Big dreams need to be built on solid foundations. In this episode Gina has a conversation with Ruth Ruckle, co-founder of Abide Worship in San Diego with her husband Orion, and the host of the Truth with Ruth podcast.
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Building The Foundation Of Identity
Gina:
I have a special guest, Ruth Ruckle. Ruth and Orion Ruckle are from San Diego, California. They launched Abide, which is a worship movement that has gone like gangbusters in San Diego. Ruth also launched her podcast “Truth with Ruth”.
I am really excited to sit down with her and hear her story, the journey that she’s been on personally. She’s a bold woman, who God uses in really powerful ways. She is a blast to hang out with and both her and her husband took some big steps and big risks to see God’s kingdom come and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. I hope you enjoy her story.
Ruth:
I’m so happy that you invited someone who’s not as peaceful in their speech into your sacred space. I appreciate that. Gina is really good at creating sacred space. I know she comes into my house and leads worship, and it’s a experience, her and Justin and their crew.
Gina:
It’s an honor and privilege to be able to be a part of what God’s doing in and through you guys. Ruth, I love you and your husband Orion and the things that you are saying yes to, and your willingness to go on this crazy ride with Jesus. I would love for you to share some of your story. First of all you launched a podcast Truth with Ruth.
Ruth:
It’s one of those things that I unwillingly said yes to, because my husband bought me all the equipment and said, “You’re going to do this.” I’m like, “I don’t know if I am, but now I am.”
Gina:
But now you are. Here we are. But that’s the newest thing. You and your husband have a ministry called Abide and we’ll get a little bit more into that. It’s a worship movement in San Diego that has taken off.
It doesn’t just encompass worship, you have the Abide Family Dinners, you did a women’s event that was phenomenally successful. You’re being the church in the community, in your home and doing your best to lean in fully to who God made you to be. That is pretty powerful.
Gina:
I’ve been actually listening to Truth with Ruth. It was fun to listen to your podcast and get a little bit more of your story. I would love for you to share a little bit about your story. You shared some pretty powerful things about your upbringing, who you are, if you’re into the enneagram at all. You’re an eight.
Ruth:
Yes. I am a challenger!
Gina:
A challenger, and a truth teller! You shared on your podcast how that started manifesting when you were a kid and that journey and the pain with that, and then the healing that came through that. Would you share a little bit of that? Because that’s important, and it’s good for people to hear other people’s stories.
Ruth:
Growing up, I am one of six kids. I am the youngest girl of five girls and then my brother is the baby boy. I’m also a bookend to the baby in the family. I’m a middle child too, and that plays a little bit into that as well.
Gina:
Wow! That’s a mix.
Ruth:
If you believe in birth order, it matters. My mother would get me little trinkets and little stuff and say, “You’re one of a kind, and you’re unique.” But then on the other hand, because we only know what we know, and parenting is a lot different now than it used to be, she would say, “Why can’t you fall in line? Why can’t you be like your brothers and sisters? Why can’t you do that?”
So growing up with mixed messages led me to ask, “Am I one of a kind? Or do you need me to be like everybody else?” There’s that dynamic and then that leads into choices. We like to label what we don’t understand. I don’t understand your uniqueness and I don’t understand your need to figure out who you are, which I believe that’s what a lot of kids are going through.
So we say, they’re rebellious. They are all these things. The choices I was making were not obviously great, but I had no identity, and I did not know who I was because of mixed messages, which are nobody’s fault. I made choices that I wasn’t doing out of rebellion, but I was actually trying to figure out what group I fit in.
In junior high, I did start going to church. I was in a new environment where I had to learn how to adapt. And there’s a loyalty aspect to me. If I trust you and you’ve won my heart, I’m in. Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do no questions asked. There was a part of me that desired that community and that connection.
