Ron + Hope: Unfiltered: Divorce: The Good, Bad and Ugly

Foreign.

Hello, everybody. It's Ron and Hope. Unfiltered, real, raw, relevant. And before we start. What are you doing?

Where's my Waffle House cup?

Oh, my word.

Ron. I had it. I had it sitting right here.

We moved it. But before we start our podcast, we've got good news today.

I'm gonna let you tell them. I always tell them. I hate to see people self promote, so I promise.

Presented to Ron Carpenter for passing 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. They sent him the silver award. That is a huge.

Yeah, we were in here just a minute ago. Y' all didn't see it. There's confetti all over the floor. I don't know if the cameras are picking it up. We had some people in the studio that aren't normally here. And so I was like, why are all these people here? But I never. It never registered with me. Thank you to YouTube number one for just recognizing. I thought that was pretty cool, and it's one of the coolest plaques I've ever received. But this wouldn't be anything. This wouldn't be anything if it wasn't.

The fact that you have to have.

People if it weren't for you. So we try to make you laugh sometimes you might cry. We always try to help you and somehow exhort you and let you get information that can benefit your life in some way. But the fact is, we just hope that you've been touched by something me and Hope do. And the fact that you are a subscriber means everything to us, and I'm just so grateful for that. And if you haven't subscribed, I didn't even know to expect that this morning.

If you haven't subscribed, hit the subscribe button on YouTube. Go to Ron Carpenter. He has his own page. Go to Hope Carpenter. I have my own subscribe. There's a lot of good things on there.

Right? All right, thank you, guys. I really appreciate that. And today you got one of them topics could make people nervous today. Honestly, we're going to laugh. We're going to cut up a little bit. But it's so plagued our American community and honestly our church community, and there's so many people been devastated and damaged by it. We kind of want these things to be lighthearted, so we will be lighthearted. But if we're going to be real, raw and relevant, we got to get relevant topics. So we're going to talk about divorce. Divorce.

The good, the bad, the ugly, all how it's wrapped up, how it affects us, you know, what does the Bible say about it? What are the rates in America? What, what happens in the church? You know, our marriage, we've talked about marriage a hundred times and how it is the reflection of Christ in the church. We project Christ's relationship with the church through our marriage. And when that is broken, you know, it's just devastating on all accounts. But it happens and it happens regularly inside the church, outside the church. So we just need to talk about it.

I think the church has gotten better. I've been hard on the church. When I was coming up, if you were in church and you had gone through a divorce or were going through a divorce, I can't speak for a lot of other denominations, but in the stream, the Pentecostal, the holiness stream that we come from, your life was all but over. And at best you could be a second class citizen.

Well, you could come to church, you.

Couldn'T be used, you couldn't really do anything. They'd take your tithe and you could show up. But other than that, there was a lot of disqualifications that went on there. I think we've evolved in a positive way when it comes to our interpretation of the Word. So I take shots at the church when I think the church deserves it. In this area, I think we're a little better. How much we move the needle, I don't know, but I think we're a little better assuming people respond correctly. You know, sometimes people do things and they just press in rebellion and arrogant about it and this, that and the other. And that really kind of destroys your chances of being, what do you call it? Enmeshed. Enmeshed once again, back in the ministry. Sometimes it's not what we do, it's the way we respond to it, it's just the way we respond to it.

And life happens to a lot of people and life happens to people who don't deserve it. You know, a lot of times people get divorced who necessarily never wanted, didn't.

Want it, didn't ask for.

You know, bad things happen within marriage and you know, you have to go forward, you have to pick up the pieces. And just like the book I just wrote that's coming out in February, you know, you gotta, you gotta pull your big girl and big boy panties up and keep forging. You know, if you don't fight, you don't win. So hang around.

