Leaning on God

Letters To My Daughters

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript

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Leaning on God

Guest: Barbara Rainey

From the series: Letters to My Daughters (Day 2 of 3)

Bob: Barbara Rainey says there’s a lesson that every couple needs to learn really early in their marriage. The lesson is this: “You can’t do this on your own.”

Barbara: The bottom line is going to be the same for the rest of your life; and that is, when God brings you to a place that you realize you cannot do this thing called marriage, you can’t do this thing called mothering, you can’t even do the Christian life on your own—that you come to Him and you say: “I give up. I surrender—Your will, not mine.”

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Tuesday, February 16th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. We’ll find out today just how important it is to have a spiritual foundation poured in your marriage if you’re going to try to build a home on top of it. Stay tuned.

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. I’m curious—did you think, when you and Barbara, in the summer of 1972—I guess September of ’72 / late summer; right?

Dennis: Right; right.

Bob: That’s when the two of you stood and faced one another and said your vows.

Dennis: It was still summer in Houston.

Bob: Did you think, “This is going to be a breeze,” or did you think, “I know there will be some challenges”?

Dennis: I just didn’t think. [Laughter] Honestly! I was in love. I was committed. I was ready to get on with life with my new bride and my new love. Honestly, I didn’t do a lot of cost-counting; but I did make a commitment.

Bob: We heard your wife laugh as you said, “I wasn’t really thinking.” Barbara, welcome to FamilyLife Today.

Barbara: Thank you.

Dennis: Were you thinking, Barbara?

Barbara: Not much more than you were.

Bob: But were you confident?

Barbara: Yes, I really was.

Bob: Did you start marriage, thinking, “I can do this”?

Barbara: Yes; I really did because I had grown up in a good home. My parents were not divorced. I had seen them work out their marriage and—though there were things I wanted to do differently—I felt like I could do this. Added to that, I was doubly confident because I was a Christian and my husband was. We were not just pew-warmers / we were committed Christ followers. I thought: “This is guaranteed to work because we’ve got the right ingredients: We love each other. We love the Lord. We are going to do this the right way. We’re going to follow the instructions in the Bible—A+B=C. It’s going to work out great!”

Bob: The reason we’re exploring this is because you’ve been spending a lot of time, recently, working on editing a series of letters—actually, emails that grew into letters.

Barbara: Yes.

Bob: Letters that you’ve written over the years to your daughters and your daughters-in-law, where you’ve just offered counsel from your own life and experience about getting married.

Barbara: Yes. I started writing this series of letters the summer that both of our sons got married. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to teach them—and I was invited to do so by the way—I didn’t do this without an invitation. It was that I wanted to encourage them by sharing some of the stories of things that I had learned so that they would know that: “Oh, it’s normal to have disagreements. Oh, it’s normal for this to happen or that to happen,” so that they would understand the long view of marriage and the big picture of marriage.

Dennis: One of the things that had occurred in our marriage that I think really pointed out the importance of perhaps Barbara doing this—early in our marriage, she had kind of run into the differences between us and how that was impacting her. Someone told us—and I don’t remember who—but said, “You really ought to go spend some time with an older woman who has experienced more of life and been around the barn a few more times than you have.” Just to spend some time and to know that what you’re going through is normal.

Bob: Yes.

Dennis: I think couples start out their marriage together and they get isolated. They don’t realize that what they’re going through is what everybody else is dealing with. But if they have someone who is seasoned / who’s authentic—and not going to create some kind of pie-in-the-sky approach that’s: “A+B=C, and you’re going to have all your problems solved by sundown tonight,”—if you’ve got somebody who’s real and helps you understand that it takes a lifetime to work out this thing called marriage. That’s what really fueled Barbara in writing our daughters and our daughters-in-law to be able to enter in to these first months and years of their marriage.

Bob: Barbara, one of the issues you felt like you needed to mentor your daughters and daughters-in-law in was this issue that we talked about—your confidence that you could be the wife and mom that God called you to be—that, at some point along the way, you kind of woke up and went, “This is harder than I thought it was going to be.”

Barbara: Yes. I think that realization was an on-going realization. What I’ve realized, as I look back over my life, is that, along the way—from those early months of our marriage all the way up until the present—God has been saying to me, over and over again, “You can’t do this on your own.” Now, my initial response is, “Oh, yes; I can.”

Bob: Yes.

Barbara: Because I’ve got—especially in the early years—a lot of motivation, a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm—to really do a good job being a wife. Most young women start out that way / most new brides start out that way. We’re highly motivated, highly teachable, energetic, ready to go and be the best we can be; but God knows that, if we really are able to produce on our own, then our confidence is in our self and not in Him.

In this section of the book, I tell lots of stories of how God took me places where I realized I could not do it on my own; and I could not garner up enough strength on my own to see the situation through.

Bob: The book you’re talking about, of course, is called, Letters to My Daughters. It’s your brand-new book. The su...