When To Say Enough | Ron + Hope: Unfiltered

I'm drinking my water.

I don't know what the thing's called, so you're gonna have to do it.

Ron, this is season four. You should know what our podcast is called.

One, two, three, four. It's five words. Six words.

Ron and Hope. Unfiltered, real, raw, relevant.

Six words.

If you don't know by now something's wrong.

Couldn't it just be running Hope? Yeah, something like that. Make it real easy or nothing. I have to remember.

It's okay.

It's been a long day.

It has been a long.

They don't know. They don't know how we had to. We're doing our podcast on admin day. Tuesday's our admin day. Whereas what?

Some things got moved around this week.

Six or seven hundred meetings.

Yes. Our hair's on fire.

And so it's hard to come in. And podcast is usually on media day, so we're having to do podcast on admin day. So it's real. It's gotta shift. You gotta turn your mind.

I hope we don't fight.

What? We won't fight. We don't ever fight. But what did your mama say about your hair?

Oh, stop.

What'd your mama tell you? Your mama's old. How old is she?

80. Excuse me. This is not the hairstyle she was talking about. She's talking about the hairstyle when I wear my hair down and just have a little poof right here. And out of the blue the other day, she said, I just need to tell you something. I don't know if you're gonna like it or not. And I'm like, what, mama? She said, I don't like your hair with that old woman poop on top. That granny bun on top. Yeah. And I'm like, wow, okay.

She wants you to get with the times.

I don't know what she wanted, but I just said, okay.

She didn't want you to be the holiness look. That's what it was. Because that was a holiness poof. Really got that big thing going up right there. Pulled it together, and it took your mama, of all people, to bring you up fashion wise, didn't it?

I still do the poof. It helps. It's easy.

Not really.

This is not the poof, Ron.

It's half poof.

This is called pull your hair back in a ponytail because I didn't wash it.

Okay.

Yes.

We want to be real raw. Raw and relevant. So when it's pulled certain ways, that means there's been no bath in days.

Oh, I bathed. Just didn't wash my hair.

We need to do a podcast on hygiene.

If you'd like.

Yep. After we met someone not too long ago, don't brush their teeth. Don't we?

Right. Somebody said, you know, I don't brush my teeth, but like once every 10 days. And we all, we just stopped. We were like, I just went, do what?

And then another guy sitting at the.

Table, he said, he said, but what do you do with all the bacteria?

He said, that's bad.

That's bacteria in your mouth. It was so funny.

I was just thinking about her husband.

Oh, Lord.

Because that stuff in the morning just don't leave by itself. That monster in your mouth in the morning just does not leave on its own.

Anyway.

There's nobody void of that. Anyway, the topic we want to talk about today is. We were going to talk about boundaries, Ron.

We could talk for years.

Boundaries on relationship. Yeah. This is. We only try to do half hour podcasts. I see so many people doing it for hours and it's hard. I will be honest with you. I go back and look at podcast clips because I can't even hardly sit down and watch a movie for two hours. I sure can't watch a podcast. So we kind of designed this for people who are geared a little bit more like me. But we did, we were talking about. It was not scripted. Even though we've done a lot of teaching on it. We didn't bring any notes in here. But we talked about the fact that you and I learned the hard way that relationships have to be qualified for. Let me give you an example.

And managed.

Let me give you an example. Please hear this from a guy, 56 year old, if you're 26, you know, because the way I viewed relationships when I was 26 got me crushed. Just got me crushed. Number one, I was taught, if you're a Christian, you gotta be everybody's friend. And that was equated with love. You know, love your brother, love your brother. That means basically give yourself away to that person. And what I realized is that is not love at all. Sometime I gotta love you from Chicago.

A distance.

Yes, I do love you. I care for your soul and I care for your person. I care for all of you. But I cannot be in a relationship with you because being in a relationship with you is unhealthy for me. And then I've heard people come up to me, I'm in covenant relationship with pastor. I'm like, no, you're not. I don't have a covenant. But with one person that's hope. I'm in a covenant relationship with her. I'm in a covenant relationship with God. I am not in a covenant relationship with you. Because the covenant relationship is the relationship that are not broken. Highs, lows, ins, outs, ups, downs. It is the relationship before God.