In the youth group, I went all in. I threw my tapes away, and I didn’t listen to secular music, and made all the vows, until I’m like, “That boy’s really cute, and now I want to make out, but that’s wrong.” But then what do you do? But I didn’t have identity to begin with. I was doing all of these things because it was what I was told to do. At church they would tell me, “You’re going to get beat up because you say this” and “Your mouth is going to get you in trouble” and all of these things.
Finally I said, “I’m done. They don’t really like me that much. I’m going to go hang out with these people because they look like they’re having way more fun, and I want to have fun, and I want to fit in. You fast forward and you find out that I didn’t even fit in with them. I became very abrasive.
I used my voice to do was to put a wall between me and every single person that could have access to my heart, because when I would give access to my heart, I felt like it would get trampled. I don’t think it was a conscious thing. I think subconsciously as a teenager and a young adult, you start doing those things but then you grow up and you enter into marriage.
I gave my life back to Jesus and I got filled with the Holy Spirit and I had these encounters, but I didn’t deal with my hurt. So then I am married now and then enter kids and all my junk starts coming up and the walls I had built. I didn’t marry someone who understood me either.
Gina:
It’s all self protection. You learn how to keep yourself safe. Those are the things we construct, those walls, those barriers. It’s like, “Okay, I’m not going to do that again and get hurt, so I’m going to put this wall up and now I’m safe. Now I can have relationship that I can limit so that I don’t get hurt. I’m not vulnerable. I’m not in that fragile state.” And then, we carry those into our marital relationship.
Ruth:
I learned a few things. I learned that healing is great and you don’t know what you don’t know until you know it. Ryan and I got married when I was 22 had I my first kid at 23. I was young and we got all this stuff going on. And we’ve been in a church for 11 years.
Within that particular church it was a great space for me to play around with the gifts of the Spirit. It was a very religious Spirit filled church, if that makes any sense to you. Everything was very negative. It fed me because I was a super negative person at the time.
Gina:
Judging everybody.
The Foundation of Love
Ruth:
That’s who I was, and I didn’t know that there was anything different. But I was also very Spirit filled. I was very prophetic at the time. It helped me hone in to hearing the voice of God, and gave me the space to do all of that. But even in that space, there were people that told me I couldn’t worship the way I was worshiping, that it was distraction and I can’t do this.
There was always something following me in every situation I was ever in, whether it was in marriage, in church atmospheres, in friend groups until in 2010 we switched churches. The same year I went to a conference, my first prophetic conference at Bethel, and it is the first time I had heard Bill Johnson preach.
And I’m like, who is this man? It’s like Gina’s voice is so soothing. His voice was the same way. It was like, honey. And I’m going, “Oh my, he has something I don’t have.” And God says, “He loves people and you don’t.” Oh snap.
Gina:
And you know what? I want to stop you for a second, because it’s so easy for us to get in our place of safety in a community that we feel comfortable in, and then point our fingers and judge everybody else who’s not where we think they should be. Or we judge ourselves.
What I love is that God is a patient pursuer and He loved you. Those people who are saying stupid things, He’s their God, and He’s your God. And He is a patient loving pursuer. He knew that there was going to come that moment when you were ready to hear that statement.
You weren’t ready until then. We’re are finicky humans, and we having our little hill to stand on and to be able to go, “You’re wrong.” but God loves his people. His bride is messy, and is a perfectly imperfect bride. He is a patient pursuer, and He loves them. They’re all on a journey. You are on a journey.
And Jesus, in His understanding of how he made you, knew that you weren’t ready to hear that statement until that moment. Sitting at Bethel with Bill Johnson’s, very fatherly, loving, and yet very, authoritative voice, to say, “You’re not very loving.” And then in that place, you could receive that conviction because at that point it’s not condemnation. It’s not an accusation from the enemy. It’s an invitation.
Ruth:
And that’s what I did. I said, “Okay, God teach me how to love. I want what he has.” So in 2011, that was the year I ended up in direct sales. I’m not an super big extrovert. I know my life seems very extroverted. God is good and he can create you into what he wants you to be if you’re moldable.
