Samantha Keller: Every married couple will face difficulties of one sort or another. Here’s Barbara Rainey.

Barbara Rainey: Elisabeth Elliot has said this definition of suffering. She said, “Suffering is having something you don’t want and wanting something you don’t have.” And that brings pressure. Doesn’t it? That definition of suffering alone brings pressure. Having something you don’t want and wanting something you don’t have.
Samantha: And when suffering and pressure come, it will either drive a couple apart, or—and this might surprise you—closer together.

Welcome to the Barbara Rainey Podcast from Ever Thine Home, where we’re dedicated to helping you experience God in your home. Thanks for listening!

Today we’re going to hear a classic, timeless message on how you can handle pressure in your marriage.

Early in their ministry, Dennis and Barbara Rainey co-authored a book called Building Your Mate’s Self-Esteem. The principles captured in that book formed a foundation for much of what they’ve continued to teach on over the years. They combined two important concepts—the Biblical idea of “building one another up” AND the application of that command of Scripture to the marriage relationship.

If you’re married, you know that the health of your marriage affects everything. And one key element is how you handle the pressures that come at you in marriage. Discussing concepts from Building Your Mate’s Self-Esteem, here are Dennis and Barbara Rainey, speaking on “Keeping Life Manageable.”

Dennis Rainey: Pressure. Everybody here lives under it. We try to deny that we’re there. We hide it. We’re driven by it. We work under it. We’re squeezed by it. We’re over-committed, over-extended, and over-loaded. But pressure is a normal part of life.

David Stoop in his fine book Self-Talk says that some 20 to 30 million Americans suffer physical problems because of stress and pressure. He says we suffer from ulcers, sleeplessness, hypertension, weight problems, and allergies – all as a result of stress. It led Samuel Butler once to say, “Life is one long process of getting tired.” I can identify with that.

I want to give you five sources of pressure. There are many, many more. But first of all, unrealistic expectations. We are a society of over-achievers. We are trying to accomplish too much. The most frequent question that we are asked in our family is, “How do you do it all?”

Barbara: We don’t.

Dennis: We don’t. In fact, if you looked up here carefully and you could really inspect us, you would find that what you’re looking at is a pair of social nerds. We have pulled out at this section of our family life and we are not involved socially much in our home community. Why? There simply isn’t time. We really do say no to a lot and we don’t try to do it all. In fact, if there’s one thing that typically is a part of our conversations when we get away for a planning retreat or on our Sunday night dates, we talk about and look at our schedules. And we’re constantly axing things – talking about what we will say yes to and importantly, what we will say no to. I personally think one of the most powerful words in the English vocabulary is the word no. And if you haven’t practiced saying it occasionally, maybe you need to do what we do – and you may think this is weird. But we walk outside. We live in the woods, in the hills of Arkansas, and we just walk around saying no to trees. And we’ll walk up to a tree and say, “No, I’m sorry. I can’t do that. No, I’ve got a commitment that weekend. I’m going to be with my family.” Say no to them. Just practice saying no. And after a while, it becomes natural and it’s easier to say no when people are asking you to do things.

Well, there are other people screaming at us as well and it’s not just our own expectations. It is a chorus of voices – and see if some of these voices I’m about to read aren’t familiar voices in your own ears about people who have enormous expectations on your life.

* “My dentist wants me to floss -- between meals, nonetheless.”
* “My doctor wants to know how much I weigh, how much body fat is on my body, what I eat, and how much I’m exercising.”
* “My creditors pressure me to pay on time, every time.”
* “The police pressure me to drive within the speed limit.”
* “Advertisers pressure me to buy more, be discontent with what I have and get more.”
* “Hollywood pressures me in the moral area.”
* “My employer, my boss, pressures me to meet deadlines, go to meetings, do it right the first time—with excellence, of course. Do it quicker, better, cheaper, faster—and of course, with the right attitude.”
* “My neighbor pressures me, maybe not verbally but it’s his yard that is always perfect, perfectly manicured. There are no weeds in his yard. The grass is always perfectly cut, manicured, and he always leaves his garage door open so you can see how clean it is.”
* “My peers, my friends are the ones who want me to be well-read and they’ve always mentioning the latest 10 books they’ve read in the past two days.
* They pressure me to know the candidates and who to vote for, to know their stance on all the issues.
* To be available as a peer, as a friend – ‘would you help us in this area? We need your leadership to help fight on this issue.’”
* And then there’s the mailman. The mailman brings all kinds of pressure devices and response pieces, bills, forms and surveys from the government, from organizations that ship you these little catalogs.
* And then there’s Christian organizations and your church which send you fund appeals.
* Your pastor wants you to be available spiritually to him, to the church and to others.
* And then, there is your family – your wife, to meet her needs, to remodel or move, to fix things, understand her, help direct our family.
* And then the children want me to spend time with them. How can you ever know if you spend enough time with six kids, to impart values to them, to know the kids that they play with and their parents and what kind of home they have? And then to prepare them for adolescence and sex education. And then, of course, to save for their college education.
* And then our parents and in-laws begin to chime in – how we’re living—too fast, too busy, too high, too rich, too much in debt, too poor, too little in savings—all having an opinion of how we live.
* Then there are the unpredictable interruptions of life, like finding out you’ve got brown recluse spiders in your house, termites, auto accidents, surgery, the loss of a job, a job change.
* And then, at the end of all this there’s God. And God pressures us to obey him, to walk with him, to be available to tell others about him and to witness to others.