We're gonna hit several different topics with this. We only do things about a half hour, maybe a little more, but we're going to hit about four or five different angles on this, let me start with this. This is at least lighthearted. We've got a gentleman that we've known for many, many years. But just recently, actually, through Hope, the gentleman is now way up in age. I would think the gentleman's getting close to 90. And he's done very well in life. He's very respected as a businessman. And I mean, he just thinks Hope hung the moon. He just thinks the world of Hope.

He probably thinks I'm like his granddaughter.

I don't know what it is, but I think you have a way of being warm, you have a way of smiling. I think it brings value to him, makes him feel important. And everybody wants to feel that, I think, especially when you make it up in age and people don't feel really important to anybody anymore. And so because of that, he's come into proximity in our life in a way that he never has. And he was at a wedding we did a while back. I thought this was the greatest thing. I just thought it was the greatest thing because he's a little old man, you know, and he and his wife both still living, he's still married. He's probably been married over 60 something years. And so somehow he was connected to the young couple that we were marrying. And as soon as I said the last amen, he was sitting right there on the second row behind family members. And when I said, I pronounce you man and wife, you know, Mr. And Mrs. So and so, and everybody claps and they walk out and then we dismiss. And he came out of his row and he came walking up to me and he said, and now their eyes will slowly begin to open. And when he said that, I just busted out laughing because you know, it's true. It is so true. It is so true. You think you're getting all the eye opening experiences you need pre marriage, but there's just some things. It's a lifetime that that covenant only reveals.

Yeah, it's a lifetime.

So let me go back, let me back to two things. Number one, we're going to talk about this. The good and bad, the ugly. This is not in any way that if you're going through it to condemn or if you've been through it to condemn, I want you to understand that me and Hope, you should know if you followed our life, if anybody understands how this can happen. Yes, we understand how this can happen. So you are not getting two people that are standing on a soapbox talking down to you. But we do. From a biblical standpoint, no matter what has happened in our life. I can't bend the word of God around people's experiences. I have to let all of the decisions we make hope come because of a set of values.

Yeah.

Okay. If you make bad decisions, it's because you have bad values. Everybody should make decisions through the filter of their values. Okay, where do your values come from? My values come from the word of God.

Right.

So my attempt in life, have I got it right? Not even close. But my attempt is to build a center inside of myself in everything. The way I handle my life, the way I do everything, the way I handle my marriage, my kids, my money, my finances, my faith, my attitude, my thinking, my words, the list goes on. I try to let that center be built by the word of God. Then out of that, decisions hopefully are made through that filter that will somehow prosper me. Because the Bible says, you know, if you observe today to do all these things which I've commanded you, all these blessings shall come upon you. If you do not deserve, all these cursing shall come upon you. I want to live in the place of blessing. But the place of blessing is not determined by God. The place of blessing is determined by if you this day hearken unto the voice of the Lord and you choose.

Blessings and curses come from our decisions.

Blessings and cursings are choice driven. Yeah, we've got to understand that our blessings are not arbitrary. You know, why does God just do stuff that's the favor of God, it's not the blessing of God. So you're talking about, you know, there's not just arbitrary blessings floating around and arbitrary curses floating around. Why is everybody picking up? That's not the thing. It comes out of choices that we make in life. So let me go back pre marriage and you come in here because when you get in marriage stuff, we used to, we got hours and hours of this stuff pre marriage. I have always advocated that even though you may be love at first sight, I believe that can happen. I believe that kind of happened to me.

It did happen to us.

Yeah, I believe that kind of happened to me when. When I saw you, I never looked again. And so I know that in my life it happened. But I've always advocated there needs to be an extended courtship.

To find out a lot of things, I think.

Do you get an exhaustive look at a marriage partner? No, but I think you need to at least get a snapshot.

Yeah, I like how you say it. You need to be with someone long enough to see them in several seasons.

You need to see someone. And other than a good Season to know how they handle and how they respond to the other seasons of life. Because, you know, different seasons will bring different things out of you.

Yeah, they do.

And so a lot of times I've always said, especially for men, you're not dating the man when you first meet him. You're dating his rep. He sends out his rep. He sends out the one that's shaven and smells good and cleans up well.