We don't do that with anybody else.

God's not going to leave me up or down. He's not leaving me. He's made a covenant with me. I've made a covenant with you. And hopefully we've walked this covenant out. But all these other relationships, everything that falls below that, there are acquaintances are friends, there are confidants there, you know, casual. Yeah, there's casual. I do think that there are different kind of friends that people need. But the fact is, I learned the hard way out of just being battered mainly by church people.

Well, we can say that, but that's the only relation. That's where we live in church. So we're not saying that by, say, in church. People are bad.

No, but it was this understanding in my mind that I got to give my life to people because I'm a Christian. Yeah. And I would even let people do, you know, we're supposed to be in relationship together. I thought you were a Christian. I'm like, wait a minute. God told me to love you. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not, you know, remember wrong. That is not a relationship. That is love. And so I learned the hard way, relationship is time. Relationships are qualified. You have to qualify spending time with people, people for relationships. Here's the thing. This is great teaching right here. When you want to take a relationship and move it, move the circle to an inner circle. Change the intimacy level of the relationship. I don't know if people understand what that is. Intimacy is information. Jesus said, I no longer call you servants. John 15. But I call you friends. Okay. He's moving it from here to hear. And then he gave the description of what allowed it to move. Because a servant does not know his master's business.

Friendship has information.

I'm going to move you from here to here by letting you know things other people don't know.

That's right.

Now, I said that to say this because I've set you up. You go through a divorce. You go out to have coffee with somebody you're working with after work and start telling them somebody you don't know. And you're moving them just like this. And all of a sudden, not even knowing it, creating bonds through the information that you are telling them. I want to pull my Hair out. When I see people giving out information that the other person has not qualified for. You are not qualified to hear that because by that I'm creating too much intimacy. I told you that's one of the greatest things I wanted to cover you from. You are open book. You come in a room and anybody can know anything about. You want to know because you were that kind of personality. On the one side, that personality has served you so well. It's a double edged sword though on the other side, people have hurt you terribly by the fact that you were that way. And you learned to close.

Yeah, I closed that door.

You learned to close that book up a little bit. But ouch, you know, that hurt. So I know I just hit some people when I said that. Because if you're in pain and you finally get somebody to talk to not understanding that you're doing this, then you have two people that get married out of shared pain, bond a relationship out of shared pain.

So they never move past pain in their relationship because that's the only thing they know.

The pain is the commonality.

That's the only thing they know. That that's how we started was through pain. That's how we started was you were down.

Often people say we help get each other through our worst. And then the thing is.

But that's the only thing you know, you don't know how to live in a healthy state.

Now that is so good. Hope you didn't meet out of anything healthy, you met out of trauma. So the foundation of your relationship is trauma.

So that's why you keep going back to trauma, because it's familiar and it makes you feel like, oh, I'm rescuing them again. Oh, I need him again.

They're rescuing me again.

Yes. So healthy is something that is so unfamiliar, but it's something that it's going to take some time.

If the non Christian and I'd follow non Christian stuff because I want to see what's going on out there. If the non Christian Instagram clips that are relationship based are really the way today's people are relating to each other. It's scary. I mean some of the things I hear where people are so called giving wisdom about men and wisdom about women and wisdom. I'm sitting there going, where did you get that? I mean, the most asinine things I've ever heard in my life. And I looked down there and the thing's got 72,000 likes and 5,100 comments, you know, and it's the most anti biblical thing I've ever heard in my life. And so the long and short of it is every relationship has to have certain boundaries. I go Back to Ezekiel 47. There's a river that came from the throne of God, ankle deep, waist deep. Then it became so deep, no man could cross it. And the banks of the river had trees, and the trees were for the healing of the nations. I've always told people, there's healing, there's vegetation, there's trees, there's leaves. When the water has banks. But it goes on to say in Ezekiel 47, but where there were no banks, it was swamp, and no thing could live there. Relationships that don't have boundaries. You know what? This cup is a boundary for the water.

