FamilyLife Today®

Samuel Rainey: I think a lot of us struggle with the idea that we just want our wives to be happy and that it's up to us to make them happy. I think we have a big impact on that, and one of the things that I failed Stephanie in was I would tell her something that she wanted to hear with the intent to follow through, and then I would forget whatever it is I said to do. She felt like I was lying to her.

Ann Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

Dave Wilson: And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

Ann Wilson: This has been a fun week of going back to the cruise.

Dave Wilson: It feels like we're in the sun with the wind blowing through my hair. Oh wait, I don't have hair. But it feels like we've been on the boat because we've been listening to different speakers that were on the Love Like You Mean It cruise. Today we get to listen to Samuel and Stephanie Rainey. This is Dennis and Barbara Rainey's son and daughter-in-law, and they were amazing.

Ann Wilson: You're going to love this couple. Today they're going to be talking about rebuilding trust. That's a big one, and it's not easy to navigate, so I think you're going to really enjoy them.

Dave Wilson: By the way, if you want to be on the boat with us this next February, you can sign up right now through June 30th and get a discount to come on the Love Like You Mean It cruise with us. Just go to FamilyLifeToday.com and use the code Countdown27. That will give you the discount. I hope you join us because you're going to hear talks just like this. Here are Samuel and Stephanie Rainey.

Samuel Rainey: I've broken a lot of bones and I've been very active. One of the worst breaks I had was in fifth grade. I also had a concussion. I remember waking up from that concussion in the hospital, and one of the first memories I have is feeling the doctor's hands on my arm as he was setting it.

If you've broken a bone, you know that when it's set properly and when it heals properly, it's actually stronger in that place where it's been broken than before. The other problem is that if it doesn't get set properly, then it may re-break or it will be deformed. Broken trust is a lot like broken bones. If you don't set it properly and heal it properly, it's not going to work out in the long run. Our hope as we present these tools to you is that they will help set the broken bones in your relationship properly and will allow you to begin the process of healing.

Stephanie Rainey: The first tool that we're talking about is really the foundation of this wheel, and it's owning your mistakes. When we start owning our mistakes, all the other tools start making more sense. When you own your mistakes, you take responsibility without blame, without justifying your action, and without explanation.

First, we have to bring our mistakes to the light. If they live in the darkness, they will stay in darkness and they will fester. Things grow moldy and disgusting in the dark, so we want to bring them to the light so that you can be healed. We don't do this so that you can be shamed or so that you can cause more pain, but so you can be healed.

Often when we think about doing this, we feel the pain and suffering that is going to happen feels too much to bear. That's when you can only do this with the help of Jesus because all things are possible through Christ Jesus, who gives us strength to do the hard things. Owning your mistake builds your maturity and it helps others trust in your responsibility. You are adult enough to own your mistakes. Responsibility is being able to respond.

Samuel Rainey: That's the first tool: own your mistakes. Let's talk about tool number two: tell the truth. Proverbs 12:19 says, "Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue is but for a moment." When we lie, we put our focus on earthly things. We say that we think we can get away with what we did or get away with our action and have safety and security on earth. When we tell the truth, we have a heavenly orientation. Truthful lips last forever. The goal here is to tell the truth in such a way that you get it all out and you tell it in an environment that you can begin to rebuild that trust.

Why is it so hard to tell the truth? Telling the truth exposes things about us we would rather not show. All of us have an internal PR firm that is running inside, and it is run by our ego. Our ego is in charge of making sure that everybody else out there thinks that we are perfect and that we have everything together.

I've had a hard time with this in our marriage. This came to a head for the first time about year three or four. I was coming home from work and I was panicking because I had just gotten off the phone with Stephanie about 15 or 20 minutes earlier and told her I would be home at a time that I was not going to be home because I was late. This had been a pattern that I had been in for the first three to four years of our marriage. I walked in the door and, instead of seeing an angry face, I saw my wife who was in tears.

Stephanie Rainey: I was in tears because I realized at that point why I was so mad that he would get home so late. He was consistently late all the time and it would infuriate me. But then I started doing my own healing and my own journey, going to my own counseling, and I realized why him being late just set me on fire.