I like that one.

And buys nice dinners and is willing to spend his last one. That's his rep. I like his rep. And then all of a sudden, you know, you've gone from whining and dining to Cracker Barrel and everything.

And I like Cracker Barrel too.

Now you like Cracker Barrel.

We did Waffle House this morning and.

I love that we did Waffle House and we still like that. But you know what I'm talking about. I'm drawing an analogy.

Ups and downs.

It's once the new wears off, you kind of settle into, okay, this is what life's going to be like with this guy.

You were my knight in shining armor until you got sick.

Really? You didn't like the first time I got sick. That is not true. I press through everything but stomach. I press through everything but stomach.

Men are babies when they are sick.

I don't even stop and stay home. Right.

When you get a stomach virus.

Stomach. Yep, yep. When I get sinuses and all this stuff, I'm staying home. Today I got allergies. I mean, I preach through and plow through just about everything. But now when my inevitably we go.

Into the emergency room, if I get.

Upset at my stomach, my world stops spinning.

Yes.

I'm going to lay down and you know, don't let anything you need all smell things. Don't let me anything like that. But anyway, other than that, I usually plow through it. But it's true. You got, you get to see me like that. The first trip we ever went on, you got a stomach virus.

Oh, dating.

I sat there beside you and held a bag on a bus.

I had to throw up in front of 50 people.

And I was sitting there, you know, this, this beautiful blonde that had entered my life. Now her hair is pulled back, she has no makeup on, she's throwing her guts up. And I'm going to, you know, I'm just kind of looking at it because I'm just not a throw up guy. And you're holding the bag like I was like, you know, and so that was definitely a different season.

It is.

Okay. We were in college and because we were president of this and chaplain of that and involved in so many stuff that was actually very stressful. I remember our mornings just being marked out from 8 o' clock in the morning till 10 o' clock at night. And for college, yeah, it was. There was very little hanging out time. So we found we understood what it was like when you're stressed out and what it's like when I'm stressed out. We ran each other tired, we were around each other sick, we ran each other poor. And it was a long time before we ever had money, quite honestly. And so we were able, over a course of a little over three years to see each other. We were able to experience each other's family dynamics. That was interesting.

Big eye opener, I would say interesting.

Big eye opener. A lot of different things. When I see people, you know, we met six weeks ago, we get married, that scares me. Because the long and short of it is six weeks don't reveal.

No.

A year doesn't reveal a lot about a person. So is there a certain amount of time? How long should we date, Pastor? I don't know. We got engaged after. After a year, I put a ring on it. I wanted to seal this deal.

And then we dated two more years.

And then we dated two more years. And in that two more years, I think we knew an awful lot about each other. Now let's go into secrets. Okay?

Now what are we talking about this for? Because we're talking about divorce.

I'm going into divorce. I'm going into how do we get there?

Okay.

And then how do we respond?

Got it.

So let's go into this. Secrets. I've always said in marriage conference, how much about what's happened to you do you share? Okay. Especially if you're a woman sharing with a man, you cannot share details. He will never get them out of his head, ever.

But what about when the man pushes for details?

Well, you can't do the details. Here's what you have to do. You have to acknowledge that there is one. That's what I've told people. You acknowledge that a past exists, but you don't give the details of the past, nor should the man or whoever it is demand those, okay? So you need to acknowledge if there has been any collateral damage from the past, okay? Now, it's well documented through your testimony, through your preaching, and through your book. I would never expose you otherwise that you had a rape. You never spoke about that rape. You never told a soul about that rape. You never told anything. And it was extremely traumatic to your life. You lived in a house where you could never have revealed it because of certain dynamics which we don't have time to go into. And so that was revealed late, late, late in marriage after a series of changes going on in you that I could not explain. I didn't know what was going on. You were my baby doll, and I loved you with an everlasting love. But you were going through a metamorphosis, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what was causing it.

