#3 - The Art of Being a Wife (Part 2) - Building Up Your Man

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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Building up Your Man

Guest: Barbara Rainey

From the series: Letters to My Daughters (Day 1 of 2)

Air date: May 31, 2018

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. 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 Thursday, May 31st. Our host is Dennis Rainey; I’m Bob Lepine. What do you do, as a wife, when you get overwhelmed / when you’re discouraged by all that’s going on? How do you deal with that? We’re going to talk about that today with Barbara Rainey. Stay with us.

1:00

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us on the Thursday 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. Sweetheart, welcome back.

Barbara: I don’t know if I can live up to all of that! [Laughter]

2:00

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—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?

Barbara: I know. I thought: “Wow. If she opened the door, then I’m going to gently and cautiously walk through that door.”

3:00

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. 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: our oldest Ashley, who was already married; and then our son, Samuel, had married the same summer. 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. You know, 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, which I understood.

4:00

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: 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 out and sent them to her sort of as a batch—a couple of them at a time—and then, that really was the end of it after that—an 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.

Bob: Yes?

Dennis: It was called Letters to Karen. It wasn’t Letters to My Daughter. It was—although—was Karen his daughter?

Barbara: Karen was his daughter.

Bob: