August 6, 2025 • 19 mins
In this heartfelt opening conversation, Theresa sits down with author and speaker Ruth McKeaney to explore what it truly means to be "Hungry for Home". Ruth shares stories from her own journey: from building a family mission statement with her husband, to creating an intentional family culture, to learning that hospitality is far more about love than perfection. With humor, wisdom, and deep faith, she invites us to look at how we can live with purpose in our homes, our relationships, and our communities. Whether you’re in a season of building, rebuilding, or simply longing for more connection, Ruth’s insights will leave you inspired to make your home a place of welcome, purpose, and love.✨ In this episode: Why every family needs a mission statement The difference between hosting and true hospitality How faith shapes the way we create home Finding purpose in the everyday 🛎️ Subscribe for more soulful conversations. Connect with us: The Soul Talks website: https://www.soultalkswiththeresa.com/ Get your copy of "He's Not Coming Back": https://bit.ly/40qGX6Y Connect with our guest: Hungry for Home website: https://www.hungry4home.com/ At Home with Ruth McKeaney: http://bit.ly/45mBNe6 Follow Ruth: @hungryforhome on Instagram and TikTok
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Hi, Welcome back. I'm Teresa Bruno, the host of the
Soul Talks podcast, and I am just so delighted to
be here this afternoon with my friend, fairly new friend,
but growing to be a deep and trusted friend, Ruth McCarney.
You know, Ruth's words just wrap around you, like honey,
(00:32):
like home. Ruth has written a book, Hungry for Home.
It's a gorgeous memoir and it talks about what I
think we all long for, and that's belonging. It's comfort,
it's healing, it's a place to go to when you know,
life knocks our socks off. And she has this glorious,
wonderful television show of the same name, Hungry for Home,
(00:55):
and she explores traditions and food, which if I were
around her all the time, be really you know, having
a problem and family. I think the thing about Ruth
that I'm growing to love more and more and more
is that everything she says, everything she does, everything she writes,
just comes from her place of lived experience. It's nothing
(01:16):
that she sought to learn or went to school for,
or pretends to be. It comes from her places of
grief so beautifully of her places in love and marriage
and motherhood just runs through her veins. So I'm just
delighted to sit this afternoon and have some time with
(01:37):
my friend Ruth.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I am just so happy to have you. Yeah, it's
a long time coming. We tried I.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Tried this a couple of times, so this is going
to be a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Well, then we'll have a lot more times in the future, right,
So I just wanted to start with, you know, this memoir,
this book of yours. It's astounding, and it's so beautiful,
and you know it's it's pictorial, and it just guides
you through something you feel like you've missed your whole life.
And I just wondered, you know, I know a little
(02:13):
of your life, but you had lived a good life,
and you had five kids, and you'd redone a million homes,
and you had this amazing farm, and why did you
decide to write Hungry for Home?
Speaker 2 (02:25):
It is a long story, like has a way of
forcing you to pivot at different times. And I went
from being, you know, as you know, a trial lawyer.
I was a criminal prosecutor, and then at the turn
in General's office and my husband and I lived at
a Philadelphia area, and it was at that point out
(02:47):
of necessity that would be end of foot host. So
for women, I can speak for women, I think particularly
if you've been in the workforce and then you're staying
home with your children, your identity can take ahead at
different times. Yeah, and you don't even realize it's come right.