Isn’t life interesting? There are an enormous number of voices today expecting a great deal of us.

Well, a second cause of pressure and source of pressure we feel is activity fueled by our own insecurity. Some of us are too busy because we have a need to feel important and we can’t stand to have some space in our schedule because we might be forced to face who we are – or who we aren’t.

I’ll never forget sitting down with a guy who wrote a book on being a father. His name is Ron Rand, it’s called, For Fathers Who Aren’t in Heaven—a great book on fatherhood. And he told a story over dinner about how he coached his three boys’ Little League baseball teams, all to champions of their league. I forget the story of how many games they won.

Well, he had no idea when he was sharing that story that I was just completing my second season of coaching and I had turned in my resignation as a Little League coach because in two seasons—the first season we went one and fifteen. And the second season we matched the first year. One victory, 15 losses. Well, you know, if I’d have been driven by that I’d go, “You know, I’m not a very good father. Maybe not a very good coach, either.” You know? But if I’d been driven by that I could have run off trying to do things with those kids to make them into a champion team and pressure them and to pressure us all because I needed to live out my identity through my kids, rather than letting them learn the agony of defeat (which they definitely learned).

What we need in our lives is balance. Balance. We need to get out of comparing ourselves with others and just do what God has called you to do.

Barbara: The third source of pressure that we feel is called inevitable difficulties. We have a friend who once said, “If we didn’t expect life to be so easy, it wouldn’t be so hard.” And I think that’s where a lot of us are. We think life is going to be easy and we expect it to be easier than it really is, and we don’t anticipate that there are going to be interruptions and crises and trials and difficulties in our lives. And so we’re caught off guard by them, and we’re not prepared for them.

C.S. Lewis said this about interruptions, “What we must do is stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life, the real life that God sends us day by day. What we call our real life is but a phantom of our imagination.” He said, “Those unexpected things, those interruptions are real life.”

I think when we can realize that the unexpected things that God sends our way day by day is what real life is all about, then we’ll quit being so disappointed. And we’ll feel not quite so much pressure because we’re trying to live this perfect life and we expect it to be a certain way and it’s not. And so we feel that stress and pressure when God sends those interruptions and those unexpected difficulties into our lives.

Well, interruptions come in all different kinds of sizes, don’t they? There are real small ones and there are medium-size ones and there are large ones. Some of the small ones that interrupt our lives are things like lost keys, a light bulb salesman on the phone right as we’re getting ready to sit down to dinner, runny noses, flat tires. All those little things that are just little irritants that creep into life every day at some point or another.

But then there are the big ones, the great big interruptions, the great big unexpected difficulties. A couple of years ago I was sitting at a Bible study in a friend’s home in the evening and a phone call came through. And, of course, I didn’t expect that it would be for me but it was. And it was our daughter Ashley on the phone telling me that Rebecca, who was then about six or seven years old, had just fallen off of our deck. Our deck is about 12 feet high off the ground because we live in a real hilly area, and she fell off of the highest part of the deck and landed right here in the middle of her forehead. Now the ground underneath where she landed was not particularly soft, either. The ground was just like concrete. It was as hard as it could be, it had all kinds of rocks in it, and it was not a good place to fall. Well, Ashley was on the phone giving me this information. It was an unexpected difficulty of very large proportions. And she told me that Rebecca was on her way to the hospital with Dennis and where they were going to be and she was home with the other kids.

