Just about everywhere we turn, we see the harmful effects of a world that has lost its grip on absolute truth. How can we guard against the thinking that truth is whatever you make it to be? Barbara Rainey believes an important safeguard against relativism is telling stories that show how truth matters. In this episode of The Barbara Rainey Podcast, hear the stories of three individuals who clung to truth and the difference it made in their lives.
Barbara Rainey mentors women in their most important relationships. She loves encouraging women to believe God and experience Him in every area of their lives.
BRP 220707 Stories for Growing Together in Truth
July 7, 2022
Barbara: I felt like I had been given a million dollars or something.
Samantha: Barbara Rainey was amazed! overjoyed!
Barbara: —this treasure of this life that was lived for Christ! It was like winning the lottery or something—having that book in my hands was a treasure!
Samantha: Today we’ll find out more about this book that produced these emotions in her.
Welcome to The Barbara Rainey Podcast. So glad to have you along! I’m Samantha.
Barbara is a speaker, an author, an artist. But she would say those items on her resume pale in comparison to the importance of her relationship, first with God, then with her husband Dennis Rainey, and then with her children and grandchildren.
Today she and Dennis are here to share a few stories around a common theme: Growing together in truth. Barbara explains why it matters.
Barbara: Understanding that there is a bedrock of truth to the universe that God put in place, and that’s found in His Word, and how we teach that to our kids is really, really important. So, when you read stories of people whose lives were changed by the truth or who acted on the truth and God intervened in remarkable ways, it gives credence to knowing it and you go, “Oh. There really is value in knowing the truth.” It can change lives. It can change the course of a person’s life forever. I think that will help parents have those conversations with their kids as they’re growing up.
Samantha: We live in a world characterized by moral relativism and expressive individualism, where truth and right and wrong are thought to be whatever you think they are. Because of that, the idea of objective truth can be difficult to latch onto. Barbara believes real-life stories are a great way to help others do that. Today she shares the stories of three individuals who held onto truth.
First up: an 11-year-old girl.
Barbara: I discovered this story, initially, many, many years ago. I tore it out of the magazine, and I stuck it in a file because I was so amazed at what this family went through and how they stood strong for Christ in some incredible situations.
But this is a story about a little girl named Elizabeth, and Elizabeth grew up in a country called Armenia. I didn’t even know where it was on the map. I had to go look. She grew up in a believing family—her parents both knew Christ, and they taught her and her little sister to know the Bible. She grew up in that environment.
When she turned 11, it was the beginning of World War I. When the war started, life changed forever for this little girl and her little eight-year-old sister. In their village, as the soldiers began to march through on their way to the front, some of them needed to spend the night. They stayed with her parents and demanded food. They didn’t have enough food to feed hundreds of soldiers coming through.
After a while, it began to become apparent that life was changed forever for their family. There began to be more and more pressure on her father to either join the army or to be exiled—taken away by force.
He wanted to stay with his family. He was a leader in their village, and he didn’t want to abandon his people. A friend of theirs came to their home one night and asked to speak to the father. They went off into another room, and the mother and the two little girls sat and listened and waited. When the friend left, the father came out and he said to Elizabeth, and her sister, and their mother, “Our friend came and he told me that if I would deny Christ, he would let the four of us come live with him; and we would be safe until the war was over.” But he said, “I told him that I cannot deny my Christ. No matter what happens, I will not give up Christ.”
The friend said, “Well, I just wanted to offer that to you,” and he left. That was the last they ever saw of him. A few days or weeks later (I can’t remember exactly now), the army came, and they took Elizabeth’s father. They drug him off, and they beat him severely. She found him. She was very much a tomboy—she tells—and she went off, chasing her father. Here she is 11—and she’s chasing these soldiers, who have her father, and she was not afraid—although I think she should have been.
But she went off chasing these soldiers, and she found her father, where they had left him after they had beaten him. He was lying on the ground somewhere near a ditch and was bleeding. It was apparent that he was probably not going to live. She got down on the ground next to him on her hands and knees and put her face down next to her daddy’s face, and she started talking to him.
He whispered to her and said, “Elizabeth, never give up Jesus. No matter how much they pressure you, never give up Jesus. If Christ died for us, and went through suffering for us, we can do that for Him, too. He will take care of us.” That was the last she ever heard of her father because, after that, he was taken away and he was killed, along with many of the other men who refused to join the army.