You don't realize that your identity has become something, whether
(03:10):
that's your job, your position, career. So I had one
of those moments when I left practicing and began to
stay who meet the kids, and realized, you know, here
here I was at that point in time. I've always
wanted to be a mom. I've always said I'll be
a stay at home. I had absolutely no idea what
I was wanting. Fast forward, you know, and I can
(03:33):
go into this story at another time. But we've flatastas
for sixteen years, moved every eighteen months, and during that
time I had four girls in five years, and then
my job three years later. So we landed on this
farm outside of Philadelphia, which is three unridden seven years old,
and William penn needd it initially and with a there's
(03:54):
a couple of guests. My mother had died, soho I
wanted a place for my Polly, but that second transition
time was coming where and I didn't even anticipate it
until my oldest daughter, and all of a sudden I
felt I trapped it to my husband at one point,
I said, it's like the taton mean a shitch underneath
(04:16):
where I knew that something was coming. Things were change
and cheeseings worship. And if you had asked me, are
your kids your identity or your purpose? I would have
said absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
You would have said absolutely not, absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Do I love them, do I appreciate them? But my
life is bigger than that. I had absolutely no idea
until the oldest was leaving. My purpose was watching me?
Oh I didn't yeah, because I didn't know. And this
began to dawn on me. Right, you're going to have
more time when your kids are gone than you did
even when they were. And who am I going to become?
(04:59):
Do I want to go back to being a trial lawyer? Now?
Am I getting tired of the flipping and the working office?
But who does that mean? And what's what's purposeful in
my life is these kids cook. So that's when the
pre growsing pains of the books are.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah, So take me back, take me back to you
as a girl, take me back to a little bit
of the story of your family. And I'm going there
because two reasons I left out in your introduction that
of all your lived experiences, one of one of the
(05:43):
other huge pillars in your life is your spiritual life.
And so I want to explore a little bit what
that looked like when you were little. You know what
your influences were spiritually.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
And I think that you know that's formative for me,
so I can appreciate you going back to that. We
grew up all over the country. I lived from California, Pennsylvania, Denver, Tulsta,
Virginia now Pennsylvania, and multiple places in each of those
those places. My father had grown up all over the world.
(06:17):
His father had been evangelis, His father, my great uncle,
Billy Graham, and a couple of others had been in
a Bible study for years together. And out of those
five men were birthed a number of big, big ministries.
So having evangelist missionaries pastoral families through our home growing
(06:42):
up was just part of day to day living. Corey
Timboom and my grandmother were best friends. So we've had
people always from all sorts of countries coming through ours
that I remember thinking, while we are so wonderful that
these people we keep them whole place, just say, you know,
(07:04):
when they're having their sabbatical. I had no understanding until
later how formative they were to us. Sure that kind
of and couple that with we probably by the time
I got married got married at thirty, I think we
had moved as a family twenty.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
I placed did not represent homes, but what my parents
created as a family. I was the oldest of six
was the bedrocks for me and my mom's have if
you are homeless. She got even both. I mean, she
just had everyone through our home.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
So going growing up in that and then being on
my own, that was a culture that I wanted to really, so.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
That that comes in after. And I'll tell you when
I lived in Richmond and I was an assistant train
general all the time, my friends would grow a lot
of events and you got formal invitations to them. So
I began to get very hesitant when I moved to
Philadelphia Energy because right we lived in sixteen years, lived
(08:21):
every eighteen months, so we were living out a box.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Craziness, like that's chaos. I don't know how you did that.
I don't know how I did it. I think, I mean,
it is so important to me to nest place.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
So that's where the name came up, and that's later
in my story. But I was asked, why do you
even bother unpacking if you're going to move every agent?
And my response was everyone's humbry. So way back then,
you said that, I said that. No, I said that
when I was in London, okay, And I was asked,
(08:56):
why did I flip those houses? That's later in my story,
that after my uncle had visited. But to me, the
importance of nesting and my role in that, like if
I wasn't going to be working outside of them all,
I sure as head was going to do a good
job Insidada, so it would. And you know, my mom
sat me down once because I got very nervous about
(09:18):
having people in my home when our coffee table were boxes,
I know, and she said, oh, Ruth. She said hosting
and entertaining isn't about performance or perfection. It's about loving people.