I immediately got in my car and ran over there. Well, Rebecca, it turned out, was fine. But nonetheless, that was a big interruption—a big, unplanned difficulty in our lives.

And I know you could tell similar stories of interruptions in your lives and those interruptions cause pressure. And that personal interruption that I experienced also affected Dennis and it affected the kids for several weeks on end because those interruptions that God brings into our lives, he brings for a reason. He wants us to evaluate what we’re doing and why we’re doing what we’re doing. And that is a good kind of pressure to have in our lives.

Elisabeth Elliot has said this definition of suffering. She said, “Suffering is having something you don’t want and wanting something you don’t have.” And that brings pressure. Doesn’t it? That definition of suffering alone brings pressure. Having something you don’t want and wanting something you don’t have.

Well, there’s a fourth thing that brings pressure to our lives and that is the failure to plan. Earlier, Dennis mentioned that one of the things that pleases me most is planning and he’s right. I really do like to plan. And the reason I like to plan is because planning brings security and stability to my life. When I know what’s going to happen in the next week or the next couple of weeks or in the next month, then I’m a whole lot better prepared to handle those things that are coming because I know what’s ahead. It brings purpose and control to my life.

For us though there are certain times of the year that bring more pressure than others. One of those times of year is May. May is always a busy month for us. It’s the end of the school year for the kids and there are a lot of things going on at the schools for the kids. But there’s also a lot going on for Dennis and I in the ministry. And we know that May is a really stressful time in our lives.

There’s another time of the year that’s really stressful for us, and that’s starting in the fall and running through Christmas. It’s not just the month of December anymore. It’s kind of expanded its way back in the calendar, and it’s eating up more time. But we have those chunks of time in the calendar year that are particularly stressful for us. And what we’ve tried to do to help balance that stress is to try to plan sections of time where we’re not doing anything on either side of that.

So for instance, this year in the month of April, we didn’t have any trips planned. And we purposely did that because we knew in May, we were going to be gone every weekend and sometimes in between. And so we planned for May by keeping April open. And we try to do that with the Christmas season as well, keeping January open and not having a lot going on in there, just keeping our meetings to a minimum, keeping travel out of the schedule. And we’ve learned by experience and by lots of failure, that that’s how we can handle those two difficult seasons in our lives.

Dennis: I want you ladies to know that I’ve resisted this for a number of years until I finally have taken note that it really makes sense. And that Barbara throwing out these anchors in our schedule to kind of create these little harbors of tranquility –I’ve begun to see that they make sense. They make sense for the long-haul to be a finisher in the race that is really the length of a marathon race. So be patient with us men if we don’t get the message right away. Be patient with us, as Barbara has with me. I now see that her thinking on this is really far superior to mine and I would drive our family off a cliff, I think, if it wasn’t for her.

Well, there’s a fifth source of pressure in our lives and it’s the spiritual battle. And if you’re in it, you know exactly what I’m talking about because it’s that portion of where God begins to expect obedience of us in the midst of spiritual warfare that is taking place – an unseen battle. There are issues today that cry out for involvement. And one of the solutions that many of us come up with is to really ignore those responsibilities and we want out from under them or we want to reduce those responsibilities.

I had one man come up with a little cartoon that was called “The Light Church.” You know, we have light salt, light sugar, of course light beer and other things that say they’re light. Everything is reduced. Well, here is the light church. Outside of this church, the light church, was this marquis with the following statements on it: “24% fewer commitments, home of the 7.5% tithe, only 5 minute sermons, 15 minute worship services, we have only 8 commandments of your choice, we use just 3 spiritual laws, and have only an 800-year millennium. Everything you wanted in a church and less.”

Well, that isn’t the solution to the spiritual problem because just getting rid of pressure is not the solution. In fact, the truth is that pressure is good for us.

Samantha: We’ve been listening to Dennis and Barbara Rainey, describing some of the sources of pressure couples can experience. Maybe you can identify with them.

We’re going to listen to a conversation they had with their friend Bob Lepine. Dennis says there’s a solution. It’s offered by the Apostle Paul in Ephesians chapter five, verses fifteen and sixteen.

Dennis: “Therefore, be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise.” And I think the phrase “be careful how you walk” is really a power-packed portion of scripture that really contains some instruction for us as to how we ought to live. And I think what couples need to do today is to first of all determine what their values are. And I think one of the most important points in our marriage came a little over a decade ago when we continually faced the tyranny of the urgent and more demands on our time and our family than we possibly had hours to go along. And it was through Barbara’s really insistence that we sit down and hammer out some of our values that a lot of this came together, Bob.

