s or pushing 50, there’s this general fatigue with life.
I think that is a kind of suffering because we do live in a broken world. That is a difficult thing to deal with because it affects everything about you—it affects your marriage, your kids that are still at home, your perception of yourself, your perception of life, your enjoyment of life. So I think that those really can be called kinds of suffering.
11:00
So the answer is--and I don’t want this to sound like a pat answer because there isn’t a pat answer—but I think the bottom line is: “Continuing to believe God that He is in control and that this too shall pass.” It’s pulling back and looking at the big picture. I describe this as watercolor painting in my book because one of the things about creating a painting is—you come up with an initial sketch, and you’ve got to decide where the horizon line is, and what’s going to be your focal point. Often, when you’re doing a painting of any kind—and even a sculpture, although I don’t do that, but I think the same principle is true with any kind of art—you have to pull back. One of the things that’s important about doing a painting is—you walk six feet away and look at it / or maybe even farther—and you see the whole more clearly when you’re away from it.
The same is true in our lives—we need to pull back / remind ourselves of the big picture:
12:00
“God is in control. He still loves me. He’s working good in my life, even though I don’t see it or feel it and I don’t know what the outcome is going to be. I can trust Him.” I think the message is, “Don’t quit when it gets hard.” Our temptation is to want to run away when things get hard or when things get difficult—to escape from the pressure, escape from the pain, escape from whatever it is that you’re feeling as a result of the suffering. But God is saying: “No. Stay there. I’m with you. I won’t abandon you. I’m going to use this for good.”
Dennis: And back to the motif or the illustration of watercolors. Bob, I’ve watched Barbara create paintings; and it’s fascinating how she shows off light. You would think that would be pretty simple; but to a non-artistic person like me, it’s fascinating how you use dark colors to show off the light.
13:00
What Barbara’s actually talking about here is—I think that God allows the darkness—God allows the valleys / He allows the disappointments and the unmet expectations—those things to come into our lives to create some contrast that will call us to trust Him. Because, frankly, if everything went our own way,—
Barbara: —we wouldn’t need Him or we wouldn’t trust Him.
Dennis: —we wouldn’t need God.
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: And we could live our whole lives just being “happy.” Well, you know what? That isn’t going to happen!
Barbara: Right.
Dennis: You’re not going to be able to live “a happy life.”
Bob: But I do think there are a lot of wives who—when they are not happy / they’re in a prolonged season, where, “I just haven’t felt happy for a while,”—they start to look around and go: “Okay, how come I’m not feeling happy? Who’s the cause of this!?” [Laughter] Guess—who is the closest person there to take the blame for: “I’m not happy! It’s got to be something he’s doing! If he was doing his job, I’d be happy!”?
14:00
Do you think that’s right?
Barbara: Do I think it is right that she’s thinking that?
Bob: Yes.
Barbara: Well, no! It’s not right that she’s thinking that. [Laughter]
Bob: Is it accurate that she might be thinking that?
Barbara: Oh, I think it’s common.
Bob: Yes! But it’s not right.
Barbara: But it’s not right; yes. [Laughter] I mean, it’s very easy to blame somebody else. That’s one of the hard things about marriage—is that it’s so easy for both of us—husband or wife—to blame the person who’s right there because they’re handy, and it’s really easy to find fault and say, “Well, if you only…, my life would be so much better.”
But that’s not really what the reason is. The real reason is that God—because He’s our Father, and He’s a loving, kind, gracious Father / is so patient—and He’s saying to us: “You need this right now. This will be for your good right now. I know you don’t like it / I know it doesn’t feel good, but I’ve got purposes and I’ve got plans for you. You will be glad in the end.”
15:00
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 / I came to know Him better as a result. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.” I’ve heard so many people say that, and 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.
Dennis: I just want to read a couple of passages, just based upon all Barbara is talking about here. If you’re going through a hard time, I’d like to recommend the best-seller—the Bible—and the Book of 1 Peter, which was written to a group of people, who had been scattered and who were followers of Christ. They were called the diaspora—they were scattered saints, having to represent Christ in cultures that punished them for it.
Barbara: Well, they weren’t just scattered—because we tend to think of scattered as they are just living in different places—but they lost homes / possessions.
16:00
I mean, they had really experienced some difficult traumas that we face today when houses burn down or we go bankrupt and we lose everything. That puts a little more context in what these people were living in.
Bob: They were refugees—not just scattered—but refugees.
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: So I just want to read what God wanted to say to some folks who were going through some hard times. Just listen to how God coaches and gently nudges people who are in the valley—1 Peter, Chapter 3, verse 13: “Now who is there to harm you if you are zealous for what is good? But even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.”
17:00
But listen to this conclusion to this passage: “For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil.”
So you hear the Scripture calling us to have the right perspective of our valley. Don’t just look at it from a human perspective. Wherever you are, maybe pull out this book and read 1 Peter, Chapter 3. Then, across the page, go look at Chapter 4, verse 12 and listen to what Peter says here: “Beloved, don’t be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.”
18:00
I’ve got to stop there because I think we, as human beings, are really odd. We think, when we get married, there’s never going to be a valley. It’s in the fine print of the marriage covenant—you’re going to go through testing / through trials. But listen to this—verse 13 of Chapter 4: “But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when His glory is revealed.”
The Bible so calls us away from our temporary thinking / from how I’m feeling right now. It’s calling you, not to live by feelings, but it’s calling you to faith: “Are you going to believe that that’s true?” As a couple, will you allow the things that are coming at you to bind your hearts to His—first of all to God’s—but then, secondly, to one another and to not give up?—and as Barbara said, “…not quit and not toss the towel in.” We’re talking to people, right now, who have secretly—or maybe verbally—threatened divorce to their spouse.
19:00
I mean, it is commonplace in our culture. But this is the biblical way to look at suffering, and the biblical way to run the race all the way to the finish line.
Bob: Well, what I’ve heard both of you saying throughout this is—first of all: “Trials are coming; so be ready, and the way you get ready is by learning how to trust God in the sunshine so that, when you’re in the valley, you’ve already learned what walking by faith looks like. You don’t wait to get to the valley to learn.”
Dennis: You don’t wait ‘til the storm comes and it starts raining to go up on top of the roof to—
Bob: —to fix the leak.
Dennis: —to fix the leak.
Bob: And then, the second thing is: “When you’re in the valley and the circumstances are pressing, you have to pull back—step away from the painting, get the bigger picture, and counsel your own soul with what you know is true in the sunshine.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: “Preach it to yourself in the shadow. That’s how Jesus walks through that with you.”
20:00
So a wife who finds herself in a season of suffering—whether it’s the mild malaise we talked about earlier, where it’s just discouragement, or whether it’s a significant period of suffering—she has to counsel her own soul and remind herself of what’s true and hang onto that.
Barbara: And she needs to realize that God wants to use the hard times for the good of her marriage. It’s not just for her good or her husband’s good, or for the betterment of some circumstance, but God really wants to use these difficulties to help them, as a couple / a husband and a wife, grow closer together. We suffer differently / we handle things differently, but that’s part of what God wants to do to help us become more one—is for me to share what I’m feeling when we’re suffering, and for me to listen to Dennis share what he’s feeling or, when he doesn’t share what he’s feeling, to trust that God is at work in his soul.
21:00
As we go through that experience together, it bonds us together more than on days when we’re not struggling.
Dennis: What I’d have to say to that is—I wish, at this point, I could reach through the radio—whether it’s a phone, or a computer, or your car, or in your shop / wherever you’re listening—and just put an arm around you and say, “Oh, we have such a shallow view of love!”
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: We think love is like the movies depict it—a couple walking off in the sunset, arm in arm, with the soft breeze, and the music swelling, and people applauding. The reality is—a lot of love is learned in the valley, where two people aren’t feeling the same thing / where two people aren’t finding a lot of romance because there’s no room in the valley, sometimes, for romance. It’s where two people learn how to really love because they meet the God of love in the valley, and they begin to understand He loves them—
22:00
—that’s what they’re supposed to reflect to one another.
Bob: I think there are a lot of wives who are really going to be helped as they get a chance to read your reflections on how God uses suffering in a marriage relationship and in a family—how God has used it in your life as you’ve gone through seasons of suffering. You write about this in your new book, Letters to My Daughters.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: We are making that book available this month to listeners who can support the ministry of FamilyLife with a donation of any amount. We are a listener-supported ministry. We depend on your donations to be able to continue the work of FamilyLife Today. If you can help with a donation this month, we’d like to send you a copy of Barbara’s brand-new book, Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife.
Go to FamilyLifeToday.com—you can make a donation online if you’d like. Or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to make a donation over the phone.
23:00
Or you can mail your donation to FamilyLife Today at PO Box 7111, Little Rock, AR; our zip code is 72223. Let me just say, “Thanks,” in advance for your support of this ministry. We hope you enjoy Barbara’s new book, Letters to My Daughters.
We want to say, “Congratulations!” today to our friends, Wayne and Carrie Owen. They live in Sacramento, California. I lived in Sacramento for a while. In fact, I worked at the radio station where they listen to FamilyLife Today—at KFIA. The Owens have been married 29 years today—“Congratulations!” to them.
If you have an anniversary coming up later this year, we’d like to help you celebrate. We will send you some text messages or emails just prior to your anniversary—just some little prompts for you to begin to get ready to celebrate your special day. We just need to know what your special day. So call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY and let us know your anniversary date.
24:00
Or you can go online at FamilyLifeToday.com and leave us your anniversary date and let us know whether you’d like those messages sent to you by email or by text message.
Now, tomorrow, we want to spend time talking about how fear can affect a family. We especially want to look at blended or stepfamilies. We’re going to hear from Ron Deal tomorrow with thoughts on the subject of fear. I hope you can tune in for that.
I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch—special help today from Mark Ramey. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.
FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas.
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Embracing the Differences
7 Jan 2020· Letters To My Daughters
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete.
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: —since college.
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: Right.
Bob: [To Barbara] After college, you went to the east coast and worked with Campus Crusade.
Barbara: Correct.
Dennis: University of South Carolina.
Bob: [To Dennis] Where did you go?
Dennis: I was in Dallas/Ft. Worth area, working with high school kids.
Bob: You kept up your friendship—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —but there was nothing romantic between the two of you.
Barbara: No, nothing romantic. We had been really good friends for three years. I really thought of Dennis as a brother—he was just a great, great friend.
Dennis: She showed up in Dallas and needed to be shown around—kind of where everything was / kind of how you get around—so I’d pick her up, take her to work.
Bob: Now, were you thinking of her like your sister at this point?
6:00
Dennis: Yes, I really was. It was not romantic—it really wasn’t—which is really a cheap shot on your part—[Laughter]—to call out this thing that I took her on as a romantic date because we were just hanging out!