And she said people can walk into your home and
know when it's more about the host than it is about. Yeah. Yeah,
(09:40):
that to me came kind of a mantra. It didn't
matter how, you know, whether we had shares for people,
we would make a pick on the floor. But I
determined at that point that nothing would stop me from
coming and open. That's kind of where my back around
(10:00):
Yenda Street, right. I mean there were years that we
had guests more in our home than we didn't when
you were growing up. A no, when Bob and I
were married, When we were first married, I mean we
had people with us probably two hundred days a year.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
So you were continuing what your family did because why
because that was you felt called to do that.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
It was so formative in who I was and became,
and the opportunity we have to love people through our
It was just part of us, you know, Ruth. That's
what she said, And I was repeating it to an
older cousin of mine, Joe, and he was a little
(10:50):
bit older than me, and my sister had said, why
does everyone come to your house? And I had made
a joke and I said, well, it's because I cook. Well,
all right, story to Joe. He and I were in
the car and he started crying and he said, it's
not why we all come here hm hmm of your
house because we know we love Oh my god, I
have no idea that my heart could be seen like that.
(11:15):
And I also the imprudence for my kids to give
to people and to learn disturb people within our home,
you know. And I didn't go over this yet, but
an older couple when we first got married, he had
been mentoring my husband and he took up and he
and his wife took us to dinner, and they said,
(11:37):
we have a couple of things we'd like to give
you some advice on this walking in bed and he said,
you need to have a mission statement as a couple
and as a think through and write down who do
you want to feed, what values do you want to reinstill?
(11:57):
Big picture, high level though that everything you begin to
do has to funnel through that, and the minute you
get off course, you just recorrect. But if you don't
do it, there's no guardrails. You just happen to you know.
That's what I say to people, you know, my heart
(12:20):
in that book is how to create an intentional family culture,
because you will have a family culture. I've had friends,
well I don't have one. Yes, you do to do
and sometimes you've lost a lot of opportunity in time
because it wasn't intentional and focus. And that doesn't mean
it can't be redeemed or you know, and it doesn't
(12:42):
mean it wasn't wonderful. It's just when you're thinking through
For me, thinking through the legacy and heritage that I had,
I knew what I wanted to curate in my own think,
and I knew that I've been the beneficiary of generations
of praying for me. And you know, when the Lord
(13:07):
tells the Israelites to remember and to tell stories that
in our family. My grandfather died in his early nineties,
he had over sixty five people underneath. I'm instilled and
grandchildren and the stories in through all of us have
been retold in God's.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
There's so many things running through my head right now.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
She doesn't really know where to go with me right.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Well, I want to go back to you know, you
growing up with people in and out of your house
all the time, and a lot of them very famous
in Christianity. And I want to say, as now, you're
the first child, so you're probably very obedient and probably
a pleaser and all those things, and probably already the
little hostess helping your mom and five kids and all
(13:59):
these people. But were you ever resentful that you couldn't
just have your family?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
So, Bob and I were far more. We entertained far
more than my parents did. But when we lived with
my grandparents, and you know, my mother would bring strangers
home all the time. I there were times I did
there was a girl that would call my mom mom.
I really struggled with that. So, yes, there were things.
(14:30):
And I'll tell you what I wouldn't change the way
they did it and the value they placed on people. Brandon.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
So when you said a few minutes ago all of
those people missionaries, ministers in and out of your home,
you didn't realize until later. Yes, informative it was to you. Yes,
all of those people, along with your own parents and grandparents,
were so formative, and you know, it just kind of
(15:01):
wasn't a question that you would be a Christian? Correct, right,
But again it's just kind of like the girl who
came in and called your mother mom? Right, did you
ever resent or did you ever say, hey, this isn't
for me, I want to take a different path.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
No, No, that isn't to say there were a couple
of major things that happened, that there was a great
deal of growth that have hatten because of those things. Well,
let me go back.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
I just want to ask those questions again. It's just
unusual to me. It's unusual to hear of a family,
you know, where your predominant influence growing up are the
friends of your parents and your grandparents, and they are
all in Christian ministry, and a lot of them are
(15:56):
pretty famous, and they stay in your house. They don't
just come for dinner. They take a sabbatical. A missionary
takes a sabbatical at your house. I just I mean,
you're such a smart woman and you I watch you
take in everything around you. I can just see like
this little eight year old girl, you know, on the
other side of Corey tin Boom, going wait what yeah,
(16:17):
you know you did what you know? And how that
had to imprint?