Bob Lepine: You were feeling pressure back then, Barbara?

Barbara: Yeah. I was feeling pressure and part of it was just learning how to live in this marriage. Part of it was the number of children that we had at that point. And just life’s demands and learning to work all that out. And I remember sitting down one day and talking with Dennis about our values and determining what do we value together as a couple. And it was an interesting exercise for us because we decided that we would each write down separately what we valued individually. And then we compared our list and it was interesting that we both valued different things. That revealed to us instantly that that’s part of the reason why we were feeling some pressure and feeling some tension in our marriage and in our family is because we were both valuing differing things. And therefore, we were driven by different objectives.

Bob: Dennis, you and I have talked before about Saturday and how that manifested itself on Saturday. Dad comes home and he’s thinking, “Boy, here’s Saturday. I can finally just kick back and relax.” And mom is thinking, “Here he comes. I can finally get some of these projects done around the house.” And all of a sudden, different values lead to a combustible explosion on a Saturday.

Dennis: Barbara’s head is nodding vociferously here. She is saying, “Amen, amen.” But that’s what happened. There’s probably no other day when our values collided more than the one day we had together. Now that sounds like, “Wait a second. The one day you have together is the day when you kind of ought to merge. Shouldn’t it?” No. Saturday, the way I viewed it, was a day to build relationships. Now how do you build relationships? You do things outside the house.

Bob: Little family outings, something like that?

Dennis: That’s right.

Barbara: And before you watch sports on TV. You forgot that one.

Dennis: You cuddle. That’s right. You cuddle beside…

Barbara: Cuddle in front of the TV on the couch.

Dennis: …in front of the TV and go to sleep in front of the TV.

Barbara: Uh-huh. That’s right.

Dennis: That’s how dad did it with me. But Barbara’s idea of a great weekend was around her value that was different than mine. In fact, I didn’t have this anywhere on my top 10. And some of the people would probably be surprised, but she had hard work. Now that was a value out of Barbara’s life. Well, here are two people – a husband and wife. I’ve got relationships as a top five value; she’s got hard work. And here you find the weekend. Who is going to win in that situation? Well, we had a lot of collisions on the weekends because I was trying to build relationships and she was trying to build a work ethic in our kids – and, by the way, in me. And as a result, I wasn’t accomplishing what she wanted to see accomplished over the weekend and it left her disappointed.

Bob: Well, this exercise of sitting down and kind of mapping out what your values are – I’m thinking if Mary Ann and I tried to do that around the kitchen table tonight, I’m not sure we would know where to begin. Where did you begin? Do you remember, Barbara?

Barbara: Well, as I remember it, we just decided we were going to think through what was most important to us in life. And I just – and my list may not have been very accurate, it may not have been especially thorough. But I just remember thinking through what do I want to see happen in my life and in my kids at the end of it all, when the kids are grown and when it’s all said and done. And I just put down some of the things that mattered most to me, and the hard work ethic was something that was important to me as a child and I remember that was one of the things on my list.

Dennis: I think one of the things you said is important to underscore here. It wasn’t that clean of a process the first time the plow went through the ground.

Barbara: Huh-uh. It wasn’t.

Dennis: The values were muddy. There was some confusion in there. But the fact was we reduced it to paper and we put it down on a sheet of paper and we began to compare. And as we compared, I began to see, “Well, she’s got some things over here that I really think are more important than some of mine.” And we began to evaluate where is our life headed? You and I, Bob, have both read a book by Stephen Covey called, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And one of the exercises he – well, you were talking about it this morning. Why don’t you share with our listeners?

Bob: Yeah. He invites folks to go through an exercise where they imagine that they are seated at their own funeral and there are three people who are going to eulogize them. One is a family member; one is someone from their business or their workplace; and another is someone who has known them either in the community or at church, but outside of family and business. And each of those folks are going to get up and talk about what made you a great person and you get a chance to write that eulogy for those people. And he says, “Now what would you want them to include?” And that process – the first time I read through that, I said, “That really cuts through it all.” That gets you to the end of your life and it asks you what’s really important. What do I want my family to say about me as a dad, as a husband? What do I want my co-workers to affirm was good about me? What do I want folks in my church or in my community to be able to say about me? And I think that really hits at what are the core values, what’s important to me in life. And Dennis, I think this is important for a lot of couples listening to the program because there’s an assumption that if you’re Christians and if you’re married to one another, you’re bound to have the same values. So, I mean, you both believe in the scriptures, you both love the Lord.

