Letters To My Daughters

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)

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: Because I also got Letters to Phillip, which was the follow-up, which he’d written letters to his son—both of them around marriage subjects, right?

Dennis: Exactly; exactly.

5:00

But there was another kind of—I don’t know—birthplace of this idea of sending letters that was a part of Barbara’s family.

Barbara: When I was growing up, I remember my mother used to anxiously look for this large legal-size envelope that would come in the mail probably every couple of months. She had married my dad and they had moved two or three states away from where she grew up. It was a place where she knew no one. Although she developed friends, there were no family members anywhere near. She, and her mother, and some other relatives in the family, and friends had this exchange of letters, that were all handwritten, that went by the postal service. It was called a round robin.

My mother would write her letter, put it in the envelope, and send it on its way, where the next person would read my mother’s letter and all of the other letters that were in it. She would take out her origina...