And I had no idea that that rape was causing a lot of these, you know, not necessarily the rape, but the unresolved, unresolved issues. Issues from it. You know, the unresolved pain that was in my heart, the unresolved lies be the truth in my head because of it.

So, yeah, so when you go through counseling or something like that, and I'm not going to take the whole time in this, when you go through counseling, something like that, this is what they try to help you do. This is what happened to me. These are the issues it created. And no, this don't make you cheat on somebody. It's a decision you make and you have to own it. But all of these unresolved issues produce these feelings, produce these desires, produce these deficiencies, produce these emptiness that begin to. To make that. They drive the decisions of your life instead of your real value system. They overwhelm you. They drive. Thus, we get the woman at the whale.

They make you crazy.

Yeah, they get the woman at the well. This woman keeps coming to the same place. She keeps the same cycle. She's doing the same thing. And Jesus came for one reason to break that pattern, Right? He came to break this. You are in a cycle. You need to drink living water. This water is dead. And if you keep drinking from the well you're at now, you're going to drink from it forever. You need to switch whales or this pattern in your life is never going to stop. And so we got father wounds. We've got generational curses. I talked about in a series a while back. You got curses, you got strongholds, you got yokes. So we had a whole podcast on that. Yep. You got basically curses that come from the bloodline. You basically got yokes that come from traumatic experiences. And then you've got strongholds which are lies that you believe in your head because of all these things and because.

Of divorce and how prevalent it is. You've got people being raised in homes who never ever one time have seen a Healthy marriage. So they're thrust into their life with.

No education, trying to do something they've had. Mom.

Never had Mom.

Right.

Trying to be a good wife or a good husband with no information.

So we go into marriage like this. Okay, Now I'm making very generalized statements. You know, if you. If you got a guy hitting you over the head with a brick, if you got a woman you know, throwing knives, that you. That's totally different. I'm not talking about. I'm not talking about that. Get out of that house. And you're like, well, I love them and I want to believe God for their salvation. Yeah, you can believe God for their salvation in Chicago.

Right?

Get out of there. You don't. I'm never advocating that you stay. Stay somewhere and take abuse. That is not what I'm advocating.

Mental.

I'm talking about this kind of stuff now. This is the kind of stuff I am going to get on and I'll take whatever responses and comments you got on this. This tears me up. Well, we fell out of love. Well, we grew apart, you know. Well, I don't feel anything anymore when I hear people destroy a whole family and give me those reasons.

So selfish.

I don't do well.

It's just selfish.

I don't do well. So. So I guess where we need to go now is some of the things that me and you've learned and how we would treat this. Let me tell you what the Bible says and how we look at it. And you interject here anywhere you want to. For our marriage conference. One of the studies I did, I do not know the study to refer to. I got these over Google searches, said that 71%, this is not Christian. This is just period in general. 71% of all people who had been in multiple marriages, so they didn't define if that's 2 or 4 or 5. It just said multiple. If they had it to do again, said they would have worked much harder on their first. On their first marriage.

Yeah.

71. So 100 people, 71 of them Christian and non Christian. If I had it to do over, I'd throw down the gauntlet to try to make the first one. Why? Because it's 52, 52% of all marriages in a divorce. Second marriage is 61, third marriage is 70. So I always tell people, I say, you think the more you do something, the better you would get. The fact is, statistics do not bear that out. Some of you have found your soulmate the second time. Some of you are second married and you're Happier than you've ever been. Okay. You are the exception. You are not the rule. 71% of the rule.

Because most people never fix the issue. They think the person's the issue. So I got to get. Get out of the marriage because they are.

They're what's wrong with me.

Yeah, if it wasn't for them, I would be better in all these areas. But they divorce, they go into another marriage, they leave with their own issues again. But then they have compounded issues from the devastation, from the abandonment, from the soul tie, from the children's hurt, from the family hurt. It's just compounded.

