All the Kings Men
Being a man of character with Christian values is a challenge in world that has lost its way. All the Kings Men is a podcast for men who want to leave a Godly legacy. Weekly guests share their stories of how God made them victorious over life's struggles. All the Kings Men is a ministry podcast of Restoration Place. Join our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090682981273!
All the Kings Men
Weathering Life's Hardest Trials: A Testament of Resilience
Picture yourself in the midst of an emotional storm, grappling with a painful divorce while pursuing an MDiv degree. Our guest, Ronnie Stewart, lived through this precise whirlwind and emerged stronger, and more resilient. Ronnie’s story is a powerful testament of faith in the face of adversity. He shares his journey from a tumultuous divorce to a newfound journey of faith, shedding light on the complexities of forgiveness, especially when children are involved.
A cornerstone of Ronnie's healing process was the courage to face his emotional trauma and dismantle old, toxic attitudes. He vividly shares how he rebuilt trust in himself and others, and the transformative impact counseling had on him. His story underscores the importance of reaching out to those who can help navigate life’s harsh trials, charting a path to healing through connection, counseling, and prayer.
Ronnie's story is not just about recovery from a divorce; it's about overcoming emotional trauma and making a resilient comeback. His journey highlights the significance of hard work and dedication in moving forward. He encourages listeners to connect with those who understand and can guide them through challenging emotional traumas. His compelling narrative serves as a beacon of hope and a testament to the power of resilience, faith, and connection. Join us on this episode of All the King's Men as we explore Ronnie's remarkable journey and draw inspiration from his courage.
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Welcome to All the King's Men, a ministry podcast of the men's ministry of restoration place, Tallahassee. Warning listeners to this podcast will hear authentic, life-changing stories from men who know Jesus and have experienced his work in their life. He prepared to be impacted by their stories and relationship with Jesus. Here is your host, Pastor Tony Tolson.
Speaker 2:Good day, good afternoon. Thank you for being here today. On All the King's Men. We are gathered here today on this podcast to talk about a very, very important topic, and so I'm glad that you've chosen to join us today and to be part of this. Make sure you share and like and comment wherever you listen so that we can learn more about it. And, of course, when I say share, share with other men and other people who need to hear some of the messages here Today I've got with me Ronnie Stewart.
Speaker 2:Ronnie Stewart and I go way, way back Like I don't know 10 or 12 years. We served in ministry together with youth and in another church, and we got a friendship that goes beyond space and time. In fact, I don't think we've spoken for probably seven years, as we were just reflecting, but Ronnie and I both have a similar experience in it. We've been through divorce and I had the unique experience of kind of watching that unfold for him, and so today this is years ago now obviously seven, eight years ago I want to give Ronnie a chance to talk to us about this process that he went through and, most importantly, where God showed up for him and how he healed and got himself ready for this future that God has for him. So Ronnie.
Speaker 2:I want to thank you for joining today.
Speaker 3:Absolutely so, ronnie, where you?
Speaker 2:at Tell me where you live now.
Speaker 3:I am in Houston, Texas.
Speaker 2:Oh right, everything's bigger in Texas, I hear. Is that true? Bigger faith, bigger churches, bigger jobs Is that all true? Sure, okay good, I know that's a lot, but All right, good marketing, all right, good marketing, but you've been in Houston for a while so I know that you've found home there, but you moved to Houston to go to school, isn't that what I remember? Is that correct?
Speaker 3:Yes, originally I moved to Houston to pursue my MDiv at the Houston Graduate School of Theology and I graduated from there, I think in 2015, with a biblical language's emphasis.
Speaker 2:Great. So the reason that's important is we're talking to somebody who has good scriptural basis for understanding how God works and how he interacts with us, and so I think that's important. But Ronnie just shared with me that he didn't quit his education there. He just finished his PhD Sorry, his EDD educational doctorate this past December. It's Dr Stewart now. So good to actually meet you, dr Stewart. You were just Ronnie when I knew you. So, ronnie, let's go back. I mean, there was a time that you were very involved in ministry you and the wife that you had at that time, and you hit a wall in which there was biblical reason, if I remember right, for divorce and we're not going to get into that.