It is.

I can take this cup and hold it, and I can take this cup and I can. Wait this way. Wrong way. I can do this.

What you'd like to do because of boundaries.

Okay. If I take this water and pour it on this table, just everywhere, okay. This water has no benefit to me because it has no boundaries.

You lost the benefit.

So I only got the benefit of the water when the water has the boundary. You're so far ahead of me, you're stealing all my thunder. So, friends, what are boundaries? You have to keep even with friends a lot.

They gotta have you same values. Yeah. And if they don't? If their values are broader than yours, then you have to know the boundary of how close and how often you have them in your life.

We have to do that.

We do. We have some friends who have broader values than ours, but we love them. We feel like God brought them into our life. So we see them in smaller portions.

And we know when to leave. Yeah. Yeah, we know when to leave. What about.

This is the hardest, I think, Ron, I think friends, you can navigate, you know, but you can't pick your family.

Well, let's go back to friends. That's a whole nother. You done gone to the big one. I was saving the big one for last. Here's another thing. Let me go back to friends. Let me tell you one about friends. Can a woman be best friends with a man?

Absolutely not.

That's a big one out there.

Because it's a natural attraction. A man and a woman, God made to naturally attract. And you cannot be best friends with.

The opposite when you're married, sharing information, sharing information creates bonds.

Now, I don't know. I mean, if you're not married, I wouldn't say yeah or nay, but I'm talking about married. Yeah. No, absolutely.

My best friend cannot Be a woman.

No.

Period. I would never even bring it to you because it's not your standard that you set for me. That's my standard. That's just not going to happen.

It creates bonds, but it also creates suspicion for the other spouse. And insecurity, if there's any insecurity there. I mean, you're just really throwing a big bullseye for the enemy to hit you.

And except for people, like, on staff that I. Obviously, I have to communicate with.

Me, too.

But except for people like that, if there's anything outside, like a DM on a social media, or if there's anything random, I always come to you. And a lot of times I will give you my phone and you will say, hello, this is Pastor Hope. This is Pastor Hope. Yeah, and what am I doing right then? Sending a message. I will not talk to you without my wife knowing about it. I feel like we're stepping all over stuff out there right now because you got, you know, phones are a big issue. But the fact is, if I know I am going to communicate with a woman that is out of my ordinary daily pathway. Like, you know, I have a secretary, I have people in administration, I have, you know, people in our C suite, and I have. That are female. And so I have to, you know, correspond with them, ask questions, different types.

Of things, get information.

But anything that is outside of that normal path, I try to bring you into it, or I don't respond at all. That's just a boundary that I have. Just a boundary that I've set. And I can just imagine how some of them are feeling out there, because there are a lot of people that believe you can be married and have a best friend of the opposite sex.

I believe. If you really believe that, then there's some.

There's a door you're leaving open.

There's a door.

Yeah, there's a door you're leaving open.

Absolutely.

You gotta be careful with that. Next thing I want to talk about is who gets your hurt.

I believe, number one, it needs to go to God. The Bible says, cast your care on the Lord.

That's good.

Cast your care on him, for he cares for you. I mean, and all of us can go there. We all want somewhere to go with our pain and hurt.

That's the way we got through that.

You got to go with God. You got to throw it on him. If you're married, you go to your spouse. You can also go to your spouse. I think it's very damaging and sometime not healthy if you go to your Friends about your spouse, or if you even go to your family about your spouse, I think that blurs some lines. I mean, if you're going for wisdom and if you got a real mature relationship and you can get mature counsel and not, you know, skew somebody's view.

About your, start trying to get somebody to take sides.

Right. That's. I get that. And that's okay, because wisdom comes in a multitude of counselors. I get it. But you got to be very careful. You know, Number one, you got to know where to go, and that's to God first. And then I come to you and you come to me.