Here's what people don't understand. You subconsciously will go into the next marriage over scrutinizing this person in the area you were wounded in the last. Yeah, okay, let me say that again.

You make them pay for things they never did.

You make them pay. They haven't done anything. You know, Harry hadn't done anything, but Larry did this, this, this, this. So because that area of trauma is unhealed, and out of a rebound, you went into a second marriage because you didn't want to be alone or whatever it was then you're sabotaging what could. Because you're unhealed out of what came first. When I really advocate no rebound marriages.

Right.

If you have come through a divorce, let me tell you something. Something has been aborted, something that was supposed to live has been aborted. And something that. A wound that has. A wound that has had a miscarriage is not immediately ready for seed. No, it has to have a time.

Of heal in the natural. They'll tell you that you need to wait.

You got to wait. It's not ready to receive seed again because something has happen. Okay? This was something that was supposed to be incubated for a lifetime, and there has been a miscarriage of that. You don't immediately go again and put it right back in the same incubation. And so you got all these different areas, which we certainly don't have time to go through, why a marriage can end up in divorce. So if you take the extremities away, okay. And basically some type of just awful abuse. Take that aside. That's not normally why we hear people getting divorces.

No. Well, they say that the number one cause of divorce is infidelity. Okay. The second is lack of communication. I mean, that's broad. That's huge. That's hugely broad.

I called that number one because the communication problem leads to the infidelity. Many times communication's been Cut off. What does the Bible say? Are you ready? I'm going to tell you exactly what the Bible says. A lot of people think, Hope, that Jesus gave the loophole right. This is going to be a struggle because I ain't heard many people say this. You and I were separated. We talked about it. Breakfast this morning. We gave God a little praise together over a cup of coffee. And we were sitting there and you looked at me and said, 10 years ago this month, we were separated.

We were separated.

And it's a decade now in our rearview mirror. It was an awful time. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. I think me and you both can say that it was a dark, dark place I thought I'd never crawl out of. You're in a dark place. You never thought. We were in dark places for different reasons, but we were both in a really bad place. And I've told you many times, I don't know what your experiences were. You pinned them in your book. My experiences were, I just thought I was going to hurt to death, was going to hurt until I died. I just think that I'd ever get over it. And so I was going to call it quits. Now. We're getting real raw and relevant here. I was going to call it quits and I wasn't going to call it quits because I didn't love Hope. I've only loved one person. I was going to call it quits because I didn't ever want to feel that again. And I was convinced that being married was going to be too painful. And so kind of self preservation. I don't ever, ever want to feel again what I'm feeling right now. So I'm never going to put myself in a position again to feel what I'm feeling now. Therefore, I'm not seeking to reconcile this thing. So a lot of people are like, don't you love her anymore? Of course. That's why it hurts so bad, right? The reason it was devastating is because the depth of my love. And then I had my experience with God where God took me to that scripture and he says for marital unfaithfulness, he talked about marital unfaithfulness. Then he says, because of hardness of heart, he made this exception. He did not do it because of marital unfaithfulness. He did it because of the condition of the person's heart due to the betrayal. In other words, because your heart is now like a stone because of this incident. It's the death of love and trust. Therefore, you know, a man can put away his Wife or divorce his wife, depending on what translation you have.

So it's not that he can put his wife away or she can put her husband away because of unfaithfulness.

It's because of the hardness of the.

Heart, because of the condition of the heart.

I read that verse.

So really, really what it says, breaking it down is it's the condition of your reflection of your Christianity. I mean, are you really operating like Christ says you're supposed to operate as a Christian in your heart?

I looked at those scriptures and I think I've always. You can disagree here. I don't mind. I think I've always kind of been known as a loving guy. I love people, love my kids. I love my wife. I love my family. I try to be nice, you know, I try to be warm toward people. And when I saw that, but for hardness of heart, that wasn't the way I wanted to live.

Right.

I don't know how much you didn't.

Want to fall in that category.