Speaker 3 (16:24):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
It's interesting. When I was I had gotten into law
school and I was sitting on my bed one evening
and there have been a number of books that have
been written about my grandparents or extended family, and they've
written books, and I had all these things on my
bed and I was reading through my grandfather's memoir stuff
and I just was weaking and I called him Grandpak
(16:49):
and he asked your forgiveness. I feel like I'm letting
her heritage here. And he said, oh, sleep, if you
are doing what I do that in China, any of
those places, you need to do it in the courtroom,
you're doing exactly what I did your battlefront. And he
(17:09):
set me free from the deep desire to live into
my herog You know, like to see that. I but
it isn't It isn't always easy. You know, I have
different cousins who have The Lord has had to be
(17:30):
very clear saying you're no grandchildren and you have to
make this decisions. I made that decision early on my problem.
I always knew our family went through a lot of
new target and I knew the Lord loved me and
(17:51):
knew the Bible right, I knew it's what he said,
but understanding it here was a very different.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
So for me, head knowledge, it's so important to actually
experience what God pass for you, and the head knowledge
someone get you.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
SI.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
So there was a year, I mean, my parents were
involved in a very very lanky, several year lawsuit where
they had lost everything. My mom's answer and fifty two surgeries,
no health insurance, my brother need a heart transplant. There
was just a lot.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
I mean, Ruth, hang on a minute, I know a lot,
all right, Just can you just break that down a
little bit. Nobody could take all that in at once.
Your parents were in a lawsuit. They had lost everything everything.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
You were living with my aunt and uncle. I was
driving groceries from Richmond down to Virginia.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Each your mom had cancer.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Mom developed cancer, but they had lost their insurance, so
she had no.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Fifty two surgeries.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
And in that time, my brother got party in my
apathy need art.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
And there's no insurance for anybody.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
My brother was separate, he had gotten married, but my
mom was indifferent, and I had to grapple with I
know that you're a big guy, or I know that
you what I know you love this family, and yet
I don't see the arts.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Next week, in part two with Ruth, she opens up
about her family's hardest seasons, loss, illness, and the faith
that carried her through. You won't want to miss it.
Hi, Welcome back. I'm Teresa Bruno, the host of the
Soul Talks podcast, and I am just so delighted to
be here this afternoon with my friend, fairly new friend,
but growing to be a deep and trusted friend, Ruth McCarney.
You know, Ruth's words just wrap around you, like honey,
(00:32):
like home. Ruth has written a book, Hungry for Home.
It's a gorgeous memoir and it talks about what I
think we all long for, and that's belonging. It's comfort,
it's healing, it's a place to go to when you know,
life knocks our socks off. And she has this glorious,
wonderful television show of the same name, Hungry for Home,
(00:55):
and she explores traditions and food, which if I were
around her all the time, be really you know, having
a problem and family. I think the thing about Ruth
that I'm growing to love more and more and more
is that everything she says, everything she does, everything she writes,
just comes from her place of lived experience. It's nothing
(01:16):
that she sought to learn or went to school for,
or pretends to be. It comes from her places of
grief so beautifully of her places in love and marriage
and motherhood just runs through her veins. So I'm just
delighted to sit this afternoon and have some time with
(01:37):
my friend Ruth.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I am just so happy to have you. Yeah, it's
a long time coming. We tried I.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Tried this a couple of times, so this is going
to be a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Well, then we'll have a lot more times in the future, right,
So I just wanted to start with, you know, this memoir,
this book of yours. It's astounding, and it's so beautiful,
and you know it's it's pictorial, and it just guides
you through something you feel like you've missed your whole life.