Dennis: Right.

Bob: Your values should be tracking down the same trek. But you guys have been married for 10 years, you’re heading up a ministry on marriage and family, and your lists were different?

Dennis: Well, I think you hit the danger on the head. We assume we have the same values because we’ve never reduced it to paper. And I think our culture is a slippery culture. I think we enjoy living in the vague. And I’m going to get on my soapbox here for second. I think this may be nearing one of the issues that are at the core of what’s wrong with Christianity here in our churches and in our nation. I don’t think we ever place our bets on our lives. What is your life about? What are you living your life for? And what happened with us over a decade ago when we would begin to list out those values, we all of a sudden began to distill out the essence of Dennis Rainey’s life, Barbara Rainey’s life, the Rainey family. Who are we? What are we about?

One of the questions that we ask is a question to say, “If you died today, describe the legacy that you would leave.” That’s another way of looking at your values. What would you like your legacy to look like? Well, all of us are in the process of leaving a legacy. All of us are in the process of living out our values. Nothing just happens.

Bob: Well, here we are talking about reducing pressure, trying to relieve some of the pressure in marriage, and the first step is a project for a husband and wife to sit down and do. And I can hear some husbands and wives saying, “Well, that’s all I need is another project, another something to do.” But Barbara, this was a pressure-reliever for you. Wasn’t it?

Barbara: Well, it was because it wasn’t that I didn’t value relationships or that Dennis didn’t value hard work.

Dennis: Thank you for recognizing that.

Barbara: Yeah. But what it did for us is it helped us understand what was driving the other person because what was driving me on Saturdays was trying to get some things done, and what was driving him was relationships. And even though we were both very different and we valued some of the same things, we were both driven by different things. And that understanding that came from doing that little exercise of talking about what we both valued was very important in understanding each other and in knowing what to expect out of each other.

Bob: And in serving one another, too, I would think because there may have been some days where you hit a Saturday and you said, “You know, I can just see in Dennis’ eyes here that he needs a relationship Saturday.”

Barbara: That’s right.

Bob: “So I need to back off my project list this Saturday and just let him do that.” And Dennis, I’m sure there were some Saturday mornings you got up and thought, “I would love to watch the game of the week but it looks to me like we need to do a little painting this weekend instead.”

Dennis: Yeah.

Barbara: That’s right.

Dennis: The handwriting needed to be on the wall in the form of paint. It really did help me serve Barbara because what it did is it communicated her language of love. Hard work was a way on a weekend for me to demonstrate to Barbara that I valued her as a person. And for 10 years I had missed Barbara. I had missed her language of love and hadn’t met her at her point of need. And this really gave me a chance, when I wanted to, to really sacrifice. Now there are times when I wanted to be selfish and wanted her to meet my needs. But it really gave me an opportunity to say to her, “You are important. You are valued. You have dignity as a woman.” And to exhibit that self-sacrifice that should be exhibited by all men as the leaders of their families.

Bob: Well, Barbara, when you and Dennis sat down and did this, you were both operating off of at least some common ground. You both had a relationship with Christ. You were both committed to serving him. And yet, you came up with two completely different lists. I know that some of our listeners don’t even have that luxury. If they were to sit down with a husband or a wife tonight and do this kind of an exercise, there is no assurance that their lists would not contradict one another because one or the other does not have a relationship with Christ. Their values are completely different and that can be daunting for husbands or wives as they face this. If a young wife came to you and said, “My husband and I simply don’t value the same things. In fact, we’re in conflict about some of these values. He thinks it ought to be one way, and I think it ought to be another way.” How would you counsel her?

Barbara: I would encourage her to still do a values list with her husband because if nothing else it will give them some time together. It will give them some things that they can talk about and it will help her understand him. And you just never know, it might help him understand her a little bit better as well. And I think that there can be some benefit to doing a list even with the husband who might be totally different from you. There were some things that attracted you to him in the first place, so there must be some values there that you can appreciate and that you can encourage him for. And I would say that by doing a list you might be reminded of what some of those positive things are.

Bob: Dennis, I would think that there’s the opportunity for this kind of an exercise to create conflict in marriage.

