Lessons From 50 Years of Marriage

Show Notes

When you've been married for a half century, you learn a few things about life and marriage. In this episode, Dennis and Barbara Rainey share some of the lessons they've learned. Listen in, for highlights from a message they shared with couples on the 2022 "Love Like You Mean It" cruise.

What is The Barbara Rainey Podcast?

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.

Samantha: Today, on the Barbara Rainey Podcast: lessons from 50 years of marriage!

Barbara: It is extremely important that we are transparent with one another, because that’s how oneness happens.

Dennis: One of the things that helps people survive going through very, very difficult times is they ultimately come to a fork in the road where they decide, “This will not define me.”

Barbara: There are three things that God created Adam and Eve to do, and therefore He created us to do the same things.

Samantha: Welcome to the Barbara Rainey Podcast, dedicated to helping you be changed by Jesus, which will, in turn, transform your home. Thanks for listening!

According to the Guiness Book of World Records, the longest marriage on record was enjoyed by Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher. Want to guess how long? Their wedding was in 1924, and Herbert passed away in 2010. Wow! 86 years and 290 days!

Well, Dennis and Barbara Rainey haven’t made it that far yet, but next month they will be celebrating their 50th. In fact, they wrote a book titled Our Story. It lists 50 lessons they’ve learned in 50 years of marriage. I think that’s pretty cool! I’ll tell you later how you can get a copy of that book.

Recently, they shared some of those lessons in a room full of couples. It was part of the 2022 Love Like You Mean It cruise, hosted by FamilyLife.

Today in this episode we’ll hit just a few highlights from that message.

Now, let me just say this. It could be that when you think of your marriage, there’s a lot of pain. Maybe your spouse doesn’t have a relationship with Jesus. Maybe there’s brokenness or abuse or divorce in your story. If that’s the case, we still invite you to listen prayerfully. Lift up your marriage and the marriages of others you know to the only One who is our perfect Bridegroom: the Lord Jesus Christ. Okay?

Let’s listen together. From the recent Love Like You Mean It cruise, here are Dennis and Barbara Rainey, sharing some lessons they’ve learned in almost 50 years of marriage.

Barbara: Point number one is: Marriage and family are all about the glory of God.

You know, the Bible begins with a marriage, right? In Genesis 1 God creates Adam and Eve, and He declares that they are to leave father and mother and to become one. So marriage is right there in the first chapter of the Bible.

Then, marriage closes the Bible, at the very end, when He talks about the marriage feast of the Lamb, and bringing the bride of the Lamb to heaven. So, the whole Bible is bookended by a marriage at the beginning, on the front end, and a marriage at the back end. I think that tells us that marriage is really important in God’s economy and in His plan of the ages. Marriage is a crucial part of that plan.

In Genesis 1:26-28 we see there are three things that God created Adam and Eve to do, and therefore He created us to do the same things.

He created us to reflect His image. He said, “We will make man in our image,” and He wants us to reflect Him.

Secondly, He wants us to reproduce godly children.

Thirdly, He gave us responsibility to reign and to rule and to govern the Garden of Eden.

There’s another verse that I like a lot in 1 Peter 4, and it says, “That in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.” It’s another way of looking at it. Marriage is all about God’s glory. It’s all about making Him known to the world around us.

Dennis: One thing I don’t want you to miss here is that your marriage is significant in the scheme of the Kingdom’s work here on planet earth. God wants to show off His image, His love, His grace, His mercy, His forgiveness, through you two, uniquely, in the midst of your story. So the key is that you finally yield to Him and join Him in that story. That’s an adventure! We can sure tell you that for certain. Join Him in that story and show Him off to a world that needs to be redeemed and needs to know of His love, mercy, grace, and forgiveness.

Number nine: Communication is to marriage what blood is to the body. What does blood do? It brings the nutrients, the oxygen, food, so that the body can function and be alive. Communication is needed in our marriages if it is going to thrive—not just survive, but thrive.