And I just wondered, you know, I know a little
(02:13):
of your life, but you had lived a good life,
and you had five kids, and you'd redone a million homes,
and you had this amazing farm, and why did you
decide to write Hungry for Home?
Speaker 2 (02:25):
It is a long story, like has a way of
forcing you to pivot at different times. And I went
from being, you know, as you know, a trial lawyer.
I was a criminal prosecutor, and then at the turn
in General's office and my husband and I lived at
a Philadelphia area, and it was at that point out
(02:47):
of necessity that would be end of foot host. So
for women, I can speak for women, I think particularly
if you've been in the workforce and then you're staying
home with your children, your identity can take ahead at
different times. Yeah, and you don't even realize it's come right.
You don't realize that your identity has become something, whether
(03:10):
that's your job, your position, career. So I had one
of those moments when I left practicing and began to
stay who meet the kids, and realized, you know, here
here I was at that point in time. I've always
wanted to be a mom. I've always said I'll be
a stay at home. I had absolutely no idea what
I was wanting. Fast forward, you know, and I can
(03:33):
go into this story at another time. But we've flatastas
for sixteen years, moved every eighteen months, and during that
time I had four girls in five years, and then
my job three years later. So we landed on this
farm outside of Philadelphia, which is three unridden seven years old,
and William penn needd it initially and with a there's
(03:54):
a couple of guests. My mother had died, soho I
wanted a place for my Polly, but that second transition
time was coming where and I didn't even anticipate it
until my oldest daughter, and all of a sudden I
felt I trapped it to my husband at one point,
I said, it's like the taton mean a shitch underneath
(04:16):
where I knew that something was coming. Things were change
and cheeseings worship. And if you had asked me, are
your kids your identity or your purpose? I would have
said absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
You would have said absolutely not, absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Do I love them, do I appreciate them? But my
life is bigger than that. I had absolutely no idea
until the oldest was leaving. My purpose was watching me?
Oh I didn't yeah, because I didn't know. And this
began to dawn on me. Right, you're going to have
more time when your kids are gone than you did
even when they were. And who am I going to become?
(04:59):
Do I want to go back to being a trial lawyer? Now?
Am I getting tired of the flipping and the working office?
But who does that mean? And what's what's purposeful in
my life is these kids cook. So that's when the
pre growsing pains of the books are.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah, So take me back, take me back to you
as a girl, take me back to a little bit
of the story of your family. And I'm going there
because two reasons I left out in your introduction that
of all your lived experiences, one of one of the
(05:43):
other huge pillars in your life is your spiritual life.
And so I want to explore a little bit what
that looked like when you were little. You know what
your influences were spiritually.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
And I think that you know that's formative for me,
so I can appreciate you going back to that. We
grew up all over the country. I lived from California, Pennsylvania, Denver, Tulsta,
Virginia now Pennsylvania, and multiple places in each of those
those places. My father had grown up all over the world.
(06:17):
His father had been evangelis, His father, my great uncle,
Billy Graham, and a couple of others had been in
a Bible study for years together. And out of those
five men were birthed a number of big, big ministries.
So having evangelist missionaries pastoral families through our home growing
(06:42):
up was just part of day to day living. Corey
Timboom and my grandmother were best friends. So we've had
people always from all sorts of countries coming through ours
that I remember thinking, while we are so wonderful that
these people we keep them whole place, just say, you know,
(07:04):
when they're having their sabbatical. I had no understanding until
later how formative they were to us. Sure that kind
of and couple that with we probably by the time
I got married got married at thirty, I think we
had moved as a family twenty.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
I placed did not represent homes, but what my parents
created as a family. I was the oldest of six
was the bedrocks for me and my mom's have if
you are homeless. She got even both. I mean, she
just had everyone through our home.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
So going growing up in that and then being on
my own, that was a culture that I wanted to really, so.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
That that comes in after. And I'll tell you when
I lived in Richmond and I was an assistant train
general all the time, my friends would grow a lot
of events and you got formal invitations to them. So
I began to get very hesitant when I moved to
Philadelphia Energy because right we lived in sixteen years, lived
(08:21):
every eighteen months, so we were living out a box.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Craziness, like that's chaos. I don't know how you did that.