My own dad never walked back through the doors because he was killed in a car wreck. My seven-year-old self was responding as a 30-year-old woman in that pain and that hurt. Once you realize where some of that pain comes from when your spouse breaks that truth, sometimes it's bigger than what the spouse did. Sometimes it comes from your family of origin or what happened to you as a child.

When those tears came, he was much more able and capable of hearing what was really going on in my heart. It made him punctual from that day forward. Or if he wasn't going to be punctual, he would let me know. It was really beautiful and a great turning point in our marriage. The benefit of telling the truth is that it builds courage in you so that you can be changed. It helps others trust that you're a safe person.

Tool number three: delayed gratification. Ecclesiastes 7:8 says, "Better is the end of the thing than its beginning. The patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit."

Samuel Rainey: I think delayed gratification is at the core of all issues of broken trust because what happens is, when we have this impulse and we can't control it, we will choose something that is more of an earthly orientation than a heavenly orientation. That's going to cause a rift between the two of us. Some of us have an inability or a refusal to delay that gratification.

There's something in you that's driving you to make the choices that you're making. If you don't figure out what that is, you're going to keep making choices that are harmful to you and harmful to your spouse. Delayed gratification is like a muscle and you have to exercise that muscle. If you don't exercise it, when it comes time for you to be able to use it or life requires you to use it, you're not going to have that muscle built up.

The story for me in this happened in 2008. Fresh out of grad school, I wasn't making a lot of money. She would come to me and say, "We can either take Gabby, our daughter, to the doctor or we can take Nathan to the doctor. They both have the flu. Which one do we take?" I was calloused to it because of my own feelings of shame on that. One day she went on a walk with one of her friends.

Stephanie Rainey: That was a hard memory, having to make that choice financially, which kid you take to the doctor. That's how bad it was. So I went on a walk with my friend Carthy. She says what I need to hear, not what I want to hear. She calls out truth in me and she holds me to the covenant relationship I have with Samuel because I've asked her to.

We were going on a walk and she was checking in. She asked how Samuel and I were doing and I just started telling her everything. As I was telling her everything, she stopped and she said, "What are you doing? You're coming up with an exit strategy to leave Samuel." I asked what she meant. She said, "So far you've told me how you're financially going to do it, where you're going to live, all this stuff."

She said, "We're going to stop walking. When Samuel gets home, you're going to take him on the back porch and you're going to tell him word for word what you just told me." I'm still kind of checked out. I was numb at this point. I said okay. I go to the porch and, as I'm talking to him, his eyes fill up with tears. In that moment, it was like cold water was washed over my face and it woke me up. I realized I was getting ready to destroy my family because I don't feel comfortable and I don't like how it's feeling. When I told Samuel that and he reflected back to me, you could see in his face he got what I was trying to say all those months. It was the breaking point for us and a foundation that needed to be removed so that we could start afresh.

Samuel Rainey: When she told me, first, I was shocked. There was this impulse in me to just tell her she was crazy. I had to delay inside of me this need to gratify my own PR firm to say it's really not that bad. I really just had to shut up and to listen.

Stephanie Rainey: I had to delay my gratification of what I wanted to do because I was resentful and I wanted to pay him back. In that moment, I paused and took a step back. The benefit that we both received from delaying that gratification is that it built patience in us and it helped us to establish stability. We decided we were going to have stability in our home regardless of what it was going to cost us.

Dave Wilson: This is FamilyLife Today and we're listening to Samuel and Stephanie Rainey on the Love Like You Mean It cruise. We're only halfway done. They had a lot to say about redeeming broken trust and how to heal. Let's go back to Samuel and Stephanie.

Samuel Rainey: Tool number four: make amends. Please listen to this. This does not mean saying I'm sorry. Saying I'm sorry is a part of amends, but making amends is very different than saying I'm sorry. 1 John 1:9 says, "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." That word confess actually means to express out loud, to express publicly, to give an account for what you have done.