Barbara: That’s right—we were.
Bob: Was this before—this date we’re about to talk about—was this before or after you had tried to hold hands with her in the parking lot?
Dennis: Way before.
Barbara: I have no idea.
Dennis: Way before.
Bob: Really?
Barbara: I would think so—yes.
Dennis: Oh, yes; oh, yes.
Bob: Okay.
Barbara: I would guess.
Bob: It’s just friends: “Hey, do you want to hang out tomorrow?”
Dennis: Yes. I’d take her back to her apartment, and we’d kind of sit on the stairs and talk—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: Just visit.
Dennis: —until about 2:00 in the morning—[Laughter]—just like a couple of friends.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: Yes.
Barbara: Yes. [Dennis laughing]
Bob: Okay. So he says, “Do you want to hang out tomorrow?” and he comes and picks you up.
Barbara: He did.
Bob: Did you know where you were going?
Barbara: You know, I don’t remember—it was too long ago. I don’t remember if I knew or not, but I knew it was casual. I knew we were going to go on a picnic. He took me to some remote place outside of Dallas/Ft. Worth—
7:00
Bob: Now wait. I’ve got to stop you here. You’re taking her on a picnic. You’re not taking your buddy—“Let’s go hang out,”— on a picnic. There’s more going on here in your mind [Barbara laughing] than just, “Let’s hang out together.”
Dennis: She needed to understand where the riverbanks were—
Bob: Alright.
Barbara: Like I really care!
Bob: We understand one another here; okay. So he picks you up? [Laughter]
Barbara: Yes. We take off to parts unknown because I’d never really been in Texas in my life. I didn’t know where we were going, but I trusted him. We show up at this stream, or river, or pool of water, or something—I don’t know where it was!
Dennis: I don’t know where it was—it was below a dam somewhere.
Barbara: Gosh; I couldn’t begin to tell you.
Dennis: It was murky / it was fishy-smelling. It was a great date!
Barbara: All I know is he pulls out a fishing pole—fishing rod / fishing thing—I didn’t know what a fishing thing was! [Laughter] Oh, how funny!
Bob: One of the things you observed or learned, when you shared this story with your daughters—it was really to talk about the fact that, in relationships, you’ve got to make some adjustments and be ready for the fact that you’re two very different people.
Barbara: Exactly; because after we married, about three months later, we moved to Colorado.
8:00
In Colorado, there was abundant fishing.
Bob: You married three months later—after the fishing date?
Barbara: Yes!
Dennis: You caught up on that small detail. [Laughter]
Bob: I just thought our listeners ought to be aware. [Laughter] It went from zero to sixty.
Dennis: I’m a man of action, Bob.
Bob: This was a sports car relationship. [Laughter] So, from the day you said, “Will you…” to the day you said, “I do,”—
Barbara: —was six weeks.
Bob: Six weeks?
Barbara: Six weeks.
Bob: You said, “I’ll be the Fish Queen for as long as we both shall live.” [Laughter]
Dennis: Then, on our honeymoon, I took her camping and trout fishing. [Laughter] We need to get to the point of the book though—she’s talking about how we, as men and women, are different.
Barbara: That’s right.
Dennis: I mean, we did start out our marriage—really, not polar opposites—because we enjoyed one another.
Barbara: Yes, we had a great time; but, had you asked me what I would have pictured for the early years of our marriage, I would not have pictured traipsing around in the mountains—
9:00
—fishing, and camping, and all of those things—because none of that was a part of my background, growing up. They were totally brand-new experiences. I learned, by those experiences, that marrying someone is merging together two vastly different—not just personalities—but life experiences. As Dennis used to say, all the time, “It’s like merging two countries.”
Bob: Yes.
Barbara: Because we are very different, as men and women—we’re very different in our life experiences / our outlook—everything is different. So those early years are years of discovery. What you do with what you discover sets the tone and the foundation for your marriage.
Bob: Obviously, we’re talking to Barbara Rainey, who is joining us today on FamilyLife Today. We’re talking about the wisdom that you want to pass on to younger women—specifically to your daughters—about being a wife. You’ve just written a book called Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife.
10:00
What are the big ideas that you want to pass on to your daughters in this area of marital differences?
Barbara: First of all—the first big idea is that there are going to be differences. It‘s normal to be diametrically opposite on all kinds of fronts. Because what happens—when we’re engaged / and dating but then engaged—we tend to think: “Oh, we’re so much alike, and we love each other so much—we’ll never have clashes. Yes; if we do, we can handle them. We love each other so much that it’s not going to be difficult.”
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.
Bob: Yes.
Barbara: All of a sudden, what was cute isn’t so cute anymore; and you think, “Now, what do I do?”
Bob: We have this tendency to think different means wrong.
Barbara: Wrong; yes.
11:00
Bob: “This is the way I think; and it’s the way I think naturally. So I must be right; and if you think differently, we need to fix you so you think like me.”
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: That’s part of the awakening and adjusting that both wives and husbands have to do in the early stages of a relationship; right?
Barbara: Exactly; because that’s one of the beautiful things about marriage—is how it broadens our perspective. I write about that in telling these stories about fishing. I knew nothing about fishing; but because of who I married, the horizons of my life have been greatly expanded and broadened. I could have either fought that, and resisted that, and said: “I don’t want any part of that! That’s foreign to me. I don’t like it”; but by embracing who he was, and his differences as a person, my life is much richer because of that.
I think, if we can encourage these young wives—and husbands too / but this is for the wives right now—to welcome those differences as an opportunity to grow as an individual, it will make it easier.
Dennis: I like what you wrote in your book here—
12:00
—you said: “These new realities created some minor earthquakes in my life—rumblings that shook my familiar, comfortable foundation. I was discovering that we were not as much alike as I’d originally thought. We were opposites who were attracted to one another but found ourselves, like magnets, that repel each other.”
And then she goes on to write about how I would make a decision compared to how she would make one.
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: I’d see something that needed to be done or something I felt like we ought to go do—I’d process at the speed of light and off we’d go.
Bob: Right.
Dennis: Barbara, on the other hand, processes a little slower. In fact—
Barbara: —a lot slower.
Dennis: —a lot slower.
Barbara: Is that what you were going to say?
Bob: A little more thoughtfully—with a little broader perspective.
Dennis: I’ve been enriched by that, but I promise you—if, early in our marriage, we had set up war with one another in two separate bunkers.
13:00
You could easily have built a case between two very different people, who had started out their marriage together, but now really can’t get along and don’t see one another—as we teach at the Weekend to Remember marriage getaway—as “God’s perfect gift for you.”
Bob: You describe how you began to approach these differences in your marriage. You call it the “Bookend Principle.”
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: Explain what that is.
Barbara: The Bookend Principle is something that Dennis and I practiced with one another; and then, after the fact, sort of came up with the name for that. What we have done through the years is—when we’ve had disagreements over our differences or conversations trying to understand one another—we would say to each other: “I love you, and I would marry you all over again. This may be hard, this may be confusing, this may be difficult—it may not be fixed in a single conversation, like we would always like; but that’s okay. I love you and I’m committed to you, and I would do it all over again.”
14:00
That statement of reaffirmation of our vows and commitment to one another provides a level of security to continue to have these discussions about our differences. I think it’s a good habit. It was a good habit for us because you can get so caught up in how different we are—and how his differences grate on me or make life difficult for me and my differences make life difficult for him—that you can subtly switch to becoming enemies rather than allies.
Bob: Were there times, or events, or evenings when you weren’t sure you loved him and you weren’t sure you’d marry him all over again?
Barbara: No. There were times when I didn’t feel loving—without question—but I never got to the place where I thought, “This was a big mistake,” because I knew that God had called us to marry each other. I knew that we were doing what we were supposed to do. So, therefore, if this was God’s will, and it was, then He would enable us to figure it out with time.
Bob: That issue was settled.
Barbara: Yes; “Done.”
Bob: That wasn’t open for reevaluation—
Barbara: No.
Bob: —reexamination—
Barbara: No.
Bob: —re-discussion.
15:00
At some point—when you stood and said, “I do,”—the ships were burned. You weren’t going to reconsider whether—
Barbara: I think that’s the mistake too many young couples are making today—is they get into it, and it becomes difficult—instead of saying, “We can work this out,” they say, “Gosh; we must have made a mistake.” They move to, “This is a mistake, and maybe there’s a way out,” rather than, “We can find a way through this / we can make it work,” and stick with it for the long haul.
Dennis: I look back on our marriage. I don’t remember ever entertaining the thought. And I mean by entertaining—I’m talking about cultivating the thought that I’d made a mistake.
I do wonder, looking back on it—this Bookend Principle of kind of starting out with a commitment that says, “I love you,” and then maybe, in the midst of an argument or after the argument has been exhausted, you say again: “I’m committed to you. I’d marry you all over again.”
16:00
It creates a safe place for two imperfect, very different people to hammer out their relationship together.
I think we’re an instant culture that is not used to having to take a lifetime to achieve this thing called “oneness.” What we were doing, back then—we were going through some very hard ground. I mean, it had not been plowed before—two very independent people—who had joined together in marriage, and who did rub one another the wrong way, and who, in their differences, missed each other over, and over, and over again—and, as a result, mis-communicated, disappointed, hurt one another. How do you maintain a relationship in the midst of that if you’re not committed?
Bob: I think it’s important because we can laugh about fishing dates, and whether you like fishing or not; but a lot of folks, who are listening, are going, “Look, our differences are not around whether you like fishing or not—
Barbara: Yes; exactly.
17:00
Bob: “Our differences are around core, fundamental, deeply-held issues in life. The fact that we’re miles apart on this—I just don’t know how to live with a husband / or a wife who does not embrace what’s dear to me at the center of my being.”
Barbara: Yes. That is a very difficult place to be. Even though Dennis and I never really had a crisis quite to that depth, we missed each other plenty of times. There are seasons in a marriage when it’s very dry and when there doesn’t feel like there’s much life. I would have to say that: “There is hope. There’s always hope, as long as we have breath, that if you are committed and you are teachable—both of you are teachable—and you hang in there, there will be a solution, given time.”
I think that we expect too much too quickly. We would like to have it happen quickly—I would like to have it happen more quickly too, but that’s just not the way of a marriage.
18:00
A marriage is slow, steady growth over a long length of time.
Dennis: If you go back to Genesis, Chapters 2 and 3, the way God commands a marriage to start is He commanded a man and a woman to leave father and mother. He commanded them to cleave to one another / to be committed to one another. And third, He commanded them to receive one another—to receive the other person as God’s gift for you.
If you practice those three concepts—leave, cleave, and receive—over, and over, and over again—if you practice that in your marriage / especially, in the early years—it doesn’t mean it’s ever going to be easy.