We had a habit, after I’d get home from work and after Barbara had been mugged by six little banditos—they had her tied up sometimes when I’d come home, over in a corner, tied up in a chair, taken over the household—I would grab her hand and we would walk around our garden. The garden itself was a great statement of God’s work in my life, because when we got married I hated gardening. I hated working with soil, but my love for my bride got me out there. So we’d go out and look and see what was blooming, and it was a great time to talk about what had happened during the day, to debrief. It was a life-giving exercise for us.

As we continued to grow, we used to have a standing date night on Sunday night. We didn’t make all four out of four in a month, or five out of five, but we’d make three out of four, four out of five. In fact, one time we didn’t show up at our favorite restaurant we went to, and the waitress came over to us and said, “Are you guys okay? You haven’t been here in about three weeks. We just were wondering if you guys were okay.”

We made it our habit to get together and to debrief and to talk. It was like the president and the vice-president of the Rainey household getting together to talk about the issues—they always changed; they were always different—and we talked about them.

One of the things we argued about even more than sex and money was the calendar.

Barbara: That was our big one.

Dennis: Pressure. “What are we going to do?” Time. “How are we going to invest our time?”

That date night really—originally, I had in mind that it would be romance, an opportunity just to connect with each other. You know, a little romance there. But it ended up being—

Barbara: It was a business meeting.

Dennis: It was a business meeting!

Barbara: It really was.

Dennis: With six kids. I’m convinced we would never have been able to keep our family unity steady as she goes had we not met together and debriefed on the issues.

One of my favorite questions to ask Barbara—I didn’t do it every time, but I would do it throughout the year—I asked her, “What are your three greatest needs right now?”

Guys, if you ask that question of your wife, pull out a pen and a three by five card and write down one, two, three. Then post it somewhere where you can pray for your wife and you can begin to get a plan to address some of those needs together.

There was one other thing we did for communication that was really a treat. We would have two or three getaways a year. It was usually two, was all we could afford. Three nights, ideally, away from the kids. (Guys, I admit I didn’t do it every time, but when I helped Barbara get the babysitter, that was life-giving to Barbara, for us being able to get away.) We would get away, we would plan and talk about what’s coming in the next month, what’s coming in the next year, and the new vistas for our life.

Barbara: Number ten is: Be transparent in your marriage. Share your struggles and temptations with your spouse.

One of the most important things about marriage that I don’t hear too many people talking about is that your spouse needs to be your most important accountability partner. I’m not saying your only one; we’re not saying your only accountability partner. But we tend to think of accountability partners as being someone out there, a friend or whoever—a same sex friend—that’s your accountability partner. I think those are important; I think we need to have those relationships, and we need to have someone that we can talk to just about girl stuff or just about guy stuff. But we need to be accountable in our marriage, too. It is extremely important that we are transparent with one another, because that’s how oneness happens. If I’m only being transparent with someone out here and he’s only being transparent with someone out here, then we’re not going to have that oneness that God intends for us to have.

Under this point, the first thing is, look at your spouse as your most important accountability partner. We learned this early in our marriage. We had not been married . . . I’m not sure it was even quite a year. We had just bought our first house; it was a little, bitty house, and Dennis was leading a Bible study with a bunch of businessmen in the town in which we lived. He would get up with these guys and they had breakfast together for Bible study.

Well, after we bought our house, he thought it would be a great idea to have the men’s Bible study in our house, which was totally fine with me. So the guys all showed up at our house in the morning, at seven or some early hour, for Bible study, and they’d sit in the living room to do their Bible study. I think there were, what? Five or six guys?

Dennis: Yes.

Barbara: It wasn’t a big group.

Dennis: It wasn’t a big group, right.

Barbara: But as they started coming, after about three or four weeks, I started feeling really uncomfortable in the presence of one of these men. I mean, I couldn’t figure out what it was. There was some vibe, there was some something about this one guy that was coming to the Bible study that just made me feel uncomfortable.

