Samantha Keller: Twenty-two-year-old Barbara suspected Dennis Rainey was about to propose. To her, it was a logical choice.

Barbara Rainey: To marry my best friend just made so much sense. Why would I want to marry someone that was a stranger? I mean, he was in many ways. But we had spent so much time together and logged so many life experiences, it just made sense.
Samantha: We’ll hear more about how Dennis Rainey and Barbara Peterson became Dennis and Barbara Rainey, today.

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!

In September of last year, Dennis and Barbara Rainey celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They captured highlights and lessons from their courtship and marriage in a book titled Our Story. Not long after the book was out, they were invited to be guests on the podcast “Michael Easley InContext.”

The Raineys have known Michael and Cindy Easley for many years. The Easleys served on the team of speakers for the FamilyLife Weekend to Remember®.

Let’s listen to part one of their conversation with Dr. Michael Easley.

Dr. Michael Easley: Let’s talk about this new book you put out. It’s called Our Story, by Dennis and Barbara Rainey. It’s dated September 2, 1972 to 2022. Now first of all, is this a book everybody can get a hold of, or is this a book that you kind of did for, obviously, your family, but was it more of a small circle with the intent?

Barbara: Yeah, it was a small circle. We wrote it because, as we celebrated our fiftieth in early September, and as we were looking forward to that, we were trying to decide, “What do we want to do? How do we want this to look and feel?” Part of what we wanted to do was leave our kids a gift of some kind—give them something that they could hang onto.

We realized as we talked that, even though our kids think they know our story, they probably only know pieces of our story. For sure our grandkids don’t know our story. They don’t know the stories of what God has done in our lives. They don’t know all the things that we’ve been through and how God has been so faithful.

We also realized that some of the youngest grandchildren we might not know for very long. We’ve got infants right now, and if God grants us favor, we’ll be around when they’re twenty. But we may not be. We know that.

So we decided to write our story in print and give all of the grandkids (and our kids, too) a copy so that they would know a little bit more about their mom and dad and their Mimi and Papa.

Dennis: A number of years ago we were given a letter by Dave and Peggy Jones.

Michael: Yes!

Dennis: You’ll remember they were on the FamilyLife marriage conference speaker team. They had been given a letter that was written by a Baptist preacher in the 1600’s. Obadiah Holmes was his name.

Michael: I remember this.

Dennis: We wrote about this in our devotional, Moments Together for Couples.

Michael: Yep.

Dennis: The last three days of the year are really a reprint of his letter to his descendents. That letter has now survived twelve generations. It’s fascinating! He was addressing his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren as he spoke, speaking into their lives:
wanting them to be on mission,
wanting them to be a part of the King’s army,
and rolling up their sleeves and making a difference in their generations.
So that’s where the idea came from. It germinated over a period of probably thirty years in Barbara’s and my life. We decided to put this thing together to give to our children and grandchildren, probably to some great-grandchildren, too.

Michael: I was going to ask. Is there any lens on when the first great-grandchild— first of all, how many grandchildren, Barbara?

Barbara: Twenty-seven.

Michael: Twenty-seven!

Barbara: I know. Isn’t that staggering? That’s how I feel about it.

Michael: I have twenty-seven pairs of socks, (laughter) but once grandkids are married, will there be a great-grandchild in the next year or two or three or four?

Barbara: Well, potentially in three or four. We had one marry. Our second grandson, James, got married last May. He’s still in college, and she’s working. They don’t have any plans to get pregnant anytime soon. But three or four years, maybe!

Michael: Yeah, those plans sometimes don’t hold up!

Barbara: They don’t.

Michael: What does it feel like to have grandchildren get married, since Cindy and I aren’t there yet?

Barbara: It feels really strange. It’s hard to believe he’s big enough, old enough. I mean, you look at him, and he looks old enough, for sure. But it’s just hard to believe he really is.

Dennis: I think it’s rejuvenating. You know, children are God’s message to the next generation. Life continues. It goes on. As I like to say, there’s more than one way to change the world. You can overpopulate it with little believers who embrace Jesus Christ and His claims for their lives. I think that’s the time-tested method of both discipleship and of passing on a legacy.

Michael: The nursery! Yeah the nursery: overpopulate and conquer. That’s a theory!

So tell folks who don’t know your story. When did the two of you meet?

Dennis: Well, we met in college when I was a junior at the University of Arkansas, and Barbara was a sophomore. We met through what was then Campus Crusade for Christ, now Cru. We were in the same group together. We always liked each other and got along well. She dated my very best friend. Unfortunately, he couldn’t make a decision to marry her, so I said, “If you don’t marry her, I will,” and I really had no intention at that point of marrying Barbara.