I don't know how I did it. I think, I mean,
it is so important to me to nest place.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
So that's where the name came up, and that's later
in my story. But I was asked, why do you
even bother unpacking if you're going to move every agent?
And my response was everyone's humbry. So way back then,
you said that, I said that. No, I said that
when I was in London, okay, And I was asked,
(08:56):
why did I flip those houses? That's later in my story,
that after my uncle had visited. But to me, the
importance of nesting and my role in that, like if
I wasn't going to be working outside of them all,
I sure as head was going to do a good
job Insidada, so it would. And you know, my mom
sat me down once because I got very nervous about
(09:18):
having people in my home when our coffee table were boxes,
I know, and she said, oh, Ruth. She said hosting
and entertaining isn't about performance or perfection. It's about loving people.
And she said people can walk into your home and
know when it's more about the host than it is about. Yeah. Yeah,
(09:40):
that to me came kind of a mantra. It didn't
matter how, you know, whether we had shares for people,
we would make a pick on the floor. But I
determined at that point that nothing would stop me from
coming and open. That's kind of where my back around
(10:00):
Yenda Street, right. I mean there were years that we
had guests more in our home than we didn't when
you were growing up. A no, when Bob and I
were married, When we were first married, I mean we
had people with us probably two hundred days a year.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
So you were continuing what your family did because why
because that was you felt called to do that.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
It was so formative in who I was and became,
and the opportunity we have to love people through our
It was just part of us, you know, Ruth. That's
what she said, And I was repeating it to an
older cousin of mine, Joe, and he was a little
(10:50):
bit older than me, and my sister had said, why
does everyone come to your house? And I had made
a joke and I said, well, it's because I cook. Well,
all right, story to Joe. He and I were in
the car and he started crying and he said, it's
not why we all come here hm hmm of your
house because we know we love Oh my god, I
have no idea that my heart could be seen like that.
(11:15):
And I also the imprudence for my kids to give
to people and to learn disturb people within our home,
you know. And I didn't go over this yet, but
an older couple when we first got married, he had
been mentoring my husband and he took up and he
and his wife took us to dinner, and they said,
(11:37):
we have a couple of things we'd like to give
you some advice on this walking in bed and he said,
you need to have a mission statement as a couple
and as a think through and write down who do
you want to feed, what values do you want to reinstill?
(11:57):
Big picture, high level though that everything you begin to
do has to funnel through that, and the minute you
get off course, you just recorrect. But if you don't
do it, there's no guardrails. You just happen to you know.
That's what I say to people, you know, my heart
(12:20):
in that book is how to create an intentional family culture,
because you will have a family culture. I've had friends,
well I don't have one. Yes, you do to do
and sometimes you've lost a lot of opportunity in time
because it wasn't intentional and focus. And that doesn't mean
it can't be redeemed or you know, and it doesn't
(12:42):
mean it wasn't wonderful. It's just when you're thinking through
For me, thinking through the legacy and heritage that I had,
I knew what I wanted to curate in my own think,
and I knew that I've been the beneficiary of generations
of praying for me. And you know, when the Lord
(13:07):
tells the Israelites to remember and to tell stories that
in our family. My grandfather died in his early nineties,
he had over sixty five people underneath. I'm instilled and
grandchildren and the stories in through all of us have
been retold in God's.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
There's so many things running through my head right now.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
She doesn't really know where to go with me right.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Well, I want to go back to you know, you
growing up with people in and out of your house
all the time, and a lot of them very famous
in Christianity. And I want to say, as now, you're
the first child, so you're probably very obedient and probably
a pleaser and all those things, and probably already the
little hostess helping your mom and five kids and all
(13:59):
these people. But were you ever resentful that you couldn't
just have your family?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
So, Bob and I were far more. We entertained far
more than my parents did. But when we lived with
my grandparents, and you know, my mother would bring strangers
home all the time. I there were times I did
there was a girl that would call my mom mom.