I remember thinking, What is wrong with me? Then I would think, I should tell Dennis, and then I’d think, No, that’s stupid. What is he going to think if I tell him I’m uncomfortable around this guy? Is he going to think that I find the guy attractive? I mean, I didn’t know what he was going to think.

I went back and forth internally, because that’s how I process things; I process inside first. I went back and forth with myself on what I should do. Finally, after a couple of weeks, I thought, I just have to tell him. I just have to tell him.

Dennis: What she didn’t know was I’d taken this guy out to lunch and I was basically in the process of leading him to Christ, but in paying for the lunch—

Barbara: Yes, because he wasn’t a believer.

Dennis: He wasn’t a believer. He pulled out a wad of one hundred dollar bills, and he said, “This is my play money.” He was a player. She didn’t know I knew that.

Barbara: I didn’t know that, but I sensed it. I sensed something about him was—I just didn’t want to be in his presence by myself, even with other people around. So I told Dennis, and I prayed about it a lot, because I was really nervous about it. But it was such a good encounter for us when I told him exactly what I was experiencing. Boom, like that, the Bible study ceased to exist in our house. It was back to the restaurant, so that I didn’t have to be in that position around this guy who was a player.

What it taught us that was so crucial in the foundational years of our marriage is that we have to be transparent with one another. We need one another to support each other. I needed him to know that this was really uncomfortable, because I didn’t know what to do about it, and I needed him to help me know what to do about it; and vice versa. We’ve done that over the years of our marriage.

So, we think being transparent with one another is extremely important for marriage.

Dennis: What I want both of you to hear in this: We as spouses need to be safe people that our spouse can share something like that with. I’ve shared this with men in men’s groups, and they said, “I could never share that I was lusting after women,” as I have shared with Barbara, just being transparent. I say, “Would you pray for me? For whatever reason, just to be open and honest . . .” Men would say, “I could never do that. My wife would melt down or go through the ceiling.”

Be a safe person and a shock absorber in those situations, to minister grace, love, and coaching along the way, and seek their advice.

Barbara: It’s a part of living your marriage on a spiritual battlefield. We’re both, each of us individually, we’re both fighting against temptations to do all kinds of things from the enemy—to lie or to be deceitful or to cheat on something. I mean, it’s amazing to me the ideas that the enemy throws into my brain from time to time. It’s like, Where did that come from?

I need Dennis to be in it with me. I need him to know what I’m struggling with when I’m struggling with things, and I want to know when he’s struggling with things, even something like lust, because I want to pray for him. I want to support him, because it’s a way that Satan is trying to get at him. So we need one another, we need to be transparent so that we can pray for each other and support each other, and it grows our oneness and it helps us repel the influence of the enemy in our marriage.

Samantha: We’re listening to highlights from a message Dennis and Barbara Rainey gave recently to a room full of married couples. These are lessons they’ve learned in almost 50 years of marriage.

Dennis: Number 14!

Barbara: This has been a big lesson for us over our years of marriage, and it seems very simple, but it has proven to be very complicated at times. Different isn’t wrong, it’s just different.

I don’t know about you, but one of the first discoveries in our marriage, early on, was how different we were. I mean, within months I realized we were so different in the way we handled money, right off the bat. That differentness has continued all the way through this year. So, we’ve created this little list of just a few of the things that we are different or even opposite in.

I think locally, but Dennis thinks—

Dennis: Globally.

Barbara: I’m a planner; I like to know what’s happening, I like to have my ducks in a row; and you are—

Dennis: I’m spontaneous, and as we’ve gotten older she’s become spontaneous, by the way.

Barbara: Yes, we are kind of switching on a few of these things. It’s kind of interesting.

Dennis: Yes.

Barbara: I prefer, with free time and doing fun things, I like to go to art museums and I like to garden, which are not on his radar at all.