Speaker 2:It's all in the past. This is not about what happened in the marriage. This is what happened after that we want to focus on, and I remember it being a very, very traumatic time for you. Naturally, you were in your master's program and so here you were, preparing for probably, maybe pastoral ministry or something of that nature, and your marriage fails. So tell me like and most people aren't going to have this experience I mean, if you're listening to the podcast, I don't believe we've got a bunch of people who were in their master's program, but all of us were in the midst of life and we had a view of our lives that included our spouse, so it doesn't matter where you were. So here you are. Tell me what happened, not specifically with the marriage, but in that time with you. What was going through your mind as you saw looking forward. This is not going to be at all what I planned. What happened? Tell me about that time.
Speaker 3:Looking back on it. It's a lot different, looking back on it, than it was at the time. At the time I remember feeling my life was over, like I couldn't actually see a way forward. It was one of my favorite stories from scripture is when Paul is just prior to the Macedonian call. He's walking, he tries to go to Asia and the Holy Spirit keeps him from going to Asia, and then he tries to go south and the Holy Spirit keeps him from going south, and he's just walking around trying to figure out what he's supposed to be doing. That's like a two and a half three year long walk and I really, looking back on it, can relate to that story because that's what it felt like in the moment, like I thought I was going one direction and I had to take a hard right turn to go a completely different direction, which is easy to say now, but in the time it was very difficult to actually do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so here you were. You thought that your life was over the way you understood it to be, so all your hopes and dreams were wrapped around, and you were in a Baptist school, is that?
Speaker 3:true? Well, the school itself was non-denominational.
Speaker 2:Non-denominational, but were you looking more baptistic in your church future? Yes, yeah. So at that point in particular, I mean divorce and still today is challenging in the Baptist church, right, yeah, From a pastoral perspective. And so if you're not coming from that tradition you may not understand what Ronnie was dealing with. But he was looking at a future where he was prepared educationally, spiritually, emotionally to be a pastor. And, by the way, Ronnie pastored my children as youth pastor and was one of the most effective pastors, to at least PKs particularly, that I'd ever seen. He connected at a very personal level and very appropriately, very spiritually, challenged them to grow. And it's just amazing.
Speaker 2:So all of your eggs were in that basket. And then you're looking at your future in which the organizational structure that you would have naturally moved into would not have accepted you because of this occurrence in your life. So that makes, that brings the end to a dream and into a journey that you believe God had called you to. And no matter what happens, whether you're in Ronnie's situation or you're working and at the state for the state of Florida and Ronnie has experienced with that too I think he worked for the state, some didn't you when something happens and your life's going to change. It's the same feeling what is going to happen from here. So tell me, Ronnie, when you were, after you got over that like oh my gosh, my life's over, how did God kind of show up for you and began to say no, no, no, I'm not done with you. I didn't call you to my service because you are married to a woman and slept in the bed with her at night. I called you because you're my child. When did he show up for you?
Speaker 3:That's a more complicated question to answer and my answer is not really going to be a popular one. I didn't have a hallelujah aha moment. There was no. There weren't choirs of angels singing over me.
Speaker 3:Years of what the Bible would call wrestling with God, right Like the process was very much me wondering what had happened and where did all went wrong, and wrestling with the idea that God should have maybe protected me from this, not knowing where to place blame and all that stuff. And throughout that process, one thing that kept coming back to me was that story with Jesus where he's asked to heal a young girl and the father of the girl says Lord, I believe, help my unbelief, that kind of. I still have this faith, I still trust in you, but there's a lot in me that has unbelief, right, A lot of me that doesn't trust what's going on right now. A lot of me that doesn't have the faith. So it was a lot of me struggling to talk to God and to recal not recapture, but to allow God to grow. What faith I still held on to.
Speaker 2:So I hear a lot about these. These two words deconstruct and reconstruct our faith and for listeners who may not know what that means, it means you hit this place where you have a crisis of faith and you begin to take apart your faith and see if you really believe what you say you believe. The problem with deconstruction is that people often get stuck deconstructing and forget to get back to reconstruction. There's nothing wrong with challenging God and saying God, I just need to know what I believe and why I really believe it. I need you to be present in my belief, not just in my knowledge, but in my belief, in my heart, in my actions, in my motivations. I need you to be present in it. But what happens a lot of times in deconstruction? It's actually a path to unbelief for a lot of people.