Yeah, I'm like, man, I think that's a good way to put it. That ain't the category. I want to drop in out of this thing, you know, the stone heart. A stone heart? Yeah. I want to go to that guy's church. He's got a stone heart. Who wants to be around that? Who wants to live that way? I don't want to live hard because of that experience. And you have that choice and it'll make you hard. I mean, it'll make you like a cinder block wall. And that was. I can't just say it any other way. That was as a man, not just as a preacher or a Christian. That was not an attractive category for me. And then I went back to Corinthians 1, Corinthians 13. What is love has nothing to do with a feeling. A feeling is not mentioned anywhere in the definition. Love is patient. Love is kind. It is not. It is not easily angered. It is not rude. It does not boast. It keeps no record of wrongs. It is not self seeking. It hopes all things, bears all things, believes all things, and it says suffers all things. And I realized people just don't want.

To go through anything they want rainbows and butterflies in marriage all the time. We're out.

But I'm going to challenge that. You're right. And I'm going to challenge that line of thought. I don't think it's the easy way out. No, I don't think divorce is the easy. People, like, I just want to be done with this. I Just want to get out of this, put it in my rearview mirror, choke it up to a mistake. I shouldn't have married this woman. I shouldn't have married this man. Yeah, and the grass is greener until you get to the other side. And ain't no grass at all.

Right.

You know, and. Because what they don't realize is a.

Different person, different problems.

What people don't realize is you're starting at zero again. And when you're in a marriage that has been hurtful and needs the love of God and the restoration of God, at least you know what you're dealing with.

Yeah, that's true. And. But I hear people say, well, I just can't live like this. They're never going to change. But you're going to try and marry somebody else. Who's going to need to change? Quote, unquote. Yeah, who needs to change? But maybe they choose not to change either. I mean, so you're just going to divorce every single time.

You can't. There's and there's. And here again, you made vows before God, you know, for better, for worse. If you're not going to keep that, then they need to stop in the middle of the ceremony and say, wait a minute, how worse?

What's worse than you?

For richer, for poorer. Okay, let me draw a picture. How poor. And so I'm coming from a Ron vantage point. I don't want to be a hypocrite. And I stood up in a pulpit and screamed for 20 years, God can fix anything. And then all of a sudden, Ron Carpenter comes up on something that needs to be fixed. Now, if my gospel doesn't work for me, how hypocritical is it for me to be?

But, Ron, how much work? You said, God can fix anything. I think that's where people get stuck. They think God's just going to sham a lamb, a ding dong, do it over people's lives. It was so much change. So much backing up, closing our mouth, crucifying our. It was awesome watching our mouth, watching how we treat. Doing different habits, learning how to love in different ways. I mean, it was so much work.

Forgiving from every angle.

So much work. And I think people are just so selfish, they're not willing to put in the work.

And so we're sitting there with some friends of ours that had gone through the same thing, and they revealed to us the nature of their thing, which we didn't know. And I said, well, how long did it take you to recover? And this person looked at me and Said two years. And I remember how overwhelming you were.

Like, I can't do two years. You're like, I want to be fixed quick.

I'm sitting there on the inside and I feel like somebody's taking a razor blade to my soul.

But I remember you saying, I just, I can't do this for two years.

The thought of experiencing what I was experiencing for two years, I remember it overwhelmed me. So you talking about people, you know, thinking we just held up, it was awful, Hope. Yeah, I know it was awful. But what, what did we talk about this morning? You said, you said, Today's the 10 year anniversary of when we separated. And I said, it is a miracle that we're here. And you said, we're not just here, but we're thriving. I think you would say you wouldn't trade places with anybody in the world. I would not trade places with anybody in the world. However, there were some decisions we made in the middle of the ash heap of our life that our vows were true. Whatever it took, we were going to take the road less traveled and we were going to hammer these issues out and find a place of healing and restoration in God. And it did not come immediately, but we celebrated victory.