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: I asked Barbara how she would summarize our marriage. I was kind of hoping for “romantic,” [Laughter] “chill bumps”—
Barbara: —“wonderful.”
Dennis: You know? But instead, you said?
Barbara: “It’s been hard.”
Dennis: “Hard work.”
Barbara: “Hard work”; yes.
19:00
Dennis: Lots of hard work. I think a lot of young couples—and for that matter, older couples—are starting out marriages today not really expecting it to be as challenging and to demand perseverance like it does
Bob: I just have to come back around here because you’re right in this section of your book that—not only did your marriage start off with fishing—but through the years you’ve learned to enjoy hunting with your husband? [Laughter] Is that true?
Barbara: Well, not by his definition; no. Not by—
Dennis: I was waiting for the answer to that question.
Bob: I’m going to read to you what you wrote.
Barbara: Okay; okay. Read what I wrote.
Bob: “And I have learned to appreciate hunting.”
Barbara: Yes, “appreciate it.”
Bob: Maybe “appreciate” is a better word than—
Barbara: “Appreciate” is a better word. Yes
Bob: “I actually went with him on an elk hunt a few years ago—
Barbara: Yes. I did.
Bob: — “with the camo, the face paint, and the human scent killers sprayed on my body.”
Barbara: [Laughing] I did!
Barbara and Bob: “Aren’t you impressed?” [Laughter]
Bob: That’s what you say right here: “Aren’t you impressed?” [Laughter]
20:00
“We hiked and hiked and snuck up on a herd of elk hiding behind trees like clandestine spies following a double agent down a dark alley in Eastern Europe. It was really fun!”
Barbara: It was fun! [Laughter]
Bob: But the point is that we’re going to face these differences in the first years of our marriage.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: Some of them crop up ten years in—fifteen. It’s a life-long process of understanding “We’re different,” and making those adjustments.
Barbara: Exactly. That really is the point that I’m trying to make with these girls—is that the differences are there—they’re not to be changed and they’re going to be there for life. I think we somehow assume, early on, that a lot of this stuff is going to subside, or change, or moderate; but who we are is who we are.
I’m just amazed at how little really changes over time. You either fight it, and resent it, and resist it, or you join and learn to actually enjoy it and appreciate it.
21:00
Now, do I love to go hunting? No. I enjoyed that because it was active. We were hiking in the mountains, and it was beautiful.
Dennis: And it was warm.
Barbara: And it was reasonably warm; yes. But the kind of hunting that he is often inviting me to go on—which I have refused—is the kind where you get up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, in the winter, and you go sit. You can’t talk / you can hardly breathe, and it’s freezing. [Laughter]
Hiking in the mountains—we could talk as we went—until we actually saw the elk / then we had to be quiet. It was a much different kind of experience so I could appreciate that one. But sitting in a deer stand—I’ve done it once and I’m not real interested in going there again.
Bob: The point is—you don’t have to be interested in going there again to make your marriage work. This is a part of the dance. One of your chapters in your book, “Marriage Is Like Beautiful Dancing”—
22:00
—“Part of the dance is understanding what we do together and where it’s better to leave each other some space and some time to do things apart.”
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: I just think you have given some real great practical wisdom to a lot of wives in what you’ve written in your book, Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife. It’s brand new, and you can go to FamilyLifeToday.com to request your copy. Or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY and ask for the book, Letters to My Daughters, when you get in touch with us.
Now, as both of you guys know, this is our 40th anniversary as a ministry—2016. All year long, we are celebrating anniversaries. Today, we want to congratulate Abigail and Angelo Pinheiro. They live in Princeton, New Jersey. They listen to FamilyLife Today on WFIL. They’re celebrating 21 years of marriage today. “Congratulations!” to the Pinheiros—“Happy Anniversary!”
23:00
We’d love to help you celebrate your anniversary this year. In fact, if you will go to FamilyLifeToday.com and leave us your anniversary date, we’ll have some suggestions for you this year on how this year’s anniversary can be the best anniversary ever. It’s all because we are the “Proud Sponsor of Anniversaries.” There are a lot of anniversaries that have happened over the years because of how God has used FamilyLife in people’s lives for 40 years now.
Thanks to those of you who make FamilyLife possible. We’re listener-supported—we depend on your donations in order for this ministry to exist. This month, we’re hoping that God might raise up, in every state where FamilyLife Today is heard, 20 new families who would join us as Legacy Partners. We’re asking you—if you’re a regular FamilyLife Today listener / if God’s used this ministry in your life: “Would you be one of the families in your state to help support this program?”
It’s easy to do—go to FamilyLifeToday.com and click the button that says, “DONATE.”
24:00
There is information there about becoming a Legacy Partner or about how you can make a one-time gift to FamilyLife Today. Again, the website is FamilyLifeToday.com. You can also call and say, “I’m interested in becoming a Legacy Partner.” We’ll explain the whole process to you when you call 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.”
Now, tomorrow, we’re going to talk about the spiritual foundation in a marriage and how important that is. Barbara Rainey will be back with us. Hope you can be here as well.
I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I’m Bob Lepine. We will see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.
FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas.
Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.
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Leaning on God
7 Jan 2020· Letters To My Daughters
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete.
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 subtitle is The Art of Being a Wife—Barbara Rainey is showing us on FamilyLife Today.
Barbara, you started marriage as a committed follower of Christ. You were involved in ministry, but there were cracks in your spiritual foundation that started to show up under the pressure of marriage—
Barbara: Yes; they did. I first felt it most dramatically after our first child was born. We had moved for probably the fourth or fifth time—I can’t remember. We’d moved a bunch in those first two-and-a-half years of marriage. I remember one day just feeling really overwhelmed with these jobs I had. I was a wife, and I was a mother—and it was 24/7. Our new little baby didn’t come with an instruction manual, and I didn’t know what I was doing. We lived in California, and my mother was in Texas. It’s not like I could call her every day, or I could go visit her, or she could come over in the afternoon and babysit so I could take a nap. I mean, I was really very, very lonely. I was very isolated, and I was very bewildered as to how to make this thing work: “How do I do this wifing and mothering thing without any instructions?” I really remember feeling a sense of real aloneness in that season of my life. I tell a story in the book—would you like to hear it?—about how I ran away?
Bob: You ran away?!
Barbara: I ran away. [Laughter]
Dennis: It wasn’t far—but she did run away. [Laughter]
Barbara: No; it wasn’t far—No; it wasn’t far—but I had this—it really is what it was though. I wouldn’t have even said so at the time but, looking back on it, it really is a good expression of what I was feeling.
I went—out of just sheer frustration—I wasn’t really angry / I was just bewildered. I left Ashley sleeping in the crib or, maybe, she was in the infant seat or something in the living room. I don’t even know what Dennis was doing, but all I remember is that I went into the bathroom in our bedroom / our master bathroom and shut and locked the door. It was a teensy little master bathroom—it had a tub, and a toilet, with a little tiny counter with a sink in the middle. I sat on the toilet. Then I got uncomfortable, and I sat on the side of the tub. Then that got uncomfortable, and so I sat on the toilet again. The walls started to kind of close in on me and I thought, “Oh, now what do I do?”
I was just absolutely lost because I didn’t know how to—I just didn’t know how to do this thing. Finally, I came out. Thankfully my husband, in his love for me, did not go: “What an idiot you were! What were you thinking?”—you know, going in the bathroom and locking the door—“What was the point of that?” He didn’t belittle me / he didn’t make fun of me. He didn’t criticize me. He, I’m sure, gave me a hug; and we sat down and talked.
Now, what it was all about—I can’t even begin to tell you. What he said to me—I don’t remember—but I remember the emotion of the moment—that I was lost. I didn’t know how to do this thing called marriage, I didn’t know how to do this thing called mothering, and I didn’t know where to go for help. That was the first real sort of moment of awakening—when I realized this was all bigger than I could handle, and I needed something outside of myself to make it work. It was God’s bringing me to this place of going, “You can’t do this on your own.”
Dennis: I think, as a husband—truthfully, I think I was clueless that she didn’t feel that confidence.
Barbara: Well, of course, you were! How could you know?
Dennis: This was an internal battle she was fighting.
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: So, when she did come out of the bathroom, I don’t think I had realized that she had actually locked herself in there—
Barbara: No; I’m sure you didn’t.
Dennis: —and had kind of run away from her responsibilities for a few minutes. I don’t think you were in there—probably, an hour—
Barbara: No; not more than an hour.
Dennis: —but the point is—as a husband, at that point / however imperfectly you may love—but just allow your wife to express the inability and to express her need for something to change / something to be different for her to move forward.
I think marriage is an opportunity for us to finish the process of growing up. In fact, I think it was Erma Bombeck who used to say, “Marriage is the last chance God gives us to grow up.”
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: I think it’s one of the tools God uses in our lives to take us to the end of ourselves—
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: —where He kind of puts an exclamation point at the end of the sentence that says: “You need Me! Signed, God.”
Barbara: Exactly; exactly.
Bob: But Barbara, you were a Christian—you studied the Scriptures, you were in church, you were—
Barbara: Yes! That’s what I thought! [Laughter]
Bob: So, what was missing?
Barbara: I think what was missing was an experiential understanding of my need for Christ. Yes, I knew I needed Christ when I received Him. Yes, I knew—had you asked me, an hour before I went into the bathroom and locked the door, “Do you need Christ?”—I would have said, “Of course!” But it was knowledge more than it was heart experience.
God loved me enough that He wanted me to feel my need for Him—for me to experience that I could not do this on my own. I think God loves us enough that He wants to take it from merely head knowledge to heart knowledge. It was the process that God was beginning to work in my life, where He was showing me: “No, you can’t do this on your own. Your knowledge of Me is not enough. You need to experience a need for the Holy Spirit to control your life—not just know it in your head that, ‘Yes, that’s the way you’re supposed to do it,’—but you need to be aware of your need for Me so you will, in fact, depend on Me.”
Bob: Okay; so, you’re aware of your need. Now, you’re going to do something different than you were doing. What’s that different thing? How does somebody come out of the bathroom and say: “Okay; I realize I need to rely on God, I need the Holy Spirit to work in my life; but what can I do to make that happen? How do I walk in the power of the Holy Spirit?”
Barbara: For me, it was very much an on-going process. It was a growth that happened over decades. But, in that moment, as much as I knew how, in that day of my life, I said: “Father, I want to trust You more. I want to be filled with the Spirit. I want You to control my life. I want You to give me the power and the strength to live the way that You want me to live—to do this thing called marriage that You’ve designed. This was Your idea in the first place; so therefore, You know how to make a marriage work. I want to depend on You more than I have in the past.”
I believe that I did; but then there came another point, on down the road, where God said: “Okay; now, you need to step it up a notch. You need to trust Me some more,”—
I was trusting myself again too much. There was another lesson; and then, a few years later, another one.