To make amends, we must confess what it is that we have done. I knew on that porch when Stephanie came to me and she said that she had begun planning this and she was like, "Balls in your court," I knew that an apology of "I'm sorry" was not going to cut it. I knew that because I had said I was sorry a bunch of other times and it really didn't work. Here we were sitting on a porch in this really terrible situation. What I told her was, "I can't promise that it's going to get better soon or that it's going to feel better soon, but I can promise I will do everything I can to make sure that our family is taken care of. My request for you is: would you please stick with me?"

Stephanie Rainey: When he did that, he gave me a choice. This is really hard to tell this story because my kids are in the room. It's the realization of what I was about to do to them that breaks my heart. But it needed to happen and it needed to be said. When he looked at me and he said, "I can't make it right today, but will you stick with me?" it was like a freedom that lifted. I felt for so long I was handcuffed to this marriage that I didn't like and didn't want to be a part of anymore because it was too hard.

By him saying, "I see you, I hear you, and will you stick with me?" I knew it was going to be hard and I knew it wasn't going to be immediate. It took at least four years to get to a better spot. But I'm so glad that we had that conversation and that I had a friend that spoke truth into my life so that I could start the healing process. Now I can look at my kids' faces and say, "I'm so glad you're here. I'm so sorry I almost did that to you because I was willing to break up my family because of me. I needed to feel good. I wanted it." What I would have done would have been horrible.

What's really cool in that story is our kids have come back after they've gone off to college and they've seen the world. They come back and they say they want a marriage like me and Dad have. Redemption! That was not flesh, that was not us doing it. It was truly inviting the Holy Spirit, who can only heal and change lives that way. My flesh wanted my way.

Tool number five: the follow-through. James 5:12 tells us, "But above all, brothers, do not swear by heaven or by earth or by other oaths, but let your yes be yes and your no be no so that you may not fall under condemnation." One of my chief things that I need is for you to be honest and for you to be truthful. If you can't do those things, we can't be in a relationship.

When Samuel was breaking that trust, when his yes was not truly his yes and his no was not truly his no, it broke our relationship. But when he started, his yes started being yes and his no started being no, it built that trust muscle. I can trust you because you have shown me that you will listen to me, that you will show up on time, and you will do what you've said you've done. That's so important, especially if you're the one that has broken the trust.

On the flip side, if you've been offended and you're the one that the damage has been done to, you also don't need to hold that over their head as a power tool. "Hey guess what, now I'm in charge. You screwed up but I'm going to take power back over it." That's not right either. That's the forgiveness part that Samuel was talking about.

Samuel Rainey: One of the expectations I brought into marriage that was incorrect was that I had the capacity to make her ultimately happy. Men, I think a lot of us struggle with that, that we just want our wives to be happy and that's it and we think it's up to us to make them happy. You didn't make her unhappy, so you can't make her happy.

One of the things that I failed Stephanie in was I would tell her something that she wanted to hear with the intent to follow through, but then I would forget because the threat had left. It kind of felt like when she would come to the door, it was like a tiger was coming and I had to subdue the tiger. I had to tell her what she wanted to hear to calm her down, and then I would feel like, okay, glad that's over with.

Then I would forget whatever it is I said to do. She felt like I was lying to her. It didn't feel like I was lying to her, it just felt like my intent was to follow through, but I just didn't follow through. Your impact is more important than your intent. When you begin to defend your intent, you tell the other person that the impact that you had on them is invalid. The benefits of doing these practices is it builds discipline in you. It helps others trust in our strength.

The first five tools are more individualistic in nature. These are things that you individually can practice whether or not your spouse is participating in rebuilding trust or not. This last tool I want you to think about as something to collaborate on and to partner in together. Last tool: use your powers for good.

Ephesians 2:10 says, "We are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." I don't know if you catch the hope in this verse. What Paul is saying to the church in Ephesus is, look, you're going to be in pain and there's going to be difficulty in your life. God knows this and He's prepared you to be able to address that pain. He has given you the power to do good works. Not just think good works, not just say good works, but to do good works. You didn't choose the pain you're in, but you get to choose how you're going to respond to that.