So then it was just Elizabeth, and her little sister, and their mom. They began to try to figure out what they were going to do to survive—how were they going to make it? Her mother decided that they must leave the village. So they packed up in the middle of the night and fled their village to a little bit bigger city that was nearby where they had some family. They lived with the family for a while. The mother got the two daughters and herself placed in Turkish families as servants so that they would have homes to live in and have places that were relatively safe.
Then about a month or so later, the army came back in and they did the same tactics with the adults in that city that they had in the village with her father. Her mother came to her one day and said, “My turn has come. I must choose tomorrow whether I am going to give up Christ and deny Christ and swear allegiance to Mohammed, or I’m going to be exiled.” She said, “I don’t want to leave you girls. I know that life will be hard for you as orphans, but I cannot give up Christ. I will not swear allegiance to Mohammed.” She said, “I want to tell you that your time for testing will come, too.”
She said, “Mohammed was a good man. You can learn about him; you can hear about him, but you must not worship him. Don’t ever deny Christ.” The next day she was taken with hundreds of other men, women, and teenagers—off to exile. These two little girls never saw their parents again.
When I read that story for the first time, I remember thinking, “Oh, my gosh! Would I say that to my kids? Could I say that to my kids? Would I deny Christ so that I could stay with my eight-year-old and my 11-year-old—so that they wouldn’t be orphans? I thought, “I don’t know if I could do that. I hope I would!”
But the bravery and the courage that those two parents displayed was stunning to me. As I read it, I thought, “This is a story that needs to be told—even though it happened 100 years ago—the faith and the courage of these two parents—because they banked their life on the truth of Scripture—they believed that Jesus was who He said He was—they believed that the Word of God was true, and it was inspired and there were no mistakes in it—they were willing to die for that. Because they lived that way, these two girls also lived that way. God protected these two girls. They ended up in an orphanage.
Elizabeth goes on in her book to tell about how she met the soldier who actually killed her father and how she told him, “First,” she said, “I was so angry I wanted to kill him. Then,” she said, “I remembered what my mother said. My mother said, ‘We must forgive because Christ forgave us.’” So she looked at him and said, “‘I must forgive you because the Christ that I belong to and the Christ that I worship forgave you. Therefore, I forgive you for killing my father.’”
She’s 11! Eleven! But that’s the power of knowing the truth in a person’s life. The inspiration for me, as a mother, in reading what this mom and dad did, was profound. Yet, I want these 11- and 12-year-olds today, who are living in our country, to hear what an 11- or 12-year-old is capable of. An 11- or 12-year-old can stand up for Christ. She or he can stand up for the Gospel, no matter how difficult the circumstances might be.
Dennis: As I was listening to you, Barbara, I was thinking, “Would I be that kind of father?” Like you, I would say, “I hope I would!”
Here’s a man who knew the truth and had a choice of whether to believe it and act on it. We believe convictions are forged where life and truth collide—where we hit circumstances, and they run up against the truth of what God has said in Scripture and what He calls us to believe, and do, and act on. Today, as never before—and I’ve been saying this repeatedly—there’s a need today for people to courageously believe the truth and obey it—to do it, not on a battleground on foreign soil, but to do it on the battleground of your home—for your marriage—for your family.
There are just some people giving up on their marriages today, and they are not believing the truth of the Bible—that God says, “For this cause a man shall leave . . . shall cleave . . . and shall become one.” It wasn’t meant to be reversed. It wasn’t meant to be torn apart. That kind of conviction around the truth of Scripture—we desperately need in our families today.
Samantha: Well, there’s a cool P. S. to this story.
Barbara: I was doing research to try to beef up the parts of the story that I didn’t know. We just went online and found that Elizabeth, when she came to the States after she had grown up and gotten married, wrote a book telling her story. It reads like The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom. I could not put it down. It is a remarkable story.
Samantha: Barbara ordered a used copy of Elizabeth Payne’s book, printed in the 1930’s…
Barbara: What was such a treasure was when I opened the front cover of the book and there, inside the front cover, was her name. She had signed the book; and she said, “To the Reader: Here are some verses that got me through these really difficult years after my parents died.” She listed like 10 or 11 references—and then she wrote something at the bottom; and she signed her name, “Elizabeth Payne;” and she also signed it in Armenian underneath that.