I think that, just as our children grow up, incrementally, through the years—they don’t go from being a baby to being 18 overnight. Physical growth is a slow process. There are all kinds of little things going on in their bodies, as they grow up, that we can’t even see. It does take a long time for an infant to become an adult. I think the journey is similar in our spiritual growth. We start out as spiritual infants. God gently and slowly works in our lives and our circumstances so that we become mature adults, spiritually, and don’t remain infants.
Bob: One of the areas where you had to learn to rely on the power of the Holy Spirit in your own life was when you decided you wanted to do a make-over project on your husband; right?
Barbara: [Laughing] Yes, I did that.
Bob: This was Extreme Makeover. Is that what you were—back before it was on TV—you were—
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: It felt that way! [Laughter]
Barbara: Yes, it probably did. What is so sad about this story is that I really thought I was doing the right thing! I was a Christian and I thought: “Okay; if there are some problems”—and there were—“if there are some things that I think are not right in our relationship”—and there were those things that I thought weren’t right—“What are you supposed to do about it? You’re supposed to pray about it; aren’t you? Yes, that makes sense.”
I made this list—I began to make a list of all the things that I thought were not right—primarily were not right about him / not so much things that weren’t right about me—because I really didn’t think there were that many things—
Bob: That was a small list / little, tiny list. So you’re setting off to try to fix—what kinds of things were you trying to fix?
Barbara: You know, that’s what’s sad—I can’t even remember what they were—but I’m quite sure it was all personality related because, as Dennis said earlier—he would get an idea, and [snaps fingers] process it that fast, and he’d be off and running. He didn’t think things through thoroughly like I did. He was much more spontaneous and spur of the moment. I’m sure it was related to these personality differences that I saw, early on.
I made this list, and I thought that the right thing to do was to pray about all the stuff that needed to be changed in his life.
Dennis: It was a long list too.
Bob: Well—[Laughing]
Barbara: It wasn’t really that long. [Laughter]
Bob: Is there something wrong with a wife identifying: “These are areas that I think God needs to be at work in my husband’s life, and I’m going to pray about God doing that work”?
Barbara: Yes; I think it’s probably not a real good approach.
Bob: Really?!
Barbara: Really; because what happened to me is—I had this list of 10 or 12 things. I prayed about them every day. What happened was—I thought about them all day after I repeated them to God in the morning. I would say: “Okay, God. Here are the things I think You need to work on in his life.” It was as if they were written in neon block letters on his back. Every time I saw him, I saw what was wrong because I was reminding myself, every day——before God, of course—but nonetheless, I was reminding myself every day of what I didn’t like and what I thought needed to be fixed.
I decided—after doing this for a couple of weeks—I thought: “You know, I don’t like the way this feels. This is not really a fun way to approach God.” It’s not fun—the results in my marriage—I just didn’t like the fact that I was constantly seeing all these things that I didn’t like.
Bob: [To Dennis] Did you have any idea there was neon on your back?
Dennis: I think I did know about the list.
Bob: Really?
Dennis: I do, and I think I definitely felt it when she threw the list away.
Barbara: That doesn’t surprise me—
Dennis: Yes.
Barbara: —because I felt it when I threw the list away too.
Dennis: I mean, all of a sudden, I’ve got my friend back instead of my judge.
Bob: What prompted you to throw the list away?
Barbara: I just began to realize that this wasn’t fun. I didn’t like focusing on everything that I thought was wrong with him. I thought: “You know, I didn’t used to feel this way. I used to like all these things about him, and now I don’t.” It wasn’t this great revelation—I just thought: “You know—this isn’t fun. I don’t like the way this makes me feel. I don’t like the flavor in our relationship.”
I told God specifically one day—and I remember saying this—I said: “God, if You want to change these things in his life, it is Your business. I am not going to ask You about this anymore because I don’t like what this is doing to our relationship. If You never change him, that is fine with me. It’s Your business, not mine. I’m going to move forward and not pray about all these things that I think need to be corrected anymore.”
I tore up the list, and I literally threw it away. Within days, I wasn’t thinking about all that stuff anymore.
Dennis: You know—
Barbara: It was a great relief.
Dennis: There’s a common thread here—to what she’s talking about—that I want Barbara to comment because this has been a theme of her life. You’re talking about, first of all, coming to the end of yourself, not once, but on multiple occasions, where you realize you couldn’t do this thing called “being a wife” / you couldn’t do this thing called “being a mom”—and you couldn’t change your husband.
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: It’s not you that’s going to do any of this. You came to the conclusion that it had to be Christ in you and you yielded to Him.
Barbara: Exactly.
Dennis: What would you say to a wife, who’s listening, who’s going: “Got me! I’m raising my hands, saying, ‘That’s me you’re describing’”? What’s the hope? What’s the solution?—not in terms of a formula—but what does she need to begin to practice?
Barbara: I think the bottom line is going to be the same for the rest of your life; 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. I need You. Will You empower me? Will you fill me with Your Spirit? Will You lead me?” because it really is coming to a point of giving up because what I was doing, when I was praying for you, is—I was trying to take over.
I was trying to tell God what I thought He needed to do in your life. I realized that I needed to give up. I need to let God do what He wanted to do, in His timetable. I basically—in essence, by saying, “I’m not going to do this anymore,’—I surrendered and I said, “Your will, not mine.”
Bob: You know, just about every time I speak at a Weekend to Remember® marriage getaway—first night, I’ll say, “If you brought your spouse here, hoping that together we could get her fixed or get him changed, I have bad news for you.” [Laughter] I say, “I’m not even going to be talking to your spouse this weekend. The only person I came here to talk to is you.” I think sometimes—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —rather than focusing on, “God change this other person,”—
Dennis: Yes.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —our prayers need to be redirected: “Lord, change me.”
Barbara: Exactly.
Bob: I had to chuckle, Barbara, because, at the end of this “Note to Your Daughters,” as you shared this story—you said, “More stories about my failures to come. [Barbara laughing] Love you, Mom.”
Really, this collection of letters that you’ve written to you daughters are lessons you’ve learned—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —some of them through not doing it right.
Barbara: Oh, lots of them learned through not doing it right because I think that’s when God gets our attention. When we’re sailing along, and everything’s smooth, that’s when we don’t think we need God; but when we realize we can’t do it, and we’re making mistakes, then we go, “Okay; then maybe—maybe I need some help—
Bob: Yes.
Barbara: —“and God needs to be my help.”
Dennis: —“and Jesus is that help.”
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: If the story of Easter is true—and it is / Christ is alive from the dead—then He can make this claim—He said in John 15, “I am the true vine.” Later on, in the same passage, He says, “As a branch cannot bear fruit by itself,”—does that sound familiar?
Bob: Yes.
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: “You can’t do it on your own!”—“As a branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in Me and I in him, he it is who bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.” If you’ve come to the end of yourself, it’s a good thing!
Barbara: It is—and that’s what God was trying to show me through this story and many, many other circumstances in my life. He was saying: “Apart from Me you can do nothing. Do you get it?”
Dennis: And I think life—
Barbara: And I said, “Yes!”
Dennis: And I think life is one long process of Him saying, “Do you get it yet?”
Barbara: Yes, it is.
Dennis: “Do you get it now?” [Laughter]
Bob: And one long process of surrender because we keep doing it, as you said, over and over again. I think, in addition to the surrender then, there needs to be godly counsel that helps point us in the right direction—to help us correct the patterns that are the patterns of the flesh that are with us and point us to new habits, that are spiritually-informed and spiritually-motivated.
Barbara, I think you are helping to provide the wise counsel for a lot of wives in what you’ve shared today and what you’ve written in your brand-new book, Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife. We’ve got the book in our FamilyLifeToday Resource Center. It’s brand-new—just now out in stores. We’d love for you to have a copy. Go to FamilyLifeToday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Ask about the book, Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife by Barbara Rainey when you get in touch with us.
We want to say a quick, “Congratulations!” and “Happy Anniversary!” to our friends, David and Diana Aguilar, who live in Union, Missouri. Today is their 29th wedding anniversary. The Aguilars listen to KSIV, out of St. Louis. They’ve been married since 1987.
We are the “Proud Sponsor of Anniversaries,” here at FamilyLife. We’re celebrating our 40th anniversary this year; but honestly, it’s not our anniversary that matters—it’s all of the anniversaries that have happened because of how God has used FamilyLife in the lives of so many couples over the last 40 years. It’s been humbling to be a part of that whole process.
If you help support this ministry, as a Legacy Partner or as somebody who gives an occasional donation, you’ve been a part of the process as well. Your support is what makes FamilyLife Today possible. We could not exist and could not do what we do if it weren’t for friends, like you, who help make this happen.
This month, we are praying and asking God that He would raise up 20 new families in every state where FamilyLife Today is heard to be new Legacy Partners, joining with us here at FamilyLife. Would you consider being one of those new Legacy Partner families? All you have to do is go to FamilyLifeToday.com and click where it says, “DONATE.” The information about becoming a Legacy Partner is available there. Or call: 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY”; and say, “I’m interested in becoming a Legacy Partner.”
Be sure to join us back tomorrow. We’re going to continue talking about a wife’s responsibility in her marriage. We’ll talk tomorrow about what happens when a woman wants to be a helper but it starts to go bad—and it can do that. We’ll talk about that tomorrow. Hope you can be here.
I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.
FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas.
Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.
We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?
Copyright © 2016 FamilyLife. All rights reserved.
www.FamilyLife.com
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Being His Helper
7 Jan 2020· Letters To My Daughters
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete.
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—
2:00
—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.
3:00
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.”
4:00
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 him to be. It’s far more of a person-building / it’s far more of a relationship-building concept than it is just tasks around the house, which is what we’ve relegated it to.
Bob: The phrase I used—the paraclete—to attach yourself to him and pour life into him.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: There really is something that a wife can—she can pour life into her husband; can’t she?
Barbara: Oh, absolutely. That’s why I have written about it in this section—about the example that the Holy Spirit is to us because the Holy Spirit does give us life. I think, in ways that we, as women, don’t realize—we give life to our husbands. I think the analogies between the two are great.
Bob: You’re not saying your role is to be the Holy Spirit to your husband.
6:00
Barbara: No. [Laughter] I am not to be the Holy Spirit, and convict him of sin, any more than he is to be Jesus Christ for me. But we model—
Bob: But you can learn; yes.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: Yes.
Barbara: —he models and imitates what Christ did in His sacrifice—and I can model my helping and being a helper after what the Holy Spirit does for us.
Dennis: Before we talk about what it means to truly be the helper, one of the things you believe strongly that it’s not—is it’s not being your husband’s mother.
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: Explain what you mean by that.