Dennis: I don’t like to go to museums at all. That’s dead things that are in museums! I like to hunt and fish; get outdoors.

Barbara: You agree, huh?

So, for dinner, Dennis thinks he always has to have meat, and I don’t really care if I have meat. I’m fine with not having meat. I don’t really need it. I love French food. But you—

Dennis: I like spicy. I like sauces. Yes. [Laughter]

Barbara: I’m an introvert and a task person.

Dennis: I’m an extrovert and more of a people person.

Barbara: I’m not really good at asking questions, but you—

Dennis: I like to ask questions and tell stories.

Barbara: I love working with my hands. I like restoring things, I like making things, I like fixing things; and you?

Dennis: Her idea of a restful weekend is to, you know, take a car engine and rebuild it or something like that.

Barbara: I don’t do car engines!

Dennis: When I scored to come on the staff with Campus Crusade originally, the psychologist said that I scored in the lower two percentile of all the human beings at working with my hands. [Laughter] That’s just not who I am. Let’s finish this.

Barbara: I love road trips because I like to enjoy the scenery.

Dennis: She does.

Barbara: And you like to—

Dennis: Fly.

Barbara: Get there fast. Yes.

I’m an anchor in our relationship; I’m the one that keeps us home, I’m the one that slows us down, I’m the one that is the anchor.

Dennis: I’m a speedboat, and I keep us headed in the right direction.

Barbara: Keep us going, going, going, right?

Dennis: Yes.

Barbara: Those are just some of our differences. I think it just illustrates that usually in marriage we’re opposites. We usually marry opposites, and we’re also just very different people. I think I thought that by the time we got to this stage of our marriage that we would sort of have all that smoothed out and we wouldn’t be bumping into each other over our differences anymore; but no, we’re still different.

Numbers 16. The next three slides are about suffering and loss and difficulties, because life is full of those, right? We’ve all just experienced it in the last two years, collectively, not just as a country but around the world. We’ve all been through some really hard times in the last few years. So we’re going to talk about that for the next few slides.

I want to read you a verse—some of you probably know this—this verse has been really important in my life. “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet various trials, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

We had a season in our lives when we went through a really hard time with one of our kids. One of our kids was a prodigal, and we went through months and years of struggle and difficulty with this one child. I remember there was a season in our lives with this child that was exceptionally hard and it was exceptionally painful. We felt absolutely lost to know what to do.

I had either read this or God had reminded me of these verses; I don’t remember, but I got out a card, a piece of paper about that big, and I hand-wrote those verses on that paper, and I taped it into the center of my steering wheel. Every day when I got up, I remember thinking, I do not know how I’m going to get through today. I’m not sure how I’m going to find the energy to get through today. I was so beat down and I was so discouraged and I was so overwhelmed, and there seemed to be absolutely no way out of this circumstance that we were in.

I would get in my car in the morning and there would be James staring at me. “Consider it all joy when you encounter various trials.” I would read those verses over and over again, and I had them down through verse 12. By the time, over a few weeks, I pretty much had those memorized. I said, “God, I am counting on these verses being true. I don’t know what You’re doing, I don’t know what endurance looks like, I don’t know how You’re using this for good in my life, because it feels like the most awful thing I’ve ever been through. But You promise me in Your Word that I need to count these as good, and that You are going to use them for good in my life.”

There’s another verse that I’ve also loved in 1 Peter 4:12. Peter wrote to this group of people, “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you, to test you, as though some strange thing were happening to you.”

Now, how many times are you surprised by a trial? Every time, right? We don’t expect them. They always seem to come out of nowhere. We’re never really prepared. They are a surprise. And yet Peter says, “Don’t be surprised.” Why does he say that?

He says that because we’re living on a battlefield. Our marriages, our families, our lives are on a battlefield, and we’re unprepared for them because we don’t really believe God’s Word when it says that we’re going to encounter suffering and hard times. We want to believe the parts of the Bible that say—when Jesus said, “I have come to give you life and give it abundantly.” We think that means no problems, and we don’t take the whole Bible together. It is very clear in Scripture that trial is a part of our lives; lots of trials, lots of heartache, lots of difficulties.