But about a year later we found ourselves together at a little meeting in Dallas, Texas, called Explo '72. I was in charge of transportation for 40,000 high school kids that were deposited all over the metroplex— Fort Worth, Denton, North Texas. . .

Barbara: And you were how old? Remind them how old you were.

Michael: What were you, nineteen?

Dennis: (We were) twenty-three and twenty-two. I think we’ll get to heaven and find out we had angels driving buses during Explo '72. Because 100,000 people came together in the Cotton Bowl (stadium). It was a powerful time to see God at work.

We were in the midst of a relationship beginning at that point. We really never dated. We just hung out. We spent time together when we were working on Explo for fifty days out of fifty-two, until a guy who had influenced our lives dramatically at the University of Arkansas, Don Meredith (not the Dallas Cowboy Don Meredith, but Don Meredith the campus director of Cru)—he sat us down in a musty motel room in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma. Tell them, Barbara, what happened.

Barbara: Well, Dennis and I were both there to be in a wedding of some really good friends of ours. I was a bridesmaid; he was a groomsman. On the afternoon before the wedding that evening, Don asked if he could have an hour with us.

We said, “Sure. Fine. We’ll come over.” So Dennis picked me up where I was staying, and we drove over to this hotel.

Don said, “Have a seat. I want to talk to you.”

I will never forget this hotel room. It was very 1950’s. It was very small. It had one double bed. It had a small table with two chairs in front of the window. And that was all that was in the room. It was dark, and it was musty.

We sat in those two chairs, and Don planted himself between us both on the edge of the bed and said, “You two have been dating long enough. You’ve been hanging out with each other. And I think it’s time for you to decide whether or not it’s God’s will for you to get married.” (laughter)

I was like a deer in the headlights! I was shocked, because that had not entered my mind at all. It hadn’t entered Dennis’s mind, either. We were really good friends. We had been really good friends in college for three years.

I had had enough dating relationships that went south, and I just thought, “You know, I really like him a lot. I want to keep him as a really good friend, and I don’t want to mess it up by turning it into a dating relationship, because then that might jeopardize the friendship,” and I didn’t want to jeopardize the friendship.

Dennis: At one point, Michael, we were walking through North Park shopping center, there in North Dallas, and I reached over to hold Barbara’s hand. And this is when we’d gone out fifty-two days out of fifty-five, just as friends. We went fishing together. We had lunch. We hung out until 2:00 in the morning just talking and getting to know each other.

And I reached over to hold her hand as we were walking out of the shopping center. She shot me a look and said, “Why did you do that?”

Michael: Yeah.

Dennis: And I didn’t have an answer. So I dropped her hand right there in the parking lot. That kind of drew a line about the physical involvement that Barbara and I had. It was not a relationship that was going to be built on any kind of physical relationship. We virtually didn’t kiss until we got engaged. No regrets about that, by the way.

That’s kind of how it happened.

(Don) challenged us to get alone, take two weeks, pray about it. I prayed about it for two days.

Michael: You were ready. (sarcastically) You’re an indecisive fella, yeah!

Dennis: I’m a man of action, as you know. I lived in Boulder, Colorado. I decided I’d call Barbara. I think it was about midnight in Boulder, and she was in South Carolina. So, it was 2:00 A.M. for her. I woke her up. I said, “I’ve been praying about this. Will you be my wife? Will you marry me?”

Michael: Over the phone?? I’ve never heard this story! (laughing)

Dennis: Yeah, it’s a closely-guarded secret.

Michael: Okay, so you’re bleary-eyed, and this crazy guy wakes you up. What did you say?

Barbara: I said yes. I knew that, because we had talked this thing through, after we had that meeting with Don in the hotel room. We drove somewhere in this little town and parked the car and looked at each other and said, “Well, what do you think? What do you think about what he said? I mean, we haven’t talked about marriage. What do you think about that?”

And we both said, “Well, yeah, I mean, we like each other. We’re really good friends. We’re open to that. Let’s think about it.”

So we talked for, probably, two hours, until we had to go get ready for that wedding we were in. And then after the wedding, we drove off somewhere and talked for another two or three hours about it.

As we talked it through, we thought, “You know, God has a plan. God knows what He’s doing. And if this is God’s will, why would we want anything else? We don’t.”

So we had agreed that we were going to pray about it, as Dennis said. As I flew back to South Carolina, I said, “Lord, I need to know what Your will is. I need to know if this is where You want me to go. And if he asks me to marry him, do You want me to say yes, or am I supposed to say no and walk away?”

I just had this sense of peace that if he asked me I was supposed to say yes. I didn’t hear a voice. There was nothing like that. It was just this contentment, this sense of peace, of “This is right, and if he asks you, go for it!”

