Praising the Positive

Letters To My Daughters

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript

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Praising the Positive

Guest: Barbara Rainey

From the series: Letters to My Daughters (Day 2 of 2)

Bob: Barbara Rainey has some advice for wives. She says, when you’re husband messes up—and, by the way, he will—when it happens, how you respond may determine whether he learns anything from his mistake or not.

Barbara: If you rail on him, and if you criticize him, and you tell him how stupid it was that he made that decision, he may not learn the lesson that God wanted for him; and he may have to repeat it again. The best thing that a wife can do is trust God, even when it’s hard, and ask God to use it for good in their life and that God would use it to grow him in that area where he just blew it royally.

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Thursday, April 28th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. The words you say have profound power in your marriage relationship. We’ll examine that subject with Barbara Rainey today. Stay tuned.

1:00

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. Have you ever stopped to just ponder who you would be: (A) if you had been single all your life or (B) if you’d married somebody other than Barbara?

Dennis: Yes; I guess I have because I tried to marry a young lady from SMU before Barbara and I started dating.

Bob: You proposed?

Dennis: She didn’t want to marry me. No, no. It wasn’t at that point.

Bob: It was clear enough that you didn’t—

Dennis: But there was a DTR—a “define the relationship.”

Bob: Yes.

Dennis: How she defined it and how I defined it—[Laughter]—“Thumbs down, baby!”

Bob: Okay.

Dennis: “Thumbs down!! You’re out of here!” [Laughter]

2:00

It was good because—it was okay because I wasn’t in search of a myth. I wanted a real relationship with a real person.

Back to the previous part of the question, though, Bob: “Have I ever thought about who I would be if I hadn’t married Barbara and was single?” I have. I don’t visit that picture very often because that’s a horror film. [Laughter]

Bob: Pretty ugly; huh? [Laughter]

Dennis: She’s laughing really hard because she knows what happened behind the curtain. [Laughter]

Bob: Are you saying, “Amen,” to that? Is that what—

Barbara: No, I just think that’s funny that he said it would be a horror film because I don’t think it would be that bad.

Dennis: Well, I don’t know what you would compare marriage to—that teaches you how to love, that instructs you in how to sacrifice for another person, to care for, to cherish, to nourish, and to call you away from yourself and force—

3:00

—I mean, if you’re going to do marriage God’s way, it is the greatest discipleship tool that has ever been created in the history of the universe. It demands that both a husband and a wife pick up their cross, follow Christ, deny themselves, and ask God, “Okay, God, what do You want me to do in this set of circumstances?”

Bob: And that’s true. It works both ways—for husbands and wives—but our focus this week is on the responsibility a wife has—the privilege she has / the assignment she has—from God to be the helper that He’s created her to be.

Barbara, we’re talking about some of the themes that are found in your book, Letters to My Daughters, which is just out. We’re getting a lot of great feedback from women who have gotten copies of this book and started reading it.

Some women recoil at the idea that they’re called to be helpers—it sounds demeaning to them. Your book affirms that it’s a noble thing that God is calling wives to.

4:00

Barbara: It is a very noble assignment that God has given us. It’s equally noble, I think, to the calling that God has put on a man’s life too. What makes it even better is that, together, marriage is a high and holy calling—it says that in Scripture. It also says that it’s a mystery. I think that’s the part that we wish God hadn’t said about it because it would be nice if it was a little bit more black and white / more obvious.

But God says it is a mystery. God is an artist / God is an author—God didn’t make robots. So figuring this out—this uniqueness / this relationship that Dennis and I have that’s unlike anybody else’s relationship on the planet—just as your marriage with Mary Ann is unlike anybody else’s on the planet—the ingenuity of God to create these little duos all over the planet that represent Him / that are a picture of Christ and the Church—all of that mystery is profound and baffling.

5:00

We wish sometimes that marriage was a whole lot easier, but it illustrates that marriage is a very high and noble calling. We think it is drudgery / we think it’s dispensable—and it’s not.

Dennis: Yes. In the book that Barbara has written, called Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife, you quote Mike Mason. Speaking of mysteries, he wrote a book called The Mystery of Marriage. This comes from that book—he says this: “Love convinces a couple that they are the greatest romance that has ever been, that no two people have ever loved as they do, and that they will sacrifice absolutely anything in order to be together.” Then I love the conclusion to the statement. It says, “Then marriage asks them to prove it.”

Well, that’s what’s at stake. You’ve got this noble relationship that wasn’t created by man—it was created by Almighty God.

6:00

His image is stamped all over a marriage that seeks to follow His blueprints for what He wants us to do. He’s trying to teach us how to love—how to love sacrificially / how to give up our lives on behalf of another. You’re never going to be able to do it if you try to have it your way.

Bob: I would love for you to expand on something that I just had to stop and ponder for a second. You said what a wife believes about her husband is the starting place for everything she says or doesn’t say about her husband.

Barbara:...