But God wants to use that in our lives, and we’ve learned so much in our marriage and in our family through these seasons of difficulty and hardship.

The question is not the hardship, the question is not the trial, the question is not the circumstances that we’re in; the question is, how will we respond? Will we surrender to God’s sovereign control? Will we surrender to what He’s allowed to come into our lives, as uncomfortable and miserable and painful as it is? Will we say, “Thank You, God”? Will we surrender to Him and allow Him to use that in our lives to change us and make us who He wants us to be? The point is, suffering will either drive you apart or it will bring you together. It’s what we do with the suffering, it’s what we do with the hard circumstances, that determines whether we will come closer together or we will become isolated and drift apart. The choice is up to us each and every time it comes along.

Dennis: Yes. One of the things that I have found that helps people survive going through very, very difficult times, they ultimately come to a fork in the road, where they decide, “This will not define me. This crisis will not define our family.” I mean, I love to ask men this question: “What’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done in your life?”

For me, one of the most courageous things I’ve ever done was to love my daughter. Tough love. Not soft, squishy love; but really love that looked out for the very best for her. For many of you, you’re going to be called upon to dig down deep into Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit to help you love the unlovable. Go there, visit there, camp there. Ask God to create that kind of love for that person.

Barbara: I’m going to give you another verse really quickly, before I go through the next slide, and that’s Habakkuk 3:17-18. I think our oldest was maybe 15, 14, somewhere early teens—we didn’t have that many teenagers yet—I was in a Bible study, and we were studying through the minor prophets. We came to this verse, and I’ll never forget sitting in Bible study and reading this verse. It says, “Though the fig tree should not blossom nor fruit be on the vines, if the produce of the olives should fail and the fields yield no food—” We’re talking about a big economic downturn. “—if the flocks be cut off from the fold and there be no herds in the stalls,” Habakkuk said, “yet I will rejoice in my God. I will take joy in the God of my salvation.”

I read that verse, and I sat there and I went, “Oh Lord, what if none of my kids follow Jesus?” That was my prayer; that was my greatest hope. It was my ambition, that all of our children would follow Jesus. Just like the farmer wants his crops to be—he wants them all to produce. My goal was that all of my kids would know Jesus. I sat there that day in Bible study and I thought, What will I do if that doesn’t happen? Well, the verse said it, right there. It said, “Yet I will rejoice in God; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.”

I said to the Lord that day in Bible study, “Okay. If they don’t follow You, I will still rejoice in You, and I will take joy in You, because You are my rock and You are my strength. I can’t control what they do with their lives.”

Samantha: We’ve been listening to Dennis and Barbara Rainey, with just a few of their tips—lessons, really—lessons they’ve learned after nearly 50 years of marriage.

I think those are helpful if you’ve been married for one day, a decade, or seven decades!

Dennis and Barbara write about these lessons and many more in a new book that’s available to you as a listener of this podcast. The title is Our Story. In this book, they tell how they met and married. It’s something Barbara wanted to give her grandchildren as a gift to celebrate 50 years of marriage. And of course, part of that is the 50 lessons they learned in the last half century. We’ll mail you a copy for your donation of $50 or more. Supplies are limited, so get in touch with us now.

For more information, just visit EverThineHome.com/OurStory (all one word). Make your donation of $50 or more, and we’ll send you Dennis and Barbara’s new book. Again, it’s Ever Thine Home.com/Our Story.

In case you’re curious about how Dennis and Barbara met and dated and got engaged, that’s what they’ll be talking about in our next episode. So I hope you won’t miss it.

Thanks for listening today! I’m Samantha Loucks. May your marriage and your home bring great glory to God. See you next time, as Dennis and Barbara share their story, on the Barbara Rainey Podcast from Ever Thine Home.