Being His Helper

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 ...