Barbara: I think what happens is—when we women have children and we become, not just wife, but wife and mother—there are a lot of things that we do, as mother, that are helping tasks. We’re constantly helping our children get dressed, we’re helping learn to tie their shoes, we help them learn to read, we help them with their homework, we help them get dressed, we help them in relationship issues when they’ve got friends and they’ve got problems in elementary school, junior high, and high school.
7:00
We are very much a helper with our children, but it’s an authoritative kind of helper. I’m the one in charge, and my child is to follow me. What happens so often in marriage is—that we wives forget sometimes to switch from being helper as mother to being helper as wife—and they’re very different. I’m not an authority with my husband / I’m not his teacher. For me to help him as if I am his teacher and he is to be my pupil—that’s backwards / that’s wrong. That’s not the kind of relationship that I’m supposed to have with him as a helper.
Bob: And you’re supposed to be able to switch gears on the fly on that kind of a deal?
Barbara: Yes, I think so; but that’s where it gets tricky. [Laughter]
Bob: So what does it look like if it’s not the kind of helper you would be with a kindergartener or a seventh grader? How is it different?
Barbara: It’s different because I have a peer-relationship with my husband—we are equals. I am not a peer with my child—I’m an authority with my child. That’s the fundamental difference.
8:00
For instance, Dennis and I had a conversation not too long ago. I don’t know if you’ll remember this—but we recently remodeled our living room. We got our couch recovered—because the kids are gone, we got it recovered in a very light color fabric, which I would have never done when we were raising kids. Now, that it’s just the two of us—we can handle this.
Not long after we had finished the remodeling, we had gotten the couch back from being reupholstered. We were eating, and Dennis wanted to eat in the living room. He plopped down on the couch—
Bob: I know where this is going. [Laughter]
Barbara: —with his plate.
Bob: Yes! [Laughter]
Dennis: Never happened at your place; has it Bob?
Bob: It wasn’t spaghetti; was it? I hope it wasn’t spaghetti.
Barbara: No, it wasn’t spaghetti—I don’t know what it was. As we sat there, I’m thinking: “This isn’t going to work. This isn’t what I had in mind. I don’t think this is a really good place to be eating our dinner.” We began—we had a conversation; and I said, “What would you think about always eating over there at the table?” He said, “I really would like to eat and watch TV some.”
9:00
Anyway, the point is that we talked through: “Where would be an acceptable place for him to eat, in the living room, where he could watch TV—watch a football game on Saturday afternoon.” We decided the couch is not where he would eat. He would eat over there in the chair—it’s on a part of the carpet that doesn’t stain as easily as the part in front of the couch does.
Dennis: Actually, what she encouraged me to do is run—
Barbara: So are you saying you don’t remember it this way? [Laughter]
Dennis: —run an extension cord outside and eat it in a lawn chair in front of the TV in the yard. [Laughter]
Barbara: Where there is a hose! [Laughter]
Bob: You didn’t put a bib on him or [Laughter] say, “You sit in this chair.”
Dennis: We were just talking about being a mother; were we not?
Barbara: That’s right; we were!
Bob: That’s what—so this is an illustration of how you help your husband? [Laughter]
Barbara: Well, it’s an illustration of how I—yes, how I help him [Laughter] eat like an adult—
Dennis: We worked it out.
Barbara: We did!
Dennis: We worked it out, and it is okay. I do think the point is—if you listen carefully to the illustration Barbara gave, we had a discussion.
Barbara: —as peers.
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I wasn’t telling you that you couldn’t eat on the couch—I said: “Would you be willing to eat over there?” / “Could we work out a compromise?” was the gist of the conversation.
Dennis: What I’d want a man to hear in the midst of this is that he has a very important assignment—to respect his wife, and her opinion, and her values, and what she’s about at that point—not just do what he wants to do. Philippians 2—we’ve quoted that many times, here on FamilyLife Today: “…not merely looking out for your own interests but for the interests of others.”
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: These little confrontations we’re talking about here are a clash of values. They don’t have to turn out and become where the wife ends up being the mother of the husband.
Bob: You tell about, how in your marriage—when you are travelling, back in the days before cell phones—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —you used to mother your husband in the airport?
Barbara: Yes. You know what’s interesting about this dilemma for women is—I don’t think we start out with that kind of an attitude.
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I think we genuinely/sincerely want to help. It just sort of evolves into a more parental attitude without even trying.
For instance, in the airport, when we used to travel before cell phones, Dennis would always want to make good use of his time. He’d walk across the area to another gate—wherever there happened to be a pay phone—and he would start making phone calls. I would sit in the waiting area and watch as every last passenger boarded the plane. They were about to close the door, and he was still on the phone.
Initially, I remember thinking: “He must not know that they’re boarding the plane. He must have not been paying attention.” I would get up and go over, and motion at the gate, and motion at my watch. He’d go, “I know; I know.” He’d get off the phone, and we’d get on the plane. Then the next time I would do the same thing. After a while, I started to become irritated because I thought, “I have to remind him all the time.”
Dennis: How many flights have we missed?
Barbara: Well, that’s the point! We never missed a flight because you were on the phone! [Laughter]
12:00
But initially, I genuinely thought he didn’t know what time it was and that he didn’t—he was so engaged in the phone call that he didn’t realize they were boarding. I wanted to help so that we didn’t miss the flight. Over time, it became more of a parental attitude on my part.
Dennis: I was going to say—I was going to say that—parental.
Barbara: It really was because I thought: ‘What’s the deal? Why can’t he get off the phone, and we can board with everybody else?” Then I started becoming critical.
So my point is—is that I think what we struggle with, as wives, is not necessarily starting out with a condescending attitude or a parental attitude. We really, genuinely want to help from our hearts; but it just sort of goes downhill sometimes.
Dennis: Let me take that, as an illustration though, and just ask this question: “How can a wife, in a situation like that, be a true helper?” The point here is—you’re not going to answer that question in the heat of the moment. You do it some other time when you’re not travelling.
13:00
The wife just simply says to her husband, “When everybody’s boarding, what would you like me to do?”
Barbara: Exactly—which is what I finally did.
Dennis: “Would you like me to come over and let you know, or am I to just trust you with that?” At that point—
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: —it is two peers respecting each other—and the husband feeling like he’s being trusted.
Barbara: Yes.
Dennis: He may—as I did—he may want her help.
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: Okay? That’s good! You’re working as teammates at that point. I think, at critical times like this—we allow these little rough spots like this to become major disagreements—at which we have a big argument and it ends up ruining the trip.
Bob: As I read through this part of the book, I have to confess to you that I think one of the challenges that I think a lot of wives / a lot of women struggle with is the issue of control.
Barbara: Yes; definitely.
Bob: “I want to be in control of my environment. I feel safer if I’m in control of things.”
Barbara: No question; no question.
14:00
Bob: So this impulse to want to be a helper—sometimes is not, “I want to help my husband,”—it’s: “I want to manage my husband—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —“and control my husband because I feel more comfortable.” You’re waving and saying, “Everybody else is boarding,”—not because you’re trying to help him—but because you’re getting nervous, and you’d like to get on the plane.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: And he needs to hurry up and get on there with you.
Barbara: No question.
Bob: It’s not helping—it’s controlling.
Barbara:And that’s why I’m saying it’s a difficult thing because 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 is that we, as women / we, as wives, need to be aware—that that shift happens—and to recognize when it does and to say: “Oh yeah; I’m being his mother, not his partner.
15:00
“I need to be his friend—we’re peers, we’re equals, we’re teammates—and we can work this out together rather than letting it become this great obstacle.
Dennis: So for wives—as they look at the subject of being a helper to their husbands—here’s the question I would encourage every wife to ask her husband: “Sweetheart, how can I be a better, customized helper to you?” because I really believe, Bob, if we could somehow zoom back and look at an individual marriage through God’s eyes—I believe He’s made the husband and the wife for one another. He made them with differences—with unique strengths, and abilities, and weaknesses—so they need each other and so they complement each other. I think many couples can live a lifetime and never ever understand how the wife— specifically: “In what areas / how can she be a customized helper for her husband?”—
16:00
—and then take good notes at what he says.
Barbara: Well, and that’s what I—one of the points that I really am hoping will come across in this book to my daughters—I want them to see the beauty that God has made in marriage—that the way I help my husband is different than the way Mary Ann helps you, Bob—
Bob: Yes.
Barbara: —different than the way my daughters will help their husbands because my husband needs something different than you would need. That’s the wonderful thing about marriage. God gave us very few rules for marriage—He gave us some guidelines to run on / some very specific things in Scripture—but He didn’t give us a hundred things to do in marriage. He gave us very few. Within that wonderful definition of marriage that we get out of Scripture, there is endless ability to be creative because we are two unique people. God wants us to design a unique relationship between the two of us.
17:00
Bob: Okay; I’ve got two questions. The first is: “There are some wives who are hearing this and going, ‘Well shouldn’t this thing work both ways? I mean, why am I the helper? Shouldn’t he be the helper to me too? Aren’t we supposed to help one another?’” You’re talking about teammates—so you’re the helper, but he’s the helper too; right?
Barbara: Yes; I think Dennis should answer that, but I think the real bottom line is—is that God has called men to serve. In that serving—of the husband serving the wife—that’s how he helps. He’s not given the title of helper, but he’s given the title of servant-leader. That’s how he would help his wife.
Dennis: Yes, I think Barbara mentioned the key term there—servant-leader. A husband is given the title, in Ephesians 5, “head,”—he is the authority. The buck does stop with him. He has responsibility to deny himself, to love his wife as Christ loved the church, and to be—as Barbara said—a servant-leader of her and meeting her needs.
I don’t think a husband—in the sense of what we’re talking about a wife being a helper—is to be his wife’s helper.
18:00
I think he’s to be—the servant, the lover, the leader, the nourisher, the cherisher of her soul, and to look out for her best interest, and her horizons, and maximize her life—but he’s got a different assignment—
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: —with her than she has with him.
Bob: Well, in fact, I was meeting with a group of guys recently. We were talking about this designation of servant-leader. We all kind of agreed that maybe it would be better to refer to husbands as shepherd-leaders than servant-leaders because the servant idea can—can almost make it sound like: “As long as your wife’s happy, you’re doing what you need to do.” That’s the trap I fell in, for years—was to think, ‘As long as Mary Ann’s happy—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —“then I’m—I’m being what God wants me to be.” It’s not necessarily her momentary happiness that I should be focused on—
Dennis: No, it’s not.
Bob: —it’s the shepherding and leading of her—wisely, gently, carefully, feeding, guiding, caring for her.
19:00
Dennis: —protecting.
Bob: That’s right. So it was a—it was a helpful metaphor—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —to say: “A man should be a shepherd-leader and a wife should respond and should help in that process.”