Speaker 2:In Christians. We all need to be accountable that. It's okay to ask questions, but it's not okay to vacate your faith. If your foundation in Christ is Christ, if your relationship is Christ, nothing's changed except your circumstances. He still loves you. That's a fact. But we have to get to the place where, like Ronnie's saying he had to wrestle, there was some deconstruction going on there where he what did God do here? What didn't God do? What was God responsible for? What wasn't he responsible for? What was I responsible for? And then, hopefully, we get to the place where, I'm hoping, ronnie's story turns and I'm hoping, because we've not had this long discussion to see exactly where this goes. But I know where you are today in serving the Lord, so I have to believe that you got to a place where you regained an understanding of who Jesus Christ was in your life and who he is for you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for me. I never lost sight of the fact that there were two things that I held on to Right. I never stopped believing that God loved me. I let go of a lot of assumptions I had about what that meant. So I thought that meant that God wouldn't allow any harm to come to me. I thought that that meant that God would protect me from everything that could possibly go wrong in my life. But scripturally that's unsound thinking that we know that God allowed his own son to go to the cross.
Speaker 3:So 11 disciples actually were martyred right, right so through that process I learned that a lot of the flaw was in the way I was thinking about what God's love means, rather than any flaw with God. So that was probably step one of the process, with me accepting that God loves me. And just because this happened, just because life didn't turn out the way I thought it would, or wasn't turning out the way I thought it would, didn't change any of that. It didn't change Jesus' sacrifice. It didn't change my redemption. It didn't change the way God viewed me as a son and a child. All it meant was that there were some assumptions I was making about God that just weren't true. That love really meant that when the hard things happen, god's going to be there. That love really meant when the hard things happen, he's going to help you through it. When the hard things happen, god is what the Psalms would call faithful. So that's what it meant to be loved by God. Not that all my problems were just magically not be there or not exist.
Speaker 2:And that's really wise. So many examples in Scripture are about people having difficult times who were faithful followers of God. And yet we somehow want to believe, at least in our Western Christian theology, in our comforts, that God is protecting us from things, when in fact, in my life and maybe in your life, you can tell us if this is true for you. I've grown the most through difficulty. I've come to understand God through difficulty. On the mountain it's a lot harder to see the lessons that need to be learned. We're just celebrating how life is so easy and wonderful, but when that theology is so wrong. Because if that's true, then only people who have easy, perfect lives are being protected by God and the rest of the world's just under some kind of weird judgment. The theology is all backwards and wrong. It doesn't mean God doesn't protect us from things. It doesn't mean that God doesn't keep certain things from happening, because we know that happens. I mean we saw that in the story of Job. Right, he kept protecting Job, kept protecting Job, kept protecting Job. And finally he said to Satan all right, just test him. Right, test him, see who he loves. And it was very clear at the end of that story who he loved Job, lost everything, but he still loved God. And all of those things are such temporary. All of life, everything we have, is temporary.
Speaker 2:And so when you realized that you were now in this next phase of life and let's kind of pivot to the next part of this, you'd gone through some wrestling. And I mean, you're a young, attractive, successful guy. So you probably had women around you that were like, hey, ronnie, here I am. And you were like no, I'm not ready yet. Is that am I about right? Yeah, so you weren't. What happens to a lot of people is they're like oh, that's a good distraction. She's looking good, let me, let me play around with that for a while. That'll make me feel better. And what happens so many times in second marriages is that they fail quicker than first marriages because you're taking the baggage from the first marriage. You're taking the things that you never did the work on into the second marriage, and then your second marriage fails and then you're even more angry.
Speaker 2:The problem is is we've got to do the work on ourselves, and so that thing that you were talking about was wrestling with God really rings true for me. That was very true for me. I really had to wrestle it out. I had to question a lot of things for me, but I'll tell you what I've. What I've learned is, when I did the work, I ended up with something really good. And I mean, you know, renee, she's amazing. She's amazing. We have the best relationship. My best friend in the world is my wife. But I had to do some work. I even had to do some work after the marriage. But talk about the work you had to do before you were engaged, before you decided I'm ready for another relationship. What's some things you had to do on yourself?