I think they're the people that you need in your life. And I don't know how you categorize them as friends, acquaintances, whatever, but there are people in your life that need to be ride or die. I think there need to be people in your life that'll be a small group. I think there are people in your life that need to be confidants. There are people in your life that you need to be able to talk to them and get real conversations about them and tell that person, say, look, dude, I'm not in a good place. I need you to pray for me. You got to have those. Does that fall in the friend category or the mentor category or where does it fall into? Because those lines can be a little blurry sometime. But you got to have the person that you can have fun with. You got to have the person that's ride or die. And you got to have the person that can hear you but not reveal you.

Yeah. Or judge you.

Right. You're not using this information to take me down later.

Right.

You're using this information because you care for my best and you want to see me turn it around for my best. And I'm going to tell you, the higher you go, the harder that is to find. Because if God is taking you to a high place and you talk to people who you are responsible for, if they have any selfish ambition, they can take the things that you have shared and use it against you at a later date.

But that just shows their unhealed place. And you probably shouldn't be in a relationship with them anyway if they're. You know, I just try to qualify my relationships with fruit where they are in their walk, in their journey with the Lord. I used to not do that. I used to qualify my relationships. Are they fun? Do they make me laugh? Are they easy to be around? You know, and that's very immature. And I believe as you grow and mature in the Lord that you need to qualify your relationships by their fruit.

Those are not the qualities that earn you as a person.

Fun, right?

That doesn't earn. You don't give your heart to that. You don't give your information to that. I will say this. Everybody wants to be blessed, and everybody wants to escalate. Everybody wants to be promoted. I could preach on promotion and going to the next level, and I have everybody slinging handkerchiefs, but the fact is, the higher you go, the smaller your circle becomes. For instance, and I'm not on near the level of other people. God's blessed me. I have some level of influence, but I'm not on the tier. Some people are. But at the stage I'm at, it is very difficult right now. If you ask me to list people, people that I would go to with a problem.

That is truth on one hand, minus a few.

One or two fingers. One or two fingers. And here again, you learned that the hard way. And so you need to understand, you know, Bishop Jakes wrote a book a long time ago, can you stand to be blessed? And I preached a sermon. Who did the chosen talk to? When Mary found out she was carrying something that nobody else had ever carried before, she had to leave her nation, go into Egypt, and she had to meet up with her cousin Elizabeth, who was carrying something that she had never. In other words, who did the chosen talk to? Somebody else who's chosen because they're the only people that identify. So can you stand to be blessed? Who do the chosen talk to? Meaning when there's a special call or gift on your life or God wants to use you for something, finding somebody, you know. What was it Bishop Jakes used to say? Naaman. But he was a leper. He was a mighty man. He brought his master many victories, comma, but he was a leper. Bishop Jake said, be careful who you show your butt to. Be careful who you show your butt. In other words, every relationship, and this is the way we look at staff in the past, who maybe we've had problems with. This is the way we looked at friends. Nobody brings you all good.

We all got issues.

Nobody to me ever loved a woman like I love my wife. But I don't bring you all good. Nobody brings you all good. You got to take all the stuff that comes with the good. So there is this thing you do in a relationship. Victories, leprosy.

The victories have to outweigh the leprosy.

The victories have to outweigh the leprosy. It has to outweigh it, or you.

Can'T sustain it, you can't carry it.

Leprosy. Leprosy in biblical times was extremely contagious, and it was a sickness unto death. You got leprosy, you died. Just a matter of when. And this king, this guy was so valuable. And many times the chief of the military officers lived somewhere in the king's accommodations, the king's palace. He had a place there right next to the king. So the king was willing to risk leprosy to have him and all the things that he was that good. He was that good. And for those of you who've got attitude problems or you got conduct problems or you can't get along with anybody, you better be dang good. Because if your leprosy outweighs what you bring to the table, what do you have to do? You have to cut it loose. So there are people that I've had to say, you know what, their victories outweigh their leprosy. And there's other people. Their leprosy outweighs their victories. And I tell people, you know, if you want to be difficult, you better bring a lot of victories to the table.

Absolutely.

And let's go here, Family.

That's a tough one.

Where do you draw on?

That's a tough one. I mean, because they're your family. And you.