You know, we had to, we, bottom line, we had to learn a new path. We had, and I say that word because we were going, we were doing life a certain way for a long time. And we really had to forcefully, intentionally ourself, learn a new path. We had to do life different. We had to treat each other different. We had to change our expectations. We had to grow. We had to.

Restoration means, like I talked about Sunday on the East Coast. It means to create a new structure. Yes, we created a lot of new structures by which we operated our life. We fundamentally scrapped a lot of the ways we function and rebuilt them. Because for God to restore, he doesn't put it in the old structure. The old structure is what caused you to lose it in the first place. So for him to restore the man with the withered hand, it means he created a structure that wasn't there. It was all new. God will restore it to you, like Job double for your trouble. But we had to build a lot of new life structures and the way we function to make it work, the.

Way we operate, to make it better.

We did. And you celebrate every little victory. And at first, the victories were, we made it today.

Yeah.

No, really, I mean, we would talk to our counselor. How do we, how do we make this every day? Today was a good day.

Yeah.

And I mean, we get done at night, we look at each other, okay, we made it day. And then you look and it's been a month.

And, you know, I live a lot. I don't know about you, but the structure in my life, I live like that now. We've got a lot going on. And I know when my assistant even will come to me and say, well, Pastor, what about da, da, da, da? And that'll be like three or four things down the road. And I'm like, jazlyn, I can't talk about that right now. I said, I'm doing this today, or I've got this due tomorrow. And when I tackle that. And it really helps you to become mindful of what's going on in the present when you live your life like that.

You.

You know, the Bible even says, who.

By worrying, adds one hour to the.

One, adds, you know, you cannot worry and change tomorrow at all. You have to really be present at what's going on right now. And that was a structure that we put in place for our marriage. And I also put it in place for my life.

Let me tell you what let's do. Let's make a decision right here in front of everybody. There's so much of our story yet that's really untold. We got some really, really. We got some made for movie stuff that never made it to a book, and we've never talked about it, but we can do whatever we want to. In our podcast, I say, let's take this into a part two, because we make and speak into couples that are there right now.

Yeah, I think we are. But let's end on divorce. Let's end. There's people listening saying, okay, that's great for y', all, but I chose to get a divorce. Now.

What?

That's great for y'.

All.

I made terrible decisions or my spouse made terrible decisions here nor there. I'm divorced. I'm a divorcee. Is there hope for me? Absolutely, Absolutely, absolutely. But I would encourage you to do the hard work now before you embark on a new relationship, or you'll be in the same boat.

And when you say, do the hard work now, and we do need to shut this down, this is what we mean by that. Don't let let the trauma of the hurts from your last marriage drive the decision making. I remember even my own mother, when my mother and father did everything together, when my dad passed, I told mama, I said, mama, don't let loneliness drive you, drive your decision making. You have a set of values. You've got to Stick to those. Because these feelings are strong feelings and they can be overwhelming. And when those feelings take over and start driving the decision making, when you, when you are overcome with mixed emotions and feelings and emotions that are all over the place, you moving into your next relationship with clarity is very improbable. Yeah. And you need, you need, especially if.

You'Re up in age, because then you bring all of the traumas, all of life's trauma. Yeah. From your whole life. And you know, the longer you live, the more you got. And if you don't deal with that hardened heart, you don't deal with bitterness and unforgiveness, forgiveness and offenses, it just compounds, it gets bigger.

It don't just go away. No, it don't just go away. So anyway, guys, I appreciate you letting us talk with you about these things. I'm going to tell you some stuff if you want to get behind the curtain next week. We had two or three what I would call defining moments, which could be in a Hallmark movie. I'm not kidding. And they were our little miracles. And I think when you put in the hard work, God will come in with the little miracles you can't do. And we needed some miracles. We were in a bad place and we made some decisions to hang on. But then God came around and did some stuff we could never do. I want to talk about that. We'll let you in on it next time. But as for right now, it's rotten.

Hope unfiltered, real raw.

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