I felt like I had been given a million dollars or something—this treasure of this life that was lived for Christ! This woman, who lost her parents, and didn’t turn on God and didn’t say, “God, where were You? Why did You abandon me?” Instead, she believed God, and she believed that she would see her parents again someday in heaven. She knew that God was in control. She knew God was sovereign. She knew He would be there for her, and she embraced that.
She lived to write this story of her life. It was like winning the lottery or something—having that book in my hands was a treasure!
Dennis: And you believe that truth does cost us, but there’s also a benefit.
Barbara: Yes, there’s a benefit. I think sometimes we look at the cost. We look at what Elizabeth had to decide and what her mother and father had to decide, but we don’t look at the reward. We don’t look at the hope. We don’t look at the benefit, down the road. Yes, it cost her—her parents, but there will be a reward in heaven.
They believed that God would take care of their children without them. Elizabeth went on to have a very successful life—she and her sister—because they believed God.
Dennis: The passage I was thinking of were the words of Christ, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” What we, as parents, must do today with our children, and our grandchildren, is that we must train them in the truth so when life’s circumstances bump into them, they know what to do.
They are free to make the right choice and not be enslaved to sin, to foolishness—to going their own way and going against God.
Barbara: The verse that I wrote on Elizabeth’s story, in the book, comes from Psalm 119, which is the longest psalm. It has all of these wonderful verses about the truth; but the one that I chose for her is the one that says, “Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever mine.”
Elizabeth was wiser than her enemies because she believed in the Scripture—so did her mom and so did her dad. They survived, and God protected them because they staked their lives on the truth.
Dennis: So, the question for every parent, “How are you teaching the truth to your children?” There are three ways that you can do it—that we’re talking about here. Number one: teach them right out of the Bible. Just read the truth of the Scripture, as Barbara did, and let them sit and hear about the truth of God’s Word. Secondly, you can tell them great stories—stories like young ladies like Elizabeth and how their lives were lived, based upon the truth. Then, third (and I’ve got to believe this was one of the most powerful things in Elizabeth’s life), was that she saw—she saw the truth being lived out by her parents.
I mean, she saw her daddy give up his life for the truth, and then her mother. You know, we can’t say one thing and do another.
Barbara: That’s right.
Dennis: We have to be a model of that same truth with our children. We’re not going to do it perfectly, but you know what? That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask God to give us the ability and the courage to be able to do it in our own lives.
Samantha: Next, Barbara shares how the truth shaped the life of one of her personal friends, Karen Loritts.
Barbara: I wanted to tell Karen’s story because Karen grew up in an incredibly difficult situation as a child—that she survived; that she thrived; that she, today, has a healthy marriage; that she is a godly woman; and that she has great kids and grandkids—is a testimony to the power of the truth, the power of Scripture in a person’s life.
Dennis: We had dinner with Crawford and Karen one time (this was years ago). We were good friends, but I had never really heard Karen’s story of where she’d come from. She’d grown up in the, really, the hood in Philadelphia. My admiration for her as a human being just went through the ceiling because she overcame enormous adversity in what she faced day in and day out. I just thought, “What an incredible story of redemption!” God did redeem Karen’s life.
Barbara: Yes. Well, Karen, as a little girl, was lost. That’s where I start her story, talking about how—here’s a little girl at seven years old who is lost. It’s not that she didn’t know where she lived. She knew how to get to her apartment, but she was lost in this sea of craziness. She lived in a concrete, public housing project area of Philadelphia.
Her mother wasn’t married. Her mother worked odd hours, and Karen was in charge of her little brother. She and her little brother would come home from school. They would climb the stairs to that apartment. They would step over broken bottles. They would step over drunks in the hall. They would smell the smell of urine as they went up the stairs to their apartment. They would go into the apartment and close the door. There would be no one to welcome them because her mother was working.
So, here’s this little girl, who at seven years old, is as lost as she can be. She has no one giving her direction; but God, in His great mercy, introduced Karen to some people who did know Him. When she was a few years older, she met this couple who belonged to a church down the road. Her mom actually encouraged her to go.