Speaker 3:The initial work was counseling. I went through a lot of Christian counseling. Probably about a year I did counseling and therapy and that was very helpful for the initial like struggle of what's going on, what's happening here. Past that the work became a lot more about okay, I've got to set aside blame and figure out how to be a better person. So it would be easy for me, because of things that happened, to just wallow in blaming the other person.
Speaker 2:Where does forgiveness fit in here with blame?
Speaker 3:That's what I was headed that direction Great. So it would be easy. It would have been easy for me to just wallow in that blame, but what I really had to do was first figure out okay, there's some lessons to be learned here. I'm I've always been, as far as I know a very introspective person, so I always want to know what's the lesson. So the first lesson was I got to be able to let the past go. That was the first major lesson, and part of that was forgiveness. We talk about forgiveness a lot in in our culture, like we're granting the other person a gift. But I really, truly believe that forgiveness is giving us a gift. When we forgive other people, we're actually giving ourselves the gift because we're not allowing those emotions and that baggage to control us anymore and we're letting that person move on with their lives without our guilt and condemnation on top of them. So it's a forgiveness is a win-win. It's not just you don't lose when you forgive other people, you win, and so that was.
Speaker 3:Step one was putting down that baggage. Step two in that process for me was diving back into church. So there was a time there where I had just stopped. I stopped going to church. I stopped attending church. It was it was difficult to meet for me for other reasons besides the divorce time. My church, the church body I was a part of, had also failed, which is a whole different topic and a whole different story. So pushing back into a family of faith really helped build that guide, that support for nurturing what God was doing in my life. It's hard to be a faithful Christian without other faithful Christians around you. It's hard to be especially when you're going through a difficult thing like like divorce or recovery from divorce without other Christians breathing life into you. It's very difficult.
Speaker 3:So that was step number two and then step number three ultimately was a lot of prayer, and I say it step three, like that happened afterward. It really happened throughout the whole process A lot of talking to God and communicating and listening, and you know I gave myself a lot of space to be. I didn't want to. You talked about the distraction. I didn't want to be distracted. I wanted the space to heal right. Healing takes time. Whether it's a cut on your arm or whether it's a deep emotional wound, healing takes time. And if you don't give yourself the time to heal and for me, healing in a healthy way meant connecting with God. Then the healing is going to be incomplete, and so I really wanted the healing to be complete before I move forward.
Speaker 2:And that's that's really powerful to give yourself the space to heal. And I think people jump too quickly into new relationships. The other thing that's challenging and you didn't have this experience but I did is that you've divorces a lot like a death in that you've got to grieve it. But it's easy to grieve it if you can walk away and not look at it all the time. But if you've got a child and you've got a co-parent, then you're constantly looking at that death in the face.
Speaker 2:Not that the person is death, but the death of that relationship, the awkwardness of the interactions and sometimes hostile nature of those interactions. So you're constantly being bombarded with emotions, a fresh and a new daily or weekly right, and you, in divorce with children, you actually lose control. Like you think, oh, I'm getting my life back. No, you now have to work with that person until that child's an adult and make decisions together when you don't get along and that's hard. So I know that you don't have that personal experience, but you've got professional experience as a pastor. What, what would you say to some folks who are dealing with that? Some men are like, yeah, I give it myself some time to heal, but you know she keeps coming at me. I mean, how does someone protect their healing space when they can't preserve their space to heal?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I understand what you're saying. Yeah, that was honestly really not an issue for me. Interestingly, at the same time I was going through the process, there were people around me who were going through the process who did have to deal with that, who had spouses that were less than gracious let's say it that way and they it was a constant struggle for them. So the answer is not going to be a popular one, but it took them more time. All right, when you, when you're not given the time to heal and to recover, then the process is naturally longer, and so for those people it took them more time. But I will say what I would be the pastor, I'll put on my pastoral hat for a second. The pastoral advice I would give would be for any, the same advice I'd give for any strained relationship.
