#3 - The Art of Being a Wife (Part 3) - Praising the Positive

Barbara Rainey's Top 10 Interviews

Click Here to Listen to the other parts in the series
The Art of Being a Wife (Part 1)
The Art of Being a Wife (Part 2) - Building Up Your Man
The Art of Being a Wife (Part 3) - Praising the Positive
The Art of Being a Wife (Part 4) - Embracing the Differences
The Art of Being a Wife (Part 5) - Leaning on God
The Art of Being a Wife (Part 6) - Being His Helper
The Art of Being a Wife (Part 7) - Facing the Storms

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)

Air date: June 1, 2018

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 Friday, June 1st. Our host is Dennis Rainey; I’m Bob Lepine. The words you say, as a wife, have profound power in your marriage. We’ll examine that subject with Barbara Rainey today. Stay with us.

1:00

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us on the Friday edition. Have you ever stopped to 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—yes; 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? [Laughter]

Dennis: She laughed—she’s laughing real hard, because she knows what happened behind the curtain. [Laughter]

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

Barbara: No; I just think that’s funny that you 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!

Bob: Yes.

Dennis: 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. 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.

We wish sometimes that marriage was a whole lot easier, but it illustrates that it is a very high and noble calling.

5:00

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...