I really struggled with that. So, yes, there were things.
(14:30):
And I'll tell you what I wouldn't change the way
they did it and the value they placed on people. Brandon.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
So when you said a few minutes ago all of
those people missionaries, ministers in and out of your home,
you didn't realize until later. Yes, informative it was to you. Yes,
all of those people, along with your own parents and grandparents,
were so formative, and you know, it just kind of
(15:01):
wasn't a question that you would be a Christian? Correct, right,
But again it's just kind of like the girl who
came in and called your mother mom? Right, did you
ever resent or did you ever say, hey, this isn't
for me, I want to take a different path.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
No, No, that isn't to say there were a couple
of major things that happened, that there was a great
deal of growth that have hatten because of those things. Well,
let me go back.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
I just want to ask those questions again. It's just
unusual to me. It's unusual to hear of a family,
you know, where your predominant influence growing up are the
friends of your parents and your grandparents, and they are
all in Christian ministry, and a lot of them are
(15:56):
pretty famous, and they stay in your house. They don't
just come for dinner. They take a sabbatical. A missionary
takes a sabbatical at your house. I just I mean,
you're such a smart woman and you I watch you
take in everything around you. I can just see like
this little eight year old girl, you know, on the
other side of Corey tin Boom, going wait what yeah,
(16:17):
you know you did what you know? And how that
had to imprint?
Speaker 3 (16:24):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
It's interesting. When I was I had gotten into law
school and I was sitting on my bed one evening
and there have been a number of books that have
been written about my grandparents or extended family, and they've
written books, and I had all these things on my
bed and I was reading through my grandfather's memoir stuff
and I just was weaking and I called him Grandpak
(16:49):
and he asked your forgiveness. I feel like I'm letting
her heritage here. And he said, oh, sleep, if you
are doing what I do that in China, any of
those places, you need to do it in the courtroom,
you're doing exactly what I did your battlefront. And he
(17:09):
set me free from the deep desire to live into
my herog You know, like to see that. I but
it isn't It isn't always easy. You know, I have
different cousins who have The Lord has had to be
(17:30):
very clear saying you're no grandchildren and you have to
make this decisions. I made that decision early on my problem.
I always knew our family went through a lot of
new target and I knew the Lord loved me and
(17:51):
knew the Bible right, I knew it's what he said,
but understanding it here was a very different.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
So for me, head knowledge, it's so important to actually
experience what God pass for you, and the head knowledge
someone get you.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
SI.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
So there was a year, I mean, my parents were
involved in a very very lanky, several year lawsuit where
they had lost everything. My mom's answer and fifty two surgeries,
no health insurance, my brother need a heart transplant. There
was just a lot.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
I mean, Ruth, hang on a minute, I know a lot,
all right, Just can you just break that down a
little bit. Nobody could take all that in at once.
Your parents were in a lawsuit. They had lost everything everything.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
You were living with my aunt and uncle. I was
driving groceries from Richmond down to Virginia.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Each your mom had cancer.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Mom developed cancer, but they had lost their insurance, so
she had no.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Fifty two surgeries.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
And in that time, my brother got party in my
apathy need art.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
And there's no insurance for anybody.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
My brother was separate, he had gotten married, but my
mom was indifferent, and I had to grapple with I
know that you're a big guy, or I know that
you what I know you love this family, and yet
I don't see the arts.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Next week, in part two with Ruth, she opens up
about her family's hardest seasons, loss, illness, and the faith
that carried her through. You won't want to miss it.
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.