We, your family had to leave, live. You choose how much you want to tell. Even though it's real raw, you choose with a good bit of invasion. In times when we were struggling, it was the worst on your side. I don't know that we always handled it right. And so what would we tell somebody who says, man, my in laws are killing me. My in laws are going to ruin my marriage. My in laws are going to break us up. What do I tell them?

I've been doing a. I've been counseling a girl for several weeks now, and she just cut her own mother off for four years.

I remember you telling me that because she.

Yeah, because she said that her mother did not approve of her marriage with her husband. And she's got a great guy, great husband. They got a great marriage.

I know him. Yeah, he's good.

And she just, you know, nitpicks him and just belittles them and wants her daughter to continue to obey her and doesn't push them to be, you know, a one united couple. So she said she cut her mother off and wrote her a letter for four years. She said, you just got to give me and my husband time to heal. She said, from what you've done to us so that I can be strong enough to invite you back into our life. That's bold.

I want to tell you something, though. I can't imagine getting that letter from one of my children. She did the right thing.

She did. From what all she's told me, how the mother has interfered, you know, in the marriage. So we've tried. This is what we've tried to do with our kids and their marriages. Be open when they need us, you need us.

I've told every one of my children, they say, you know, I don't want to keep calling you when there's a problem.

I said, that's why we're here.

You know, there was an old, old. Because my daddy used to listen to country music. Old Conway Twitty song. That's my job. That's what I do. And I tell. I want to be the guy you call for all of my life, for anything. That's my job. That's what I do. But in the end, I'm going to give you counsel and point you right back to try to handle. It's not my job to handle it. It's my job to try to help you see clearly.

Let me give you perspective.

Yeah, let me try to help you see clearly. Maybe you hadn't thought about this, maybe you don't see it this way. Have you thought about this?

Because when you in the heat of it, you know, when you in the heat of something, you don't see clearly.

No, you don't.

So you do need a different perspective.

And so I try to maybe bring some perspective, bring a little bit of wisdom, diffuse, but point them back to execute it.

What if you got that person in your family that's just causing drama, drama, drama all the time with other family members and you can't have an Easter and you can't have a Christmas. And it's always something.

You have to limit their involvement. You can't cut them off because they're family. You just can't cut them off. If you're in a dire situation like this girl, I understand what she did. We're not going to reveal those circumstances, but it was pretty bleak. That's an extreme situation. I don't think most people are there. But if you got somebody that destroys peace. Destroys peace? Peace is the most valuable commodity on planet Earth. And if you've got somebody that is a constant disrupter of peace, there has to be a conscious decision to limit. I can take you in bite sized pieces.

Do you think you should even address it? You know like Matthew 18, you got off with your brother, go to him. If you, you know, there's somebody you think it's okay to say, you know, listen, now you can come, but this is what's not gonna happen. And this is what's gonna happen if I think so too.

You know, in a marriage conference, we haven't talked about all these boundaries. One of the things we really haven't talked about is, is in laws. And you can hear that we hold up to 500 couples. Sometimes we have 400, sometimes we pack it up, but it's 800 to 1,000 people in there. And when you say boundaries with in laws, you can hear the murmur come across the room. I mean the whole room. You have to be strong enough to determine. You can come up to right here if the flood comes past, if the water comes past the bank, it's a flood.

Yeah. I think it's a naturally hard transition to make from living in your parents house for 18, 22, 30 years, however long it was before you got married. And then the transition into, okay, now this is our home. I mean, this is all you've known. This is all your brain has known. This is all your emotions have known. This is all the conflict flick resolution. You've known all of it. It's a hard break from that tie that you have. That's a natural. I got to got to ask. I got to ask my dad or I got to go to my mom or I need to fight instead of leaving and cleaning.

You think it's harder for a girl or harder for a guy to leave and cleave. You know, the guy is being addressed. For this man shall. For this reason shall a man.

Yeah.

So the man is being addressed. I believe there may be some natural difficulties for the man to move from son to headship.

I think it is because a woman naturally wants to be led. A woman naturally we are used to. Even if she don't say that we are, it's in there. God made us that way that we want to come up under and want to be led. And we've seen our daddy do this and lead and do and be and take care of. And then we get married to this young guy who don't know jack crap. And then we're like, well, you ain't a good leader. Well, you don't know how to fix the toilet. Why won't you cut the grass?