Speaker 3:I don't believe the Bible requires us to stay in toxic relationship, but it does require us to show the same love and grace and forgiveness to toxic people that God showed to us, and there's a that's a fine distinction, because you're not required to engage in a toxic relationship, but you're also required to offer grace and kindness and forgiveness to toxic people. That that is a fine line to walk and a difficult line to walk, and I think the only way to actually walk that is to be in constant contact or constant communication with your father, right? All the good that's in? I really believe that all the good that's in us comes from God, and so if we're not connected to that source of goodness and kindness and hope and love, then it's going to be really difficult for us to display that in our relationships, even, especially in the very difficult relationships.
Speaker 2:That's really powerful. So when you got somebody emptying your, your love and grace tank, you got to get connected even more often and more powerfully To that grace source of grace, which is Christ and our relationship. That's really powerful. And so you've really said a couple of things that are really super powerful, which is you got to give yourself space to heal, no matter how long that takes. So this isn't a six month or one year or two year or five year process. It is what it is, whatever it takes. So tell me about when you felt like you had healed enough that you could then look towards the future. How did you have any understanding of that space or that time in your life?
Speaker 3:Question that I had a stronger answer for you.
Speaker 2:I know it's a hard question.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the truth is like that story of Paul walking around. I honestly wasn't sure, right, and I thought, okay, I think I'm ready to move forward, but it's like someone who's been, it's like a little kid who's been burned by the stove. They probably don't want to approach the stove.
Speaker 2:Well, I was gonna say you lose your trust in yourself, right? You don't trust your own, your own thoughts in your own you don't value it the same way, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so for me it was. It was a process of Rebuilding that trust in myself and that trust in other people.
Speaker 2:So it took somebody very special.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was very, very guarded, but, like I had, I had walls I didn't know I had, like I had built walls I didn't know I had built I had I had taken in some attitudes that I didn't know I did like I remember thinking at some point I'm just an angry person, now that's just who I am. Well, that's, that's not true. That was just something that like anger is just something I feel sometimes, but for some reason I had, I had made that a part of myself identity. Yeah right, and so it took work to get rid of. Like I had to identify that and get rid of that, and like it was a Lot of I think I'm ready, but oh, there's a wall I gotta take care of. I think I'm ready, but oh, this is gonna be a process. I think I'm ready, but you know, I I don't know. I think if I had waited till I was actually ready, I'd still be waiting.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's fair, that's fair so what?
Speaker 2:I'm think I'm heading to here is Ronnie, the, the fact that Clearly God delivered to you a very special person who was able to help you through the rest of that healing. Yeah, so you had affirmation, both through the spirit and through your relationship, that those were in alignment, that you could trust her, peace by peace. Like you didn't just open your heart a hundred percent on you know day 32 of the relationship, it was step by step, as, as God would prompt you and she would reaffirm kind of what the spirit was telling you, you would slowly begin to identify and open your heart and maybe work on some things. And is that kind of how it was I?
Speaker 3:kind of that give and take but it was so, it was a slow process. It I can't I don't know because I'm not her, but I can't imagine it from her perspective but it must have felt like she was taking a part of wall right, like it must have felt just like, brick by brick, she was taking apart a wall.
Speaker 2:Did you guys ever do counseling together?
Speaker 3:Yes, we did, we did. In fact we did a lot of counseling together, mostly in premarital stuff. Yeah, we did. We did three separate premarital counseling.
Speaker 2:Did you do all that after engagement or before engagement? After after engagement? Okay, yeah, did you do any therapy before engagement or any, I wouldn't say let's not even limit it to therapy. Relationship conversations, like even within your faith group, oh yeah, so yeah.
Speaker 3:So like it helps that her father's a pastor and he knew the whole story. That was a conversation I had to have with him and she knew the whole story. She's a very strong she's probably a stronger Christian than I am. So those kind of conversations about okay, what do you believe about God, about through this, and what do you believe about marriage through this, and what do you believe about Relationships through this, and how does this affect the way you process life and the way you think about other human beings All those conversations we did have before, both together as just as a couple, and with her family Because of their relationship with God, it took a lot of honestly. It was like I gave a little bit of trust. That was all. At the beginning I gave a little trust and over time that trust grew right. It started pushing aside the boundaries and started pushing it like as the trust grew it was easier and easier.
