About the Guest
Barbara Rainey
Barbara Rainey is a wife, mother of six adult children (plus three sons-in-law and two daughters-in-law), and “Mimi” to nineteen grandchildren.
After graduating from the University of Arkansas with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history, Barbara joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ in 1971. She and her husband, Dennis, whom she married in 1972, are co-founders of FamilyLife, a ministry of Cru that is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Barbara has published articles on family-related topics and is the author of Thanksgiving: A Time to Remember and When Christmas Came. She speaks at FamilyLife’s Weekend to Remember® marriage conferences and is a frequent guest on FamilyLife Today®, a nationally syndicated, daily radio program. She and Dennis are the coauthors of several books, including Growing a Spiritually Strong Family, Starting Your Marriage Right, Moments Together for Couples, The New Building Your Mate’s Self-Esteem, Parenting Today’s Adolescent, Rekindling the Romance, and Moments with You. She co-authored A Mother’s Legacy with her daughter, Ashley Rainey Escue and joined Dennis and their children Rebecca and Samuel on the book So You’re About To Be A Teenager. Barbara has also co-authored Barbara and Susan’s Guide to the Empty Nest, with close friend Susan Yates, and A Symphony in the Dark, written with her daughter, Rebecca Rainey Mutz. And Barbara has written a series focusing on character traits for families, including the titles Growing Together in Gratitude, Growing Together in Courage, Growing Together in Forgiveness, and Growing Together in Truth.
Having faithfully served alongside Dennis for more than 30 years, both in ministry and at home, Barbara has recently launched a new endeavor called Ever Thine Home™. This new line of products, including Christ centered ornaments for Christmas, teaching tools for Lent and Easter, and beautiful additions for your home for thanksgiving and year round makes it easy to express faith at home in a way that is both biblical and beautiful. Her heart for Ever Thine Home is based on the familiar Old Testament instruction:
“And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:9, ESV)
You can read more about Barbara’s work at EverThineHome.com.
Find Barbara online on:
Twitter @BarbaraRainey and Facebook facebook.com/raineybarbara
Susan Yates
Susan Yates has written 15 books and speaks both nationally and internationally on the subjects of marriage, parenting, and faith issues. Her books include And Then I Had Kids: Encouragement for Mothers of Young Children; And Then I Had Teenagers: Encouragement for Parents of Teens and Preteens; Barbara and Susan’s Guide to the Empty Nest (with friend Barbara Rainey) and Raising Kids with Character That Lasts (With her husband John). Her two new books are Risky Faith, Becoming Brave Enough to Trust the God who is Bigger Than Your World and the One (Devotional) Book. You can read Susan’s blogs on a variety of topics at susanalexanderyates.com. She also writes for Club31Women.com. For 11 years, she was the Parent child Columnist for “Today’s Christian Women” magazine. She has also written for other publications including, “Thriving Family,” a magazine published by Focus on the Family. She’s the mother of five children (including a set of twins) and the grandmother of 21 (including a set of quadruplets!). Susan and her husband John have been married over 50 years. They live in Falls Church, Virginia, a Washington D.C. suburb where John is the Senior Pastor of The Falls Church Anglican. But what is she really like? Her blood “bleeds blue.” She’s a Tarheel, a graduate of the University of North Carolina. She loves Monday night football, ACC basketball, shooting hoops with her grandsons, hiking and riding horseback with her husband, running-especially on country roads, eating chocolate, playing practical jokes on folks, walking and talking with girl friends. You are not likely to find her at the mall; she’d rather be at the farm. You won’t find her in the kitchen by choice; she’d rather be outdoors with her golden retrievers. Her favorite time of the year is June when all her kids and grandkids are together for a week of “cousins and family camp” in the foothills of the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia.
Episode Transcript
Bob: And those who are thinking, “Well, that season is still pretty far off for me,” – I remember hearing somebody talk about their empty nest experience even before we’d had all of our kids, and I just remember being struck by the fact that this happens for everybody – you can wait to think about it, you can wait to imagine it, but it’s coming for everybody whose got kids, and it’s better to start thinking about it and preparing for it on the front end than just wait until they’re juniors in high school, and saying, “Oh, it’s here.”
Let me encourage our listeners: go to our website FamilyLifeToday.com, order a copy of Barbara and Susan’s Guide to the Empty Nest. Again, you’ll find it online at FamilyLifeToday.com or you can order a copy by calling 1-800-FLTODAY; 1-800-358-6329. That’s 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word TODAY.
Again the title of the book is Barbara and Susan’s Guide to the Empty Nest. If you’re calling, just ask about the Empty Nest book and we’ll be happy to get a copy of it out to you.
We are half-way through the month of May. I want to say a quick word of thanks to those of you who have responded to the matching gift challenge that FamilyLife has going on here. We had some friends of the ministry back earlier in the spring who said, “We know that summertime is often a difficult season for ministries like FamilyLife.” Donations go down and that can cause some challenges for the ministry. So they said, “We’d like to help out. We’d like to make a matching gift challenge. If FamilyLife listeners will send in a donation during the month of May, we’ll match the donation dollar-for-dollar, up to a total of $750,000.”
That, by the way, is the largest single matching gift that we’ve ever received for a month outside of the month of December, so we’re very grateful for their generosity and we want to make sure we can take full advantage of it. I was looking at the thermometer on our website that’s keeping track of how we’re doing, and we’ve still got a ways to go.
So, would you consider today going online at FamilyLifeToday.com or calling 1-800-FLTODAY and making whatever kind of a donation you can make? $10, $20, $50, $100, $500 or whatever you can do. Go to FamilyLifeToday.com to make your donation or call 1-800-FLTODAY. That’s 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word TODAY.
Let me just say how much we appreciate your generosity and your willingness to stand with us. We appreciate you helping us take full advantage of this matching gift opportunity.
I want to encourage you to be back with us tomorrow when we’re going to talk more about the sense of loss that women feel when they enter into the empty nest season of life. Our guests again tomorrow are Barbara Rainey and Susan Yates. We hope you can be back with us again as well.
I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I’m Bob Lepine. We’ll see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.
FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas.
Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.
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