My other question, though, for you is for the wife who would say: “If I went to my husband and said, ‘How would you like me to be your customized helper?’ he would say, ‘Get off my back and leave me alone! Just let me do what I want to do.’”
Dennis: But that’s not a good answer.
Bob: So does she tell him that?!
Barbara: Well, I think she frames the question a little differently. I think she says, in a particular situation—like, when Dennis and I were travelling, I could have said to him, “Is there anything I can do to help you so that we can get on our flight on time?” rather than some generic question that he might not be able to put words to. It’d be much better if she said, “How can I help you when we are…” or “…when this situation happens?” or “How can I encourage you when you’ve had a bad day at work?” If she will be specific, then she might get a more specific answer that would be easier for her to perhaps know what to do with.
20:00
Bob: But if he says, “Just leave me alone,” how does she respond to that?
Barbara: I think she needs to say: “What do you mean by leave you alone? What do you want me to back off on?” I think—if she really, genuinely wants to be a better helper—then she needs to ask some follow-up questions / find out: “What does he mean by that?”
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: I think, over a lifetime together, this is a great question to interact about. In fact, we’d been married for 38 years before the thought ever occurred to me. I was talking to Barbara about her book—just to explore a little bit: “What have we learned in our marriage about how you are a great helper to me?” One of the areas she is—is she’s a wise counsellor.
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: She gives me the perspective that I most count on for my life, from a human perspective. Now, I go to the Bible for my guidance and to guide in prayer; but she’s my closest friend—knows me well, looking out for my best interest in multiple ways.
21:00
I go to her for her advice, her counsel, and her perspective. She is a great—
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: —helper in that area. I think, for a man, if he can just pull back and ask—if you’ve been married 10 years: “How is your wife a great helper to you? How do you see her having been designed by God to help you?”
Another way for Barbara is—and I told her this—she brings great beauty to my life. She’s an artist—she likes design / she notices things years before I do. [Laughter] Then she points them out and I enjoy them. Because of her in my life—not only is she beautiful—but she brings beauty to my life and an appreciation for the aesthetics that God has created.
Bob: She keeps the sofa looking beautiful, too, by assigning you a place to sit. [Laughter]
Barbara: Now Bob, I didn’t assign now—
Dennis: —in the yard!
Barbara: —we agreed!
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Dennis: —in the garage, with the hose! [Laughter]
Bob: The thing is—this is a part of the reality of marriage that you guys have, after more than 40 years of being together—you’ve figured out how to make all of this work. Barbara—now for you to be speaking into the lives of younger women / younger wives—I’m really excited about the book that is now available: Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife by Barbara Rainey. You can go online at FamilyLifeToday.com in order to request a copy of the book, or you can call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, the title is Letters to My Daughters by Barbara Rainey. Order, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or call us at 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.”
By the way, I should have you give the shout-out today to some friends of ours, Keith and Mary Kirkland, celebrating their 15th wedding anniversary today.
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They live in Montgomery, Alabama—listen to WLBF. Mary is a big fan of the resources you’ve created for homes in the Ever Thine Home collection. They’ve got the Easter banner, they’ve got Adorenaments, they’ve got your “Behold the Lamb” resource—I mean, she’s got a bunch of stuff in her home, and they’re friends of this ministry. They’ve helped support the work that FamilyLife Today is doing. If it weren’t for friends, like the Kirklands, FamilyLife Today couldn’t do all that we do. We’re listener-supported, and your donations make this ministry possible.
During this month, we are hoping that God would raise up, from among our listeners, 20 new families in every state—who would be brand-new Legacy Partners—monthly donors, supporting the ministry of FamilyLife Today. We’d like to ask you to consider being one of the families in your state helping to keep FamilyLife Today on the air in this community.
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You can become a Legacy Partner by going to FamilyLifeToday.com. Click the link that says, “DONATE,”—the information’s available there—or call 1-800- FL-TODAY and say, “I want to become a Legacy Partner.” We hope to hear from you.
We hope you can join us back tomorrow when we’re going to talk about what’s at the heart of being a godly woman. Priscilla Shirer is going to join us, and we’ll talk about a godly woman’s priorities tomorrow. Hope you can be here for that.
I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.
FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas.
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Keys to a Healthy Marriage
6 Jan 2020· Letters To My Daughters
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete.
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.
1:00

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]
2:00
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.
3:00
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.
4:00
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.
5:00
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—
6:00
—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 said, “For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, shall cleave to his wife and the two shall become one [emphasis added].” One of the problems, Bob—and many of our listeners may be experiencing this right now—we have reversed the order.
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: We’re trying to become one without the leaving and the cleaving—the commitment that really bonds two broken human beings hearts to one another and gives you the only chance of two broken people experiencing marriage for a lifetime, as Barbara was talking about here.
7:00
Bob: Barbara, explain to our listeners why, for a wife / for a woman this issue of a solid commitment is so critical when it comes to intimacy.
Barbara: In the book I tell the story of a book that we used to read when our kids were growing up, called The Secret Garden. It’s the story of a young woman / a young girl, who grew up in a huge manor estate in England. As she was growing up there, she discovered this garden; and it was a secret garden. It had walls all the way around it that were six to eight feet tall, brick or stone walls. As she dug though the ivy, she found a door. The door was locked and she couldn’t get in. Over time, she began to continue to dig around. One day, she found a key and was able to unlock the door and go in.
I use that story in the book because I liken this area of our marriage—this intimacy / this sex in our marriage—to a secret garden.
8:00
It’s a place that only a husband and wife go together—no one else is allowed. It is for them only. I think the reason commitment is so important is because 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. We need the walls that that secret garden had. We need the walls of a commitment. We need that security, as women in particular, but men need it as well for us to experience what God intended for us to experience in marriage. 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: You’re talking about something that goes far beyond just the biological experience of intimacy—
9:00
Barbara: Absolutely!
Bob: —because the biology may not need that, but the oneness we’re talking about here—
Barbara: Correct.
Bob: —really requires that we can trust one another—
Dennis: Yes.
Bob: —in order to be vulnerable with one another.
Dennis: In fact, Bob, I think what you’re hitting on here is so important. I think one of the least understood passages in Scripture—there’s a reason why we can’t understand it—Genesis, Chapter 2, verse 25. I’m going to read it and then I’m going to explain why we don’t understand it—it says, “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” That verse comes right after the leave, cleave, and become one. The reason we can’t understand what that means—we have never experienced what Adam and Eve did in the garden before the fall.
Barbara: That’s right; yes.
10:00
Dennis: Two people, totally naked, totally exposed, totally transparent with one another—and there was no shame. There was joy / there was delight—there was the experience of God and one another—there was no hiding in a marriage back then.
When it comes to the subject of sex, I think we’re trying to get to that point of being naked and unashamed; but we don’t know how to get there. So a lot of single people are co-habiting—they’re thinking they can experience the sexual delights of marriage without the commitment—
Bob: Right.
Dennis: —and they can’t! Barbara’s talking about a commitment that creates safety around this garden.
Bob: There is something about being able to say: “You’re safe. I’m not going anywhere.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: “I will not expose what happens here. You can be who you are and still be loved.” That’s what we long for—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —and that is what is supposed to be going on in intimacy in a marriage relationship.
11:00
Barbara: That’s what we get married for—we get married to be loved unconditionally. That’s our expectation and our hope when we say, “I do”; but we don’t realize that it’s not just the physical oneness that produces that. It’s all of the conversations—it’s learning to be, as Dennis just said, naked and unashamed. That does not happen quickly.
If you’ll think about what happened in Genesis—after that verse where Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed—and then, when the fall happened, what was the first thing that Adam and Eve experienced?
Bob: Their shame.
Barbara: Their shame and they were afraid.
Bob: Yes.
Barbara: I think we vastly underestimate the fears that we bring into marriage. All of us come into marriage with fears, even if we don’t have past experiences that were negative or were difficult. We still have the fear of rejection; we have the fear of exposure; we have the fear of being known—
12:00
—just the question, “If you really knew me as I am inside—as I know I am inside—would he still love me?” A man thinks the same thing, “If she really knew what I thought—if she really knew who I was—would she still accept me?”
I think that fear—that we all bring into a marriage—takes time to expose those fears because it’s a risk to do so. It takes time to work toward that place of being unashamed. It doesn’t ever totally go away, because it won’t until we go to heaven; but we can make great progress / we can make great strides in that comfort level that we all long for when we get married.
Dennis: That’s exactly right.
I have to use a present-day illustration, Bob, of something that really makes me sad—but immediately after the evening news / the local news here, there’s one of these Hollywood reports. It always is telling of some breakup of some Hollywood marriage.
13:00
I really feel a great deal of compassion, because they don’t understand the God who made this relationship and how He made them to function. In their lost-ness, they’re just trying to reach out to one another and experience that oneness and experience the intimacy of a great relationship.
But I’ve got to tell you—Barbara and I have been married 44 years—and there have been a lot of incredible highs and sadly, some tough, tough lows. The thing that has kept us safe and secure in our relationship is we’ve never/ever used the “D” word—divorce. It has never crossed our lips. We have used the “C” word—covenant-keeping love for a lifetime. In the process of doing that, two imperfect people are wobbling their way to the finish line, attempting to represent how God designed marriage to proclaim His love to the world; because a marriage is to be a model of Christ and the church.
14:00
It is representative of a husband who loves, serves, leads, and gives his life on behalf of his wife—and a wife who supports her husband and loves him back. One of the ways they both do this is through the gift of sexual intimacy in marriage.
Bob: Barbara, I had to smile when I read this letter from your daughter, saying, “So, what’s the big deal?” for two reasons. One is because there is a stereotype that says: “This is how women view sex in marriage.” Men are very different. I stop to think to myself, “Would a man ever write to his father, ‘So Dad—’
Barbara: “What’s the big deal?” [Laughter]
Bob: —“’What’s the big deal? We’re married now. I don’t get it—what’s the big deal?’” I also smiled because there’s a sense in which the mystery of marital intimacy—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —is just beginning to unfold in the early days of marriage; right?
15:00
Barbara: That’s a word that I use a lot in my book—is the word, “mystery,”—because I think it helps us be more at peace with the process. When we realize that marriage is a mystery—that we will never, totally understand it—because, as Dennis just said, it is a picture of Christ’s relationship with us. Just accepting the fact that marriage is a mystery kind of gives you a sense of: “Ah! I can rest. I can relax.” It is a mystery and it is a process of beginning to discover what God has built in this, all along, from the very beginning. As we’ve been saying, it’s about getting to know one another and being transparent with one another.
Dennis: When we think of a mystery, we think of an unsolved murder case or a crime.
Bob: —a puzzle.
Dennis: Yes; exactly. This mystery is going to be revealed—[Laughter] —in heaven, in eternity, with Jesus Christ and the church at the wedding feast of the bridegroom and the bride—the church being the bride.