And so, when he asked me, I was all ready with my answer, and I said yes.

Michael: A couple of things…the Don Meredith story—I knew about Don in your life, but I just now had this explosion, “Okay, now I understand Don’s fingerprints on FamilyLife.” Even in the session workbook we had for pre-marrieds about, “get away and pray for two weeks,” or whatever the number was. I thought, “Okay, this is all from Don’s mouth, to the FamilyLife material.

Secondly, I have become reductionist in my pre-marriage counseling. What I mean by that is, I don’t tell people to go to pre-marriage counseling anymore because they don’t listen. They don’t pay attention unless it’s a bona fide psychologist, generally. (Instead), “Go after you’ve been married a year! Because now you’re going to have fighting,” and so on.

But the other thing I tell them (and I told a couple this recently), “We’re Christians. Bottom line: do you like each other? Do you like hanging out with this person?” and you said you went fishing together, and I’m laughing. “Do you like this person?”

Cindy and I, we’re just babes. Forty-three years of marriage. But we like each other. We still like hanging out. She’s got her office upstairs, and I’m downstairs, and we interact over the coffee pot once or twice in the morning. We like each other.

I think this is something not talked about. We’re talking about sex and compatibility and finances and planning and dreams and hopes. Those are all crucial, but do you like this person? What I hear you all saying is that you were friends. What a great way to start!

Barbara: Yeah. To marry my best friend just made so much sense. Why would I want to marry someone that was a stranger? I mean, he was in many ways. But we had spent so much time together and logged so many life experiences it just made sense.

Michael: Absolutely.

Dennis: The reality, Michael, is that I just think God led us together. If you nail that down on the front end, what is there left to discover, in terms of “It’s God’s will, so get on with it!” It changes your options of pulling a parachute out and bailing—divorce has never crossed our lips. We didn’t have romance when we started our marriage. That was one of the odd things. There was not feelings there. We hadn’t had a chance to develop that side of the relationship, but we went to work on that soon after we got married. It’s been fifty years of fun, courting my wife, dating her, and pursuing her. I’d marry her all over again, 100 times out of 100.

Michael: You know, it’s interesting, and again, you taught Cindy and me this as we taught these conferences: romance is a horrible foundation for a marriage, because it waxes and wanes, because we’re differently wired. Men look at romance specifically physically. Women look at romance with a more holistic approach to everything…

Dennis: Right.

Michael: …from atmosphere and experience, and if they don’t line up— Well, we tried to teach that through those conferences, that this is a horrible way. And when you have couples today living together, it’s so hard to extricate that, because that intimacy that they think is good will not sustain that relationship. It’s got to be more than “romance.”

Dennis: Yeah, I was just looking. The book that we gave our children and grandchildren on our fiftieth anniversary September 2, 2022, contains our story in the first half of the book.

Michael: Yes.

Dennis: And then the second half is a message that Barbara and I have been working on, just distilling it out. Fifty lessons from fifty years of marriage.

Michael: Now let me interrupt for just a moment. When you first told me about the concept of this, I thought, “This is going to be a ginormous book that none of his kids or grandkids are going to read!” Because I know Dennis Rainey. When he says “fifty,” I’m thinking of fifty chapters that are twenty pages long, and we’ve got two volumes coming. And then, when I saw your product, I thought, “Okay. This was brilliant,” because these lessons are succinct. They’re potent, but they’re also digestible.

Dennis: Yes. I was first asked to speak on marriage and do this at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. They gave me sixty minutes. At that point, we had been married forty years. So I had forty lessons from forty years of marriage.

Michael: Of course you did! (laughing)

Dennis: And I finished that message in sixty-one minutes. And Dr. Al Mohler, who’s got a pretty good mind…

Michael: Oh boy!

Dennis: …got up to speak, and he said, “Well! Forty lessons from forty years of marriage. What is there left to say about marriage?” He then went on to speak for an hour!

Michael: Exactly, exactly. “Let me clarify what Dennis didn’t.”

Dennis: Exactly. Let me expound on it. But I think people are hungry to know “What is the essence?” It is one thing, it’s a commitment to Jesus Christ and to one another in a covenant relationship. That’s the source. That’s the foundation. That’s where you start. That’s the headwaters of a marriage relationship and a family.

But there’s a lot of other components. I was looking, I can’t find them in here, but sex and romance are way on down the line. It’s not that they’re not important. They are. But it’s not number one or number two.

So to your point, Michael, romance is oversold to single people, thinking they can sustain a relationship on that, and they can’t.

Michael: It’s lesson thirty-one. It says, “Husbands and wives spell romance differently.”