So, she grabbed her little brother by the hand, and they’d walk down the street to this church. They’d go to Sunday school. Sometimes, they’d get something to eat, which was really appealing to them as kids.
Then, a few years later, she, her mom, and her little brother moved to another place; and she started attending another church. As Karen tells it, she says, “I started going to the white church,” because Karen is African-American. The pastor of the white church, actually, he was Ukrainian.
So, Karen grew up in those years, those middle-elementary years, going to this little white church in the suburbs. There she heard about Jesus. She heard that Jesus loved her. She heard that Jesus had a plan for her life. She kept hearing it over, and over, and over. The contrast between this Ukrainian man and his wife—
Dennis: Wow!
Barbara: —pastoring this little white church in the suburbs of Philadelphia and the things that they were teaching her out of the Bible about Jesus and that Jesus had a plan for her life—and what she saw at home with her mom and her extended family, who—they never got along, and they were always changing where they lived. There was so much instability in her home life; but in that church, she felt secure.
She found a sense of stability. It drew her, and it kept drawing her until she was in her junior high years. She decided that this was what she wanted. This life that she was learning about in this church was what she wanted. She gave her life to Christ. She said, “I want to do life God’s way, not the way I was raised. I want stability, not instability. I want peace, not constant disruption.” So, she chose to give her life to Christ when she was in junior high.
Samantha: That was a turning point for Karen. Barbara makes the connection in Karen’s story with another story: that of the exploration of Antarctica. Here’s the parallel. Karen really stepped from darkness into light in that moment, and Barbara looks back to those Antarctic explorers who were trapped in darkness years ago.
Barbara: They were lost in utter darkness, too, as Karen was; only, Karen’s was a spiritual darkness, and theirs was a physical darkness. In both stories, in Karen’s life and in Ernest Shackleton’s voyage to the South Pole, both of them found their way out of darkness by following the truth. Karen, by following the truth of Scripture; and Shackleton, by following the truth of the sextant, which was the instrument they used to calculate their distance and the direction they needed to take.
It was because they believed the truth of that instrument—that the instrument wasn’t lying to them—even though it didn’t feel like they were going in the right direction. The instrument took them to safety. They were rescued, and they lived.
Karen found the same thing to be true because she banked on the Word of God. She said, “This is the truth. This is right, and I’m going to give my life to it. I’m going to follow what it says.” Because she gave her life to Christ and because she followed the truth of Scripture, God took her out of that unstable life of darkness that she was born into and redeemed her and gave her a life of light and hope.
Dennis: If you think about today, we may not be growing up in a ghetto in Philly, but we’ve all got enough cultural darkness around us today clouding our direction—how we’re living and the choices we’re making. There is pornography. There are choices on the internet. There is adultery. There is the rejection of the absolute standards of Scripture.
What you are trying to do is give parents a tool to tell stories—to be able to drive truth into the hearts of young people so that, as they encounter darkness around their lives, they’re going to know their way. They’re not going to be lost like Karen was, but they’re going to know the direction to go.
Barbara: The key is—is once you know the truth—is that you believe it even when it is dark, even when it’s confusing, or even when everybody else around you is saying, “Go this way.” If the truth is your guide and you’ve banked your life on it, you will go with what the truth says, even if it doesn’t feel right, because we know that God’s Word never changes—that He will not lead us astray; and we can count on the truth of His Word, no matter what.
Samantha: Three stories, all intended to help us see the value of the truth:
An explorer who had to rely on an objective standard in spite of his feelings,
a poor black girl from the projects who found the light of God’s truth,
and a brave Armenian child who courageously clung to the truth about Christ at great cost to herself.
How about you? Are you growing in the truth? Are you helping others (maybe your children or extended family or even your friends)— are you helping them grow in the truth, too?
Let me encourage you to subscribe to Barbara’s blog. You’ll get excellent content like you’ve heard today sent directly to your inbox on a regular basis. To sign up, just head to EverThineHome.com, find the tab that says “Subscribe,” and you can enter your name and email address and stay up to date. Again, the website is EverThineHome.com.
I’m Samantha Loucks, saying, “Thank you for listening to the Barbara Rainey Podcast, from Ever Thine Home!”