16:00
In between time, between now—this thing called “time”—and eternity, here you are, as a couple, hammering out your commitment and attempting to be naked and unashamed in a way that honors God. It’s tough, and it’s hard.
I would ask you, Barbara, as a young wife might come to you—what would you say is the most important thing she needs to know as she approaches this most intimate area of the marriage relationship? What does she need to know and do?
Barbara: I think the first thing she needs to know—and she may already know this—but I think it bears repeating—and that is that marriage is holy. I think that when we see it as—not just a gift, not just a privilege, not just something we get to experience—but there is an element of marriage that has a holy aspect to it; because God created it and because He lives in our lives, there is a holiness there.
17:00
I think that helps us put it in right perspective—it helps us go: “Well no wonder it’s so hard! No wonder it’s a challenge to discover the kind of oneness that we got married for.”
Secondly, from there, I want to say, too, that I would strongly encourage any young wife to remember that it’s an important part of the relationship. It’s really a mirror of the rest of your relationship. You may feel like you’re having good sex; but if you’re not really becoming one—if you’re not really being transparent with one another—then you’re not going to be really growing together in other areas of your relationship.
It’s important that you keep that area of your marriage healthy and growing and keep it alive. The temptation is—when it gets hard, is to just say, “Well, forget it!” but you can’t give up on it because it’s one of the important parts that God has built into a marriage. Because God created it and God sanctioned it, then we need to learn what He wants us to do with it—we need to figure it out.
18:00
Bob: You know a lot of wives, who are saying, “I hear you and I agree with you; and if I was not tired all the time,—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: “—I would give more attention to this! But I am tired all the time! How do I make this a priority, and how do I make it important when I’m exhausted?”
Barbara: Did you read that in my book?
Bob: Well, I did. Yes! [Laughter]
Barbara: Yes; I talk about that in the book, because that is such a common complaint for women. I get it! I was tired all the time—and Dennis used to say he would be a very wealthy man if he had a dollar for every time I said, “I am so tired!” [Laughter] Right?
Dennis: Right! [Laughter]
Barbara: But even if we are so tired—and we are—and a lot of women are exhausted all the time because of the responsibilities of jobs and kids—and just the emotional weight of being in life. There are just so many ups and downs that we feel so deeply; and yet, it’s learning to prioritize your life.
19:00
It’s deciding, during a particular day, that you’re going to take a nap so you’ve got more energy for your husband at night or it’s choosing not to add these things to your schedule so that you can have more energy and more focus for your marriage. It’s choosing to keep your marriage a priority—make it a priority. That’s hard to do sometimes. There were plenty of times when I would take a nap in the afternoon and I’d still be exhausted at night.
Dennis: That’s correct! [Laughter]
Barbara: It’s not a quick and easy solution. [Laughter]
Dennis: I just want to insert something. There are men, who are listening right now: “That’s right! She’s just tired too much.” To which I would say to the guys: “Are you cleaning up the kitchen—
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: “—after dinner? Are you helping to get the kids ready for bed?—brush their teeth, read them a story, pray with them. Get down on your knees, next to them, and look them in the eyes and ask them how their day was,”—but take some of your wife’s load off of her and assume it yourself!
20:00
There is a concept in the Bible called “bearing one another’s burdens.” I do think some guys—they want sex, but they don’t want the process of loving—that means nourishing, which is creating growth—and cherishing, which is creating value—
Bob: Yes.
Dennis: —they don’t want to do that with their wife. When you help your wife with her household duties, with the kids and all—you’re making a statement of value to your wife that she ultimately will hear.
Bob: I have to ask you about the wife, who would say, “This is a priority for me—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —“but it’s less a priority for my husband.”
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: Let me first of all, though, let our listeners know how they can get a copy of the book that you’ve written, which is called Letters to My Daughters. It’s a book that we’ve got in our FamilyLife Today Resource Center. You address, not only this subject, but you address a variety of subjects—letters that your daughters and daughters-in-law have written to you over the years, asking questions about being a godly wife and how you’ve responded to those letters that they’ve written.
21:00
You can go to our website, FamilyLifeToday.com, to order a copy of the book; or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY and order by phone. Again the website is FamilyLifeToday.com; and you can call 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.”
Dennis: Bob, I just want to say a word to our listeners. When you buy a book from FamilyLife Today, you’re helping to keep this radio broadcast on the air. I’ve got to tell you—the people who really float this ship right here, to keep FamilyLife Today broadcasting, are Legacy Partners. They’re people who give, every month, and who say: “I want to keep this kind of right-thinking—a biblical approach to marriage, to sex, to intimacy—I want to keep this on the air in my community; because this is going to make a difference in a lot of people’s lives.” I just want to say, “Thanks,” to Legacy Partners right now: “Thank you for making this broadcast possible.”
Bob: If you’d like to join the Legacy Partner team, we could use more Legacy Partners.
22:00
You can go to FamilyLifeToday.com and click the link, where it says, “Donate.” There’s information available there about becoming a Legacy Partner. Again, our website is FamilyLifeToday.com.
Barbara Rainey has joined us today. We’ve been talking about Chapter 6 in her book, Letters to My Daughters. Barbara, we started the conversation with a letter that you got from one of your daughters, saying, “What’s the big deal?” There are some wives, who have been listening to us have this conversation, and they have said, “My question is: ‘Why isn’t this a bigger deal—
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: —“’for my husband? I’m ready. In fact, I feel robbed, or starved, or like there’s something wrong with me! What do I do?”
Barbara: I interviewed a couple of young women when I wrote this particular portion of the chapter because I wanted to know what they thought, and what they felt, and what they were experiencing. It’s interesting—I don’t have statistics to back this up—but I did do some research and talked to a number of different counselors and different people.
23:00
I think, oftentimes, there are issues in a young man’s life that are keeping him from wanting to have sex with his wife; and typically, it’s pornography.
In the women that I talked to—when I was preparing to write this chapter—that was the issue with most of these young men. There was so much shame attached to them as men / as young men because they were exposed, when they were children or when they were teenagers, and they just didn’t know how to handle it—they still don’t know how to handle it. That shame is keeping them from wanting to be one, sexually, with their wife.
Whether it is pornography or whether it is something else, the encouragement that I got from those that I talked to and that I would offer to you is that this is a concern that you need to carry with him. Dennis just mentioned, a minute ago, the verse, “Bear one another’s burdens.” Once you become married, your burdens become one another’s. You need to carry those burdens together.
24:00
I would encourage a wife, who is in that situation, to say to her husband: “You know, I know this is hard; and this is hard for me too. Let’s go find someone who can help us; because I’m committed to you for a lifetime, and you agreed to be committed to me for a lifetime. Let’s figure out what we need to do. Let’s find what challenges we need to face. Let’s do the work together to make our marriage what God intended it to be.”
I know—from talking to these women—that it can change / it can be redeemed. God can change those broken places in both of our lives and bring you to a place where marriage is what you wanted it to be and where sex, in particular, is as God designed it to be.
Bob: FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas.
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Surviving the Seasons of Intimacy
6 Jan 2020· Letters To My Daughters
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete.
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.
1:00
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.
2:00
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.
3:00
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…
4:00
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.
5:00
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 a dangerous assumption. I think that it’s a very real possibility in a lot of marriages, because—
6:00
—you’re right—there is a middle ground in marriage, where it’s just hard work; because you have so many demands on both of your lives. There’s not much energy left over; there’s not much enthusiasm; there’s not much rest. 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.
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, which is why there are so many affairs. There are so many couples, who are splitting up and finding new partners, because it is exciting. They’re finding that excitement that they once had in the early days of their marriage.
7:00
But it’s not going to satisfy; it’s not going to replace; it’s not going to be better. It’s actually going to be more complicated.
I really believe, and I’ve repeated it multiple times in my book, that God is big enough to change any marriage. I strongly believe that His Word is true when He said, “Nothing is too hard for Me.” You may look at your marriage, and you may go: “This is impossible! This is just too hard! I don’t think there’s any way out.” I want you to know—I’ve felt that way. I remember feeling that way at different times in those middle years of marriage, when we were swamped with kids and life. It felt too hard; but I knew that God meant what He said when He said, “Nothing is impossible for Me.”
So, therefore, if I believe in God—and I do—then I have to take Him at His Word. I have to go to Him and say: “This feels impossible. This feels too difficult, but I know that You can bring life back to our marriage.”
8:00
If you don’t quit, then there’s always the hope of the redemption—there’s the hope of God bringing new life back into your marriage. But when you quit, you’ve basically slammed the door on the possibility of God working a miracle. I think that’s a tragedy.
Dennis: And there’s a biblical admonition that Paul gives us from 1 Corinthians, Chapter 7. He said, “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise, the wife to her husband.” It goes on to talk about the wife doesn’t have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and the husband doesn’t have authority over his body, but the wife does.
What I think Paul is exhorting us to here is that you’ve got to pay attention to one of the strongest drives in humanity. I got to thinking about this, and there are really only a couple of drives, I think, such as the need for oxygen and the need for water and food that would supplant sexuality.
9:00
Bob: You think survival might be a little ahead?
Dennis: Well, those are both survival categories; but the point is—the urge for two people to merge was put there by God. I’ve thought about this many times. It’s a good thing, in most marriages, that one of the two of you has a stronger desire to be with the other in the area of sexuality. Why? Because if one of you didn’t have a pursuit, what might happen? You’d just have two people, spinning plates, off doing their own thing, and occasionally coming back, like roommates at a house to be able to maybe touch each other with eyesight, but never emotionally—never in depth, with a true, real relationship—the way God designed it in marriage.
I think God, in His ingenuity, has made something powerful here that too often has been called “dirty.”
10:00
It really is a healthy desire for two people to become one.
Bob: So this brings up the issue, then, Barbara: “How would you coach a wife? Is it ever appropriate for her to say, ‘No, not now / not tonight—I’m not interested right now.’ How should she say that? And what are the legitimate reasons for her to say, ‘I can’t be with you’? Is it because, ‘I’m too tired,’ or because, ‘You hurt me the other day’? What works here?”
Barbara: Well, first of all, I think she does have a responsibility to be honest with her husband. I think that faking it—faking being together sexually—is not going to accomplish anything. If there is emotional distance between you—and you’re feeling hurt because of something he said or if you really are so exhausted that you just can’t function anymore that day—those are real life issues that we all deal with and we all feel.
11:00
The purpose of sex and of coming together is for intimacy—it’s for transparency / it’s for sharing our lives together. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with delaying it—I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a woman expressing how she feels or what her needs are—because to not do that is being disingenuous / that’s not transparency. If the goal is transparency / the goal is intimacy and oneness, you have to be real / you have to be honest. Now, the way you do that, I think, is what’s most important. That is, you can say, “I just can’t tonight,” or “I feel like we’ve got to finish talking about this argument that we had two days ago,” or whatever it might be.