Speaker 2:It's just multiply project yeah.
Speaker 3:Once you get started, it's easier to keep going right like yeah.
Speaker 2:So but I would imagine, but I would imagine you Protected yourself too. Right in the sense that you didn't let yourself to to go too far with the relationship. Yes, to make sure that you didn't make the mistakes that you've seen so many people in ministry do. Right, and that had to be hard. Right, because you had this really, really trusting person who loved you. Clearly you could see that she loved you and that you were loved by her family and all of that. So, just to kind of push us forward a little bit, you clearly were. You got engaged and you've gotten married. Mm-hmm, were there any Leftover things that you had to work through?
Speaker 3:Oh, I mean, they're probably still left over. That's the hard part about. I won't even limit it to divorce, though divorce is a big one. Any significant emotional trauma is going to live.
Speaker 3:It's like a scar in that it heals and it doesn't usually bother you. There's not usually something there that like I've got a scar on my finger that I've had since I was a kid, right, and I don't usually think about it, but every once in a while I noticed it. You know, every once in a while something will happen. I'll go oh, you know, that didn't feel quite right. It heals and it's good, it's strong.
Speaker 3:But there are things that still pop up from time to time that I'm like oh, that's a button that's left over from all that anger I used to carry around, or that's a button that's left over from not quite fully trusting people, or that's a. You know, there's leftovers that I'm still having to work through and still having to get through. And that's really hard because we live in a culture that wants a microwave answer right. It wants, you know, 30 seconds and we're done. That's not how this works. That's not how. That's not how any significant emotional trauma works. Even after you're healed, you're still healing Like even after you can move forward with your life, you still have to be doing the work to continue that process of moving forward.
Speaker 2:I love that and I think that's the really the crux of the matter here, right when you were talking about divorce today. But if you expand it, like you said, to any emotional trauma, it's just lifetime of work to do. So it's important that, I think, if we can move to application here, you said right off the top you had to give yourself space to heal, so you went for some therapy, you dealt with that.
Speaker 2:I mean you had to. You had to face it head first, like you could not sneaking around to try to get rid of it. You had to look it right in the eyes and figure it out. But you return to your faith community. You had to find a faith community that you could be plugged into, that you knew you were going to be loved and supported and you did that and that made yourself vulnerable again, right In relationships.
Speaker 2:So we often practice the kind of relationships that are godly in our faith communities. I say we often because we still are surrounded by people, right, that do bad things, and sometimes we do bad things and say bad things or whatever. But we should be practicing godly relationships in our faith communities and that's a great way for us to model behaviors and practice behaviors that we want to carry into relationships. What I see a lot of times and you've seen this in ministry you're in ministry now as well, they're still, and so you see people give the best of their lives when they're in quote unquote public settings, which would be like church settings, work settings and then when you get into the counseling behind the scenes, you'll hear their spouse say they're so nice around other people, but they're not nice around me, right, that's not, that's not biblical, it's not right, it's sinful, right and it's abusive, quite frankly, to the spouse. And so it's important that we remember that we need to continue to model godly behaviors around our spouse and our spouse, primarily, like that we're, we're shepherding them, we're loving them, whether you're the wife or the husband we're, we have responsibility to, to pour God's love into their lives, or Christ's representation here on earth, even in our marriages. So we can't forget that.
Speaker 2:And the third one was prayer, and I love the fact that you said you not only prayed when you talk to God, but you listened to God. One of our pastors, pastor Shadrach, said in one of his sermons recently that if you pray for 20 minutes and you're talking, you probably should listen for at least 20 minutes. And you know some people would call that meditation. We call it prayer. Prayer is not a one way communication us to God. Right, it's not like, and that's what we often think about it, as we often will give rote prayers, right, just things that we've said over and over and over again. It means absolutely nothing. It doesn't come from our heart, it comes from our head. What we're talking about with prayer. I think right now you're talking about like gut feelings shared with the faith.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so when Jesus was was in the garden of Gethsemane. He goes away to pray three times and there the Bible records very short prayers, but there's hours in between. Each time he comes back to check on the disciples, so he's listening right. Most of the time Jesus goes to talk to God, he talks very short sentences and then spends a lot of time listening for the father's response. And so when we, when we pray, it doesn't give God any space to answer us. If we just stand up after we're done talking and move on with our lives, that that doesn't give God any space to move in our spirits, move in our hearts, change our understanding, because we end up what ends up happening is not like God couldn't miraculously do that, but we end up distracting ourselves. So even if he is trying to respond, we're distracted by something else. So, yeah, listening is a vital part of prayer.
