#3 - The Art of Being a Wife (Part 1)

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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The Art of Being a Wife

Guest: Barbara Rainey

From the series: The Art of Being a Wife (Day 1 of 1)

Air date: October 20, 2016

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Bob: In the Book of James, the Bible says we are to be “quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.” Barbara Rainey says she doesn’t see that being lived out today in a lot of marriages.

Barbara: We are so quick, as women, to say exactly what we think / exactly how we feel without much regard for how that impacts him—or other people, for that matter. We have a really high value in our culture today on being truthful / on saying what we think; but we don’t have an equally high value on saying it in love. It affects our marriages. We all say things in our marriages that we probably shouldn’t say.

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Thursday, October 20th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. Would your marriage be different / be better if you slowed down and didn’t speak as thoughtlessly as you sometimes do?

1:00

We’re going to hear from Barbara Rainey on that today. Stay with us.

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. Most of the time, I am glad our program is radio and not television. That way I can wear pajamas to the studio if I want to and nobody knows what I’m—

Dennis: You have never done that. [Laughter]

Barbara: Except all of us in the studio would know! [Laughter]

Dennis: Twenty-four years—

Barbara: You should try it sometime! [Laughter]

Bob: Well, I’d have to go buy a pair of pajamas first before I did that.

Barbara: Oh! [Laughter]

Bob: But, there are days when you think the visual would be helpful. Actually, what we’re going to hear today—

Dennis: Of you and your pajamas? I’m not getting beyond that.

2:00

Bob: No, not that visual. There’s a different visual here. It involves your wife, who is joining us again. Welcome back to FamilyLife Today, Barbara.

Barbara: Thanks, Bob.

Bob: You had an opportunity, not long ago, to speak to a group of wives and moms. You were talking from the book you’ve written, Letters to My Daughters. You did something unique as you began this message that we really can’t—we can’t show it on radio the way we wish we could.

Barbara: I wish we could show it. It actually was quite fun. What we did is—I set up an artist easel on the stage, with a large canvas. I had two wooden palettes. I invited a woman to help me do this—someone whom I had never met before / someone who has an interest in art. So, I wasn’t asking someone to do something that would be totally foreign to her. But nonetheless, we didn’t really talk this through ahead of time. On this easel—I did tell her ahead of time, “Here’s what I want us to do—you and I are going to paint something.”

3:00

We had the easel turned away from the audience so they couldn’t see it.

I told the audience that each of us had a palette in our hands, with different colors. She had five colors and I had five colors. We had two that were the same, but the other four were each different. That was to illustrate for the audience that a husband has responsibilities in marriage that are different than a wife, and a wife has responsibilities that are different than the husband. Both of us are commanded to love—that was the color we had in common. In that illustration, the love was the color white—we both had the color white.

We went to work painting, much like you do in a marriage. I didn’t know her very well, and she didn’t know me. That’s very much like a marriage when it begins. We think we know each other, but we don’t know each other at all.

Dennis: And so, I’m wondering if you whispered to her what you were going to paint?

Barbara: No—well, I did tell her what shape I wanted us to paint, but I was not talking to her as we painted. I was talking to the audience, and I was explaining, “One of the colors on my husband’s palette is, ‘Live with your wife in an understanding way.’

4:00

“He’s been commanded to do that, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not supposed to be understanding of him.”

As this woman and I painted this image on this canvas, I was explaining that principle. I reached over and I got some of her yellow off of her palette, and I put some yellow on my half of the painting. For about ten minutes we worked on this painting. It was a painting of a heart—she did one half and I did one half—and they were very different. Yet, there were some similarities between them; because we were both painting the same picture. Then, when we finished, we turned it around and showed the audience.

The whole idea was to help create a visual so women could see that God’s idea for marriage was to create a masterpiece—to create a painting that was unique from every other couple’s painting on the planet. The painting that Dennis and I create in our marriage is going to very different than the painting you [Bob] and Mary Ann create.

5:00

Bob: So that opening illustration—quite literally an illustration—set up the rest of what you wanted to talk about. That’s what our listeners are going to get a...