Belgian draft horses are the strongest horses on planet earth. They can pull about 8,000 pounds as an individual horse. You put two of those horses together, you tie them together and you put a wagon behind them, you can load up that wagon with 24,000 pounds. That's three times the amount that one single horse can do.

If you take those same two horses and you train them together, you feed them together, and you put them in the same barn in the same stall and you let them get oriented with each other, they can pull 32,000 pounds together. I think the amount of good that each individual couple in this room can do is way more than what you can do on your own. That's why I believe so deeply in marriage. I believe God's kingdom can be shown through marriage in a way that no other creation can. I want you to be able to be strong together and use your powers for good to accomplish God's works.

At my wedding, my dad gave me a gift. It's a King Arthur's Excalibur sword. It's a replica, but it's pretty cool. It's about five feet long and it weighs about 12 pounds. This thing is heavy and it is fun to hold up and to imagine being a knight in a battle. But you hold it up for very long and it's going to start tiring your arm out. You've got to train to be able to use that.

I think one of the unique powers that God has given us humans is language. I think our words are ways that we can accomplish really good things. Proverbs tells us this in 12:18, "The words of the reckless pierce like swords, but the tongue of the wise brings healing." I think our words are a lot like this sword. We can use words to build up and to do really good things and to defend and protect what is good. But we can also use words to tear down and to cut and to destroy. I want to encourage you to use the power of your words to build up and to do good in your relationship, and to encourage each other, and to help each other get to heaven better than the shape you found them in.

The benefit of using your powers for good is it builds humility in you and it helps others trust in your gifts and in your limits. Humans are incredibly gifted but we're incredibly limited too. We have both the image of God and the image of sin inside of us and they are at war. When we use our powers for good, it allows the goodness of God to be seen. C.S. Lewis says that both good and bad choices are like compounded interest. The more good choices you make, the easier the next good choice is to make. The more bad choices we make, the easier the next bad choice is to make. Orient yourself around good choices.

In Japan, there's an ancient tradition called kintsugi. That is when something really important or valuable to the family has been broken, such as a piece of pottery. What happens with that piece of pottery is it will be taken and put back together. When it's put back together, they take 24-karat gold and they will etch out the broken places of where that pottery was broken. Then they will take that piece of pottery and they will display it in the most prominent place in the home. When it breaks, they don't discard it. They put it back together and then they put gold on it.

For us believers in Christ, Jesus is the gold in our broken places. Jesus is the gold in your story with your marriage where there's been broken trust, if you let Him. If you let Him etch that out, it will be the most radiant and the most glorious picture that you will be able to tell the world around you. You can tell that story with confidence and with belief that others will see that and they won't see you and your brokenness, they will see Jesus and what He has healed in your life.

Dave Wilson: What a great day with Samuel and Stephanie from the cruise on the boat last February. Again, you can be with us this next February on the cruise. There's a discount going on right now through June 30th and if you'd like to join us, here's what you do. Go to FamilyLifeToday.com, use the code Countdown27, and we'll see you on the boat next February.

Ann Wilson: If you've never been on the Love Like You Mean It marriage cruise and you might be thinking, "Now what is it again?" just imagine.

Dave Wilson: It's a marriage conference on a boat in the sun with singing artists and bands and worship. We renewed vows on the last night. It was a world record, a Guinness World Record, the most people renewing their vows. It's expeditions and you can do all of it and you can do none of it. It's whatever you need it to be and want it to be. The food is great, the ships are incredible, and you can have the time of your life.

What's most important, I think, is God meets us on the boat. He's going to transform your marriage. You're going to meet other couples and probably become friends with people. But I'm telling you, the Holy Spirit is working on that boat and things happen that don't happen when you're at home. It's a chance to get away, separate yourself from the stresses and pressures of life and say, "Let's just work on us. Let's just focus on us and on Jesus and see what He wants to do in our marriage." You come off the boat a different couple. We're not exaggerating. It's a life-changing week and you don't want to miss it.

Ann Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Crew ministry, celebrating 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.