Speaker 2:And I'll tell you, the best relationship that helps you get better at prayer is your relationship with your wife. Right, it does, because you have to speak little, listen more and she will tell you what you need to do to make her happy. But you have to listen and you can't be on your phone during that conversation, these conversations. You can't be distracted. You need to look at her, you need to listen to her heart. It'll stir inside of you and it will make you want to do better. But you have to be in tune with her and I think that it's so funny how God allows these relationships in our lives that actually make us stronger believers when we utilize all of these things that God has given to us. The Bible says when we found a wife, we found a good thing. And I didn't just find a good thing that was good for because she's good to me. I found a good thing because she pushes me to Jesus, and not because she's so bad, but because she's so good. You know what I'm saying?
Speaker 1:She pushes me, she's so good.
Speaker 2:She'll say have you talked to God about that? You know well, that's convicting, but it's a good question, you know? No, I made this decision on my own. I'm a competent man. But have you talked to God, you know? Are you sure? Are you being led by the Lord here? And she already knows that's the thing. She already knows. The Spirit's already spoken to her. I used to tell her she's like the Holy Spirit in our relationship. She was far more sensitive to the Holy Spirit than I used to be. We're probably more the same now, but years ago, even though I was a pastor, she heard from the Holy Spirit quicker. She would give space to the Holy Spirit and I would just take action Sometimes.
Speaker 2:I think you're right. We just we need to stop and we need to wait for God.
Speaker 3:I've never heard it explained the way that you said it Go ahead. Men tend to want to solve whatever the problem is, which doesn't allow God to solve the problem. So you know and that's the same thing in our marriages we tend to want to solve the problem instead of listening. The solution might already be there and we're over here working on a different solution because we didn't listen.
Speaker 2:That is so true. That is so true. I think there's a lot we can unpack here, but I think the key thing is, no matter what you're going through, make sure you do the work. Deal with it head first. Just look that problem in the eye. Get into some counseling whether that's a therapist, like a licensed therapist. If it's biblical counseling, you need to get in with your pastor. Make sure you're getting good, strong counseling, though, not just somebody who's going to passively agree with you or pat you on the back and make you feel good, but somebody's going to push you to do the work. If it's not challenging, it's probably not worth your time when it comes to counseling.
Speaker 2:Secondly, as Ronnie shared, build yourself into a faith community and finally spend a lot of time with the Lord, not just talking, but listening, and I think when we do that, we come out better. We are not just going to recover from the divorce situation or the emotional trauma, but we're also going to be more attractive to other people. So other people will want the Jesus that we have when we demonstrate the fruit of the spirit. People will want to know about what that's all about, because it's so different than what they see in the world. So, ronnie, I just want to thank you for joining me today.
Speaker 2:Ronnie is an amazing guy and he may be willing to share his email address if anybody has some thoughts. If he does, I'll put those in notes here. I think the key is that you connect with people, if you're going through something, who understand what you're going through, who will push you to do the work. So I promise you, if you contact Ronnie, he's going to tell you to get busy and it's going to be painful, and take your time. Don't take any shortcuts and I'm telling you, when we do, shortcuts never pay off.
Speaker 2:They just never pay off. And so here's what we're going to do. We're going to end the podcast today, but I'm going to challenge each one of you to really look at the emotional traumas in your life, whether it's divorce, or whether it's a childhood trauma, maybe a marital trauma, relational trauma. Whatever it is, if it's not resolved, you need to do the work, connect with somebody, call me, call someone who can help you get started on that, so that you can live, as Christ said, of more full, free life. You'll be free indeed, with Jesus, but it takes a little bit of effort on your part. So thank you again. Thank you, ronnie, for being here, and we look forward to seeing you next time.