Dennis: I think that you’ve got to underline and underscore the need for a wife especially – and for that matter, a man too – to be gentle and loving in differing with their spouse. Not to club them with their differences, to judge them or to come across condescending or judgmental toward them. But instead, come up with some creative alternatives of how your values do overlap and how you can share values. And rather than looking at the list at how you differ and how drastic your list is, find a way to meet him or her at their point of agreement and build from there. And pray. Pray that God will begin to use you in a winsome way. I Peter 3 says, “So that you can win your husband without a word.” That’s the concept here of being winsome, to win them to the truth so that they would want to adopt the values of Christianity.

Bob: Well, help me understand this again. We’re talking about managing pressure in marriage and in relationships. And today we’ve been talking about this project of trying to define some core family values. And Barbara, your pressure didn’t just evaporate after you had this exercise around the kitchen table a decade ago. Did it?

Barbara: No. It didn’t. In fact, what we have done is we have continued over the years to talk about our values and to re-evaluate them and redefine them. And it’s interesting that we have over the last – what has been now – 12 years since that time, we have in a sense come together. Now it’s not that we have exactly the same values but we have sort of merged together in a way that we wouldn’t have had we not talked about those values and recognized that there were differences in the first place.

Dennis: I really agree. I think what the exercise has done for us as a couple is it’s helped us develop our own identity. There is less of a tendency to compare ourselves with the culture and with our other Christian friends and be driven by their expectations, their lifestyles, their choices instead of hammering out our own on our own clear direction for what we want to accomplish. And I think that’s where a lot of our pressure comes from. We’re exposed to so much today. And what Barbara and I revisit is a question that I think is real healthy for couples to do almost on an annual basis and that is, “Where must we succeed? Where do we feel like we’ve got to succeed above all else?” And I think it’s just a couple of things. Number one, our own relationship with God; secondly, our marriage – we need to strive to maintain moral purity and communication and resolving conflict in our own marriage; and then thirdly, we want to win with our kids. And vocational and other issues spiritually related to our church all flow from the strength of those three commitments. And I think if those begin to come in focus then it’s easier to say yes to the right things at church, at work, in our culture and say no to things that will pull us apart in our own marriage and families...

Bob: So Barbara, when someone calls in here and says, “Hey, Dennis, can you fly up for the weekend and speak at our church?” Or “Can you come out for the week and do a conference for us on something?” The two of you get an opportunity to sit down and weigh that request, that opportunity alongside your core values and make a determination about how it fits. Don’t you?

Barbara: That’s right. And we do talk about all of those decisions. Sometimes we don’t talk about them for more than two or three minutes because it’s pretty obvious to both of us. But we agreed years ago that we would discuss those kinds of outside opportunities before we made the decision individually. We would always make it together first.

Bob: I bet there have been times that you’ve looked at something that Barbara had in mind to do, Dennis, and you’ve said, “You know, that’s a good thing to do but I don’t know that we’ve got the time. I think it would put us under the pile,” and caused her to reconsider in a healthy way. Right?

Dennis: Barbara has high expectations and she can tend to move us toward over-commitment just like her husband can. And it’s interesting though, Bob – I was just reflecting as Barbara was sharing her answer with you just a second ago. I think this clarification of our values as a couple has really helped us define our lives, not out there among Christians in the public arena on the platform speaking or even in here on the radio speaking to thousands of listeners. But instead, has helped us define our lives where it counts first – and that’s in our own marriage and family. And we don’t do that perfectly. We’ve hammered out our values and we don’t live consistently by them. But having them – having them clearly set before us I think probably insures a better focus and probably a greater chance of hitting the bulls-eye than if you didn’t have them at all.

Samantha: So one important way to deal with pressure in your marriage is to figure out—to “hammer out,” as Dennis and Barbara Rainey put it—your values. Your priorities. What’s important. It’s part of what the Bible calls walking wisely and making the most of our time.

I’d like to pause for a quick comment here. It may be that in your marriage, the pressure you’re facing is a lot more serious than differing ideas of how to spend your Saturday. Pressure and stress can also be the result of a spouse’s egregious sin against you. I’m talking about situations like abuse. In that kind of a scenario, you need to get help from outside your marriage. Professional counseling, mature Christians in your church, the civil authorities—all might need to be involved, depending on your specific circumstances. Don’t wait. Okay?

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Thanks for listening today. May the pressures you encounter in your life drive you closer to God and closer to those you love. We’ll see you next time, here on the Barbara Rainey Podcast, from Ever Thine Home.