It’s the way in which you communicate that that matters to your husband. It must be done with respect; it must be done with commitment; it must be done with love. You say something like: “I need you to know what I’m feeling. Can we talk about this now, or should we talk about it later?”
12:00
“I need some resolution in this area of our relationship.” If you communicate that you’re committed to him and you say: “I’m committed to you, and I’m going to work this out. I want to be with you, just not tonight,” or “…just not right now.” I think that’s perfectly acceptable as long as “not right now” doesn’t turn into two years. I think it needs to be an agreement between a husband and a wife—they talk about it, and they find a solution together that works for both of them. It has to be mutual.
Bob: That’s 1 Corinthians 7 again; isn’t it?
Dennis: It is. Paul goes on to say: “Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement, for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer. But then, come back together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” I mean, we live in a highly-sexualized culture.
13:00
We’ve got to understand one another.
Here’s where Barbara’s book does an outstanding job of helping young wives, and for that matter, older wives understand their husbands in this area—and how they are made by God—and that it’s good—it’s not bad / it’s not evil.. They should bless their husband and not ignore him. If you need to say, “Not tonight, Sweetheart,” don’t ignore it tomorrow night, and the next night, and the next night, and the next night.
Bob: So the wife who is feeling, tonight: “I think he might be interested. I just—maybe if I just go to bed early—I don’t say anything / I just fall— you know, he comes in and finds me asleep. Then, he’ll leave me alone.” She gets a little passive-aggressive with how she handles this. She finds ways to dodge or avoid.
Dennis: Do you think a guy doesn’t know this?
Barbara: Yes! He does.
Dennis: Yes; he does!
Bob: So, to that wife—you’d say: “It’s time to get this out in the open and have the conversation”?
14:00
Barbara: Yes; I do. I think it’s much better to talk about it. I mean, I think it’s a temptation for all of us women to want to kind of just avoid it and hope it will go away when we’re too tired, or overwhelmed, or whatever. But making it go away isn’t the solution. It’s not the solution to any kind of a disagreement, or an impasse, or something that’s between you, as husband and wife.
It’s like the part that Dennis read earlier from my book—even not-so-great sex is bonding. It’s remembering what’s true / it’s remembering the value that God places on your marriage and on the sexual part of your marriage relationship. It’s going to him and saying: “I am really exhausted, but I sense that you might be interested in making love tonight,” or “…having sex tonight. Can we talk about that? Can we talk about a solution? Can we figure out what we want to do together so that we’re mutually agreeing?” She’s not controlling by being passive, and going to sleep ahead of time, and hoping he won’t notice.
15:00
Does that make sense?
Bob: It does!
What do you say, then, to the wife who says, “You know what? Thirty pounds ago, he was attractive. Today, I’m just not attracted to him.” Or she says, “Thirty pounds ago, I felt attractive.
Barbara: Yes.
Bob: “And now, I don’t feel desirable. Even though he says he’s interested, I think, ‘How can you be? Because I look at myself in the mirror and I don’t feel attractive.’” What do you say about those issues?
Barbara: Well, I think those are just further reflections of our need for transparency and our need for oneness. We got married to be acceptable to one another. We got married to know one another in our strengths and in our weaknesses. So when we gain weight or when things change about us, are we still committed? Are we still called to love one another? Are we still committed to making our marriage all that God wants it to be for as long as we both shall live?
Well, we have to learn to love one another in our weaknesses.
16:00
We have to learn to love one another in our imperfections. Yes; it may have been easier when you were both in your 20s and you were both—whatever attracted you to each other—but marriage wasn’t built for just when we’re in our 20s. Marriage was built for a lifetime. You are going to go through trials and difficulties, and both of you are going to change. Is God big enough to give you the kind of love that will last?—the kind of intimacy that you got married for in those years when you are challenged with health issues, or weight issues, or whatever it is?
Dennis: And I know a dad who took his daughters aside—they had several daughters—and he just talked to them about the importance of your attractiveness to your husband: “You need to do your job of being the best—the very best—magnet you can be to your man.” Now, we all know that there are these superstar models out there.
Bob: Right.
17:00
Dennis: You’re never going to be able to compete at that level, but you know what? You can be a beautiful, attractive wife to your husband. One of the things I appreciate about Barbara is—even when she says she doesn’t feel pretty, she’s still incredibly attractive to me. I just appreciated her for how she’s paid attention to the process of aging. I mean, 44 years—that means our listeners know we’re no longer teenagers in our 20s; okay? Forty-four years of marriage—I mean, you’ve got a lot of gravity to fight by the time you get there. So the point is: “Do you care enough to love your husband in the way that speaks love to him?”
Barbara: And it’s not just about the exterior; because I think what we’re talking about right now—people tend to think it’s the exterior. It’s not! What makes a person beautiful—what makes a man or a woman beautiful—is our hearts.
18:00
If we pay attention to our hearts, we pay attention to learning to love well, and to do what God has called us to do as men and as women, then we’re going to be attractive to one another. Because when Dennis serves me, and denies himself for me, and when he does the kinds of things that I know cost him something—and he’s doing it because he loves me—that’s attractive to me. I mean, I appreciate that / I respond to that. Any woman alive will do that; because, when she sees a man sacrificing for her—we’re just built to respond to that—and vice-versa—when women serve their husbands and love their husbands, that’s what makes us attractive.
Bob: We’ve been focusing on your counsel to young wives because, again, that’s the subject of the book you’ve written: Letters to My Daughters. I did want to, before we’re done, go back 22 years and let our listeners hear a clip of advice that you shared for husbands in this area of sex and romance, back when we recorded a series on FamilyLife Today, back in 1995—
19:00
Dennis: This is scary! [Laughter]
Barbara: It is!
Bob: —called—do you remember 1995? Do you remember being 22 years younger than you are now?
Barbara: Yes, but that was a long time ago! [Laughter]
Bob: Well, we’re going to hear this clip in just a minute.
Let me, first, let our listeners know how they can get a copy of your book, Letters to My Daughters. It’s a book that we’ve got in our FamilyLife Today Resource Center. You can go online at our website, FamilyLifeToday.com, and order your copy of Barbara Rainey’s book, Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife. Again, the website is FamilyLifeToday.com. You can also order a copy when you call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, the number is 1-800-358-6329; 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.”
By the way, when you’re on the website at FamilyLifeToday.com, there’s a banner there that says, “Romance Me.”
20:00
If you click that, there’s a quiz you can take to talk about your romantic style and your spouse’s romantic style and to see where there’s compatibility and where there might be areas for growth. Click on that when you’re on our website at FamilyLifeToday.com. You can share the romance quiz with friends on Facebook® or on Twitter®. We just thought this would be something fun for you to do and just see how you match up in the area of romance.
Let me also say a quick word of thanks to those folks who made today’s program possible—it’s those of you who support this ministry. Particularly, we want to thank those of you who are monthly Legacy Partners and who provide the financial stability / the backbone for this daily radio program. You really are partners with us in this outreach to marriages and families, all around the world, as we work to effectively develop godly marriages and families. We appreciate your partnership with us.
21:00
If you’re able to help with a donation today, we’d love to say, “Thank you,” by sending you Dennis and Barbara Rainey’s devotional book called Moments with You. It’s our thank-you gift if you make a one-time donation or if you make your first gift as a Legacy Partner. Again, go to FamilyLifeToday.com to find out more or to make a donation. Or
call 1-800-FL-TODAY, and you can donate over the phone. Or you can mail your donation to FamilyLife Today at PO Box 7111, Little Rock, AR; our zip code is 72223.
Now, we promised our listeners that they were going to get a chance to hear some advice that you shared to husbands. We were recording a series called “Creating a More Romantic Marriage.” We were just asking you to help husbands understand how women think on this issue of romance, and intimacy, and sex in marriage.
Dennis: Is this the story about Saran Wrap? [Laughter]
Barbara: No!! [Laughter]
Bob: Stop it!
22:00
Barbara: It’s a story about “a + b = c”; right?
Bob: Ah, she knows where we’re headed! [Laughter] Listen to this clip from 22 years ago:
[Previous Interview]
Barbara: I don’t think that a woman wants to feel pegged; I don’t think she wants to feel figured out, button-holed, taken advantage of—whatever you want to call it. I think that that defeats the essence of love. Again, I think that a husband needs to live with her in an understanding way, and to love her as Christ loved the church, and then she will respond to that.
Bob: So it sounds to me like the message here to men is: “Once you’ve found what really communicates love to your wife,—
Dennis: —“don’t ever do that again!” [Laughter]
Bob: That’s right.
Barbara: Noooo!
Bob: — “she will realize it, and she will change the rules.
Barbara: That’s not true.
Bob: “And tomorrow it’s going to be something completely different!” [Laughter]
Barbara: It makes us sound schizophrenic.
Bob: But that’s what it feels like for men sometimes!
Barbara: I know!
Dennis: Well, it feels like it to a man—that, here, he is doing his best to love his wife—
Barbara: I understand.
Dennis: —and she throws away the rule book.
Barbara: I do.
23:00
Dennis: And she says: “I don’t want a rule book. I don’t want to be figured out.”
Barbara: It sounds awful! [Laughter] It really does.
Bob: But it’s true; isn’t it?
Barbara: Well, I really do think it’s true. I really do, and it’s not that she doesn’t want those things done again. It’s not that you bring her flowers two or three times and she loves it; and then, all of a sudden, she feels like she’s been pegged and she doesn’t ever want them again for the rest of her life. I think there needs to be variety / there needs to be creativity. She needs to feel like he’s thinking about her in different ways at different times and not just the same old, prescribed pattern.
[Studio]
Bob: So, 22 years later, it still can’t be a formula. Is that what you’re saying?
Barbara: That is correct. It cannot be a formula. Women still want to be pursued / we still want to be figured out. I think it’s a very good thing.
Dennis: I’m Dennis Rainey, and that’s real family life! [Laughter]
Bob: I was waiting for you to say, “I approve this message,”—
Barbara: Yes!
Bob: —but you didn’t say that; did you?
Barbara: No.
Dennis: That was back last fall—we can’t say that anymore. [Laughter]
24:00
No; it’s really important that men live with their wives in an understanding way and that a husband understands that his wife needs to be loved. That’s a lifetime assignment. What communicates love to your wife will be different than mine, and what communicates love to your wife today will be different in a decade. It will grow / it will mature.
I’ll tell you what you have, as you move into the twilight years of life, you’re going to have a great relationship that you wouldn’t want to swap out with anybody, even though there’ve been some very, very difficult times.
Bob: FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas.
Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.
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