Letters To My Daughters

By: Dennis and Barbara Rainey
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  • Summary

  • These podcasts are the essence of a couple dozen emails I wrote to my daughter and two daughters-in-law at their request about the art of being a wife. After our other three daughters married I pulled out, refreshed them and sent them to the new brides. Other young women were interested in hearing what I’d learned in marriage so I refined the originals and added a few more and the result was a good summation of my life lessons. It became a book called Letters to My Daughters. In these podcasts I hope you will find encouragement and help for your marriage, and maybe you can avoid some of the mistakes I made! - Barbara
    © Dennis and Barbara Rainey
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Christianity Relationships Social Sciences Spirituality
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Episodes
  • Praising the Positive

    Praising the Positive
    Jan 7 2020
    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 ...
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    25 mins
  • Building Up Your Man

    Building Up Your Man
    Jan 7 2020
    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: ...
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    25 mins
  • Facing the Storms

    Facing the Storms
    Jan 7 2020
    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 ...
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    28 mins

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