Your dad can fix anything. And I couldn't. And problem was I didn't have money to pay $75 to get a Plumber to come over. So, yeah, those were natural switches. Because there were things you were used to Daddy doing I didn't have the.

Ability to do right.

I don't remember you making that a big deal, but I do remember the surprise sometime when you'd have. I need you to come in here. This thing's leaking. And I just look at you, clueless. I'm like.

And I'd have to fix it.

Yeah. I have no idea.

I'd change the guts in the toilet.

I knew that my dad. I knew farm equipment. I knew farm tools. I knew that. But you know construction, because you'd been around construction and plumbing and electrical. I didn't have a. I don't know how to hang a ceiling fan. If I hung a ceiling fan, I'd burn the whole house down. God, I don't know how to do that.

But that is also, you know, the beauty. This is not what we're talking about.

Learning, experience.

It's the beauty of becoming one. You don't become one when you say I do. It is that. It's the ebb and flow of life, of good and bad and up and down and good days and bad days where you are becoming one. It's when you look back over your life and say, wow, look how far we've come, man. We figured this out. We've been married 20 years, and we finally got this. And got this victory. And now, like me and you, we've been married 35 years, and look, we are saying the same things. We're repeating each other. We don't fight over what we used to fight over. It's the beauty of becoming one. You don't just become one. And so many people just back out.

It's the beauty of getting to the place where I'll do everything for you, Jesus.

Okay. Help him, Lord. It's 30.

I can't even hear you right now. Cause your eyelashes.

You like them?

I do.

I got them done yesterday.

I'm called up. You got them done? I thought those were yours, Ron.

No. You know, I get my eyelashes done.

Oh, I thought those were real. Thought that was real natural beauty, baby. I've been telling everybody. It's all natural.

I do it for you. I know, because I know you love it.

I do love it. You know what? We might start. We might do the next podcast. Just personal boundaries. The things you have to have as a person. Dr. Henry Cloud. Is that who it was? We read this book when our world was falling apart. I had never heard such a thing as boundaries. I'D never read a book on it. It's not a Christian book. He might be a Christian. Is that a Christian book? Okay. I wasn't sure. I don't know if he's just a clinical psychologist or a Christian Clinical psychologist. He's a Christian and one of the top five books that has helped me live because the stuff that he gave me permission to do in the book, I didn't know I had permission to do. And it was so healthy for me. So check out the book. The book's called Boundaries. I think that Boundaries two now.

And he's got boundaries with your kids. Boundaries in marriage.

I haven't read these.

Yes, Boundaries in. Yeah, it's great. Really great.

I haven't read these. I just read the number one boundaries books. Anyway, we love you guys. Listen, go get my AI appreciate.

People love that thing.

20, 30, 40,000 hours of questions have already been asked. This out in hours. I ain't talking about minutes. I'm talking about hours. Somebody DMed me the other night and said they had two and a half hour conversation.

That's crazy.

With the AI app and it's all there if you want to learn it. The AI app pulls from my archive. It does not talk to you as a random computer. It is programmed to talk to you out of the answers that I've given over 35 years of ministry. It is a powerful discipleship tool app and it is free. We don't charge a dime. It costs me money, but we're not charging anything. I believe the Lord will take care of it. But It's Ron Carpenter A.I. download that app. Inner Circle.

Yep, Inner Circle. I'd love to have you, if you really feel like that you need some help in your life. You need somebody to come give you a spiritual B12 shot to be your coach, somebody to be in your corner. I'd love to be that for you. Go to hopesintercircle.com we meet every first Tuesday night of the month and every third Saturday, Saturday of the month. Pretty powerful time we're having right now. We're studying the gifts. Not the gifts, the fruit of the spirit. And woo. It has been so challenging for me and for everybody in it. But we're growing. So come grow with us. Go to hopes inner circle.com until next time.

Running hope unfiltered.

Real, raw and relevant.