Did you all have discussion, or was this pretty much, “Okay, we’ve done this long enough to know.” I’ll let you tell them what number one is. But I read number one and went, “Of course. I knew they were going to say that.” Was there a prioritization to the way you put the fifty lessons together?

Barbara: Yeah, there was in the sense that we knew there were certain things we wanted to be sure and say. But we also tried to do it somewhat chronologically. We didn’t want to start out talking about lessons we’ve learned in the empty nest on lessons one and two. So we did try to keep some kind of chronology and order as we went through it. But yeah, we had a lot of conversations. We literally sat on the couch next to each other with our computers and talked our way through all of these and shifted certain ones around.

It was very much both of us writing everything together.

Michael: Your first one is “Couples that pray together stay together.” Again, that was sort of non-negotiable in the FamilyLife Weekend to Remember. We talked about this incessantly. I remember you using an illustration about the first time . . . and, for those that don’t know, when we were on the speaker team, Dennis and Barbara would lavishly treat us to a FamilyLife speakers’ retreat. They didn’t pay us much for the conference (fake coughing), but they made up for it by lavishly treating us to this week in different locations.

I remember…I think we’d only been on the team two or three years. Of course, we’re doing this together, and the one thing I’d tell people was, “You can’t stand up and lie all weekend.” You either have to do what you’re preparing or you’re just going to be a big, fat liar.

I don’t think I prayed with Cindy. This is beyond embarrassment. I remember the first night, and I told this story at the conference, I flopped my left hand over, because I was on the right side of the bed, and I said, “Will you pray with me?”

Without a second’s hesitation, she said, “Yes!” and put her hand in mine.

And I tell the story to try to be humorous, you know, “I’m glad I was laying down! I think I’d have fallen over.” It was easy.

But the fear, especially for a man who probably has a less-than-adequate prayer life and has not ever, or for years, said, “Honey, will you pray with me?”

You know, I don’t know, I just always found that striking, that she was like, “Sure.” I don’t think there’s been a night in our married life when I’ve done that— and it waxes and wanes because we go to bed at different times now. So it’s a little different. And you know, I live with chronic pain, so when I’m done, I’m done. I’ve got to lay down, and she tends to go to bed later than I do. But fascinating to me is that she’s never said “No.” The only thing she’s ever said was, “I’m too tired. Will you just pray?” (laughter) And then she falls asleep while I’m praying, but be that as it may.

Dennis: Well, Barbara has said no to me about praying with me on occasion.

Barbara: But very few times.

Dennis: That’s right. But it’s usually broken up with a pause after she says, “No, because…I don’t like you tonight…”

Michael: Yes.

Dennis: “...You’ve hurt me, and until you repent, you’re not going before Almighty God and having a conversation with Him about us.”

Michael: Yes, like nothing’s wrong.

Dennis: Yeah. I can honestly say (and I have said this for fifty years)— I don’t think we would be married today if we didn’t pray together. We are both two very strong-willed, opinionated people.

Michael: Really? (laughing)

Dennis: I know that comes as a great reveal to you.

Michael: Breaking on InContext with Michael Easley: Dennis Rainey is a strong-willed, opinionated know-it-all— I mean, uhhh— person of decision.

Dennis: Barbara, do you want to comment on that? I can tell. I’m looking at you.

Michael: Yeah, clean up!

Barbara: It’s just the practical reality of marriage. You’re not always going to feel like doing the right thing, no matter what it is. And praying together is just one of those many things that’s right but we don’t feel like doing. I just wasn’t willing to fake a relationship with God with my husband. And so when he asked if we could pray and I felt like there was something unresolved, I said, “No. I think we need to talk about this first.”

So it’s being real with each other, but also being real before God, because faking it doesn’t get you anywhere.

Samantha: Well, again, that’s a conversation between Dennis and Barbara Rainey and their friend Michael Easley.

They were just discussing the importance of praying together as husband and wife. It’s the first of fifty marriage lessons Dennis and Barbara list in their book Our Story.

Now, if you’re a subscriber to Barbara’s Friends and Family, you’ll be able to go on and listen to the other half of this conversation with Dr. Easley right away. They discuss things like what it means that marriage is a covenant of trust.

You’ll find part two of the interview at BarbaraRainey.substack.com. That’s also where you can sign up to become a member of Barbara’s Friends and Family. The subscription is only $5 a month. Again, head to BarbaraRainey.substack.com.

If you’re interested in the book Our Story, there are just a few copies left. Head to EverThineHome.com/OurStory for all the details on how you can order the book Our Story. EverThineHome.com/OurStory.

Thanks for listening today. I hope you and your spouse will pray together. Today. And tomorrow. And every day, as much as you can.

I’m Samantha Keller. Join us next time, for the Barbara Rainey Podcast, from Ever Thine Home.