Don’t ever pigeonhole yourself based off of your engram or your Myers – Briggs personality tests. Those are great tools to help guide you and navigate you in your strengths your identity. Understanding that I am introverted, helped me understand why I need to pull away from people.
Versus my husband who is extroverted and loves their energy. So in 2011, I’m thinking, “Direct sales? First of all, I don’t want to sell anything. And second of all, I don’t want to do this.” And Holy Spirit goes, “Are you going to put me in a box? Didn’t you ask me to teach you how to love?” And I said, “I sure did.”
Delivered to Love
I went on a four year journey with that and honest to God, those four years between the church we were in and between direct sales, I got deliverance for the first time. Like you believe in something that you’ve never experienced. I believed that deliverance was a real thing. Getting rid of your junk, but I’ve never experienced anything like it.
To be in this environment where like things are happening and you now are questioning what you actually believe in. At the same time I was sitting there hating my husband because he had agitated that thing that was inside of me, hating the church we were in because they had rejected us on some level, even though we weren’t leaving, we loved them.
But it was me, I personally was experiencing this. Then all of a sudden, Mike Connell says, “Hey, I want to pray for people who have bitterness and unforgiveness in them.” And it was interesting because prior to this conference we had these friends that had this radical experience with God.
He got massively delivered from a bunch of things and they wanted to have dinner with us and sit down. They made us this beautiful meal and got together with us and then looked at me, handed me this letter that told me all these horrible things that I was doing and how I needed deliverance and how it could really set me free.
That experience happened and it crushed me. In their mind, they were like, “I want to see this person set free.” Because when we get free, we tend to be able to see the areas of unfree on other people. Because now our eyes are clear. You get that so they could see what was on me, but with no wisdom.
Truth without wisdom is abuse at times, or it can be very damaging, and it was for me in that moment. It fed that thing inside of me that was already there and growing. I didn’t talk to them for probably 10 years. Not because I hated them, but because I didn’t even understand how people could do that to me. I thought they were my friends and they tricked me.
Then we went into this deliverance conference and I had already made up my mind that I wasn’t going up for prayer because I saw what was happening when people went up for prayer. And I’m like nope that ain’t me. I was in the very back of the whole place. When Mike Connell said that, I had my eyes closed and I could see where the seed had been, how far back that seed had been planted in me.
I could see every word, every interaction, everything that had ever watered it. And it was almost like I was going to vomit if I didn’t go up and get prayer because it was growing out of me. I looked at Orion and I said, “I gotta go.” I walked to the front and I stood there. Someone started praying for me. I couldn’t tell you to this day what the words were.
I was sobbing from a depth inside of me that I’d never experienced, for about 20 minutes until she picks me up, hands me to my husband and says “Here, you should take your wife now.” I don’t think he knew what to do with me either. You have to recover from that because that was your best friend for a long time, and it’s like a breakup you had. And what do I do now? I sat there and I like to tell people, it was like I had LASIK eye surgery. I went in and I saw life one way, and then I left and I saw completely different.
It was about a year process walking through this. Nobody helps you navigate freedom. What had happened to me is I got set free from bitterness and unforgiveness. I have been building a direct sales team completely around the core of it was unforgiveness and bitterness, because that was the core of what was inside of me.
When I realized it, it was an opportunity for me to go to all of these groups of people in my life and start saying, “Hey, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.” And a lot of people would be like, “It’s all good, Ruth. That’s who you are.” I was like, “No, that’s who I was. I don’t want to be that person anymore.” I made an effort to change the way that I dealt with people, the way that I saw people.
What I noticed in that season was there were people who stuck and stayed, and journeyed with me. Then there were the ones that were very accusatory and no matter how many times I apologized or how my actions had changed or what I was doing different, it was like, “You’re this and you’re that.”
I would sit there and I would go, what is wrong with me? What am I doing wrong? I don’t understand. And Holy Spirit said, “Ruth, your connection was your dysfunction.” I recognized they’re still in their dysfunction, and it’s not my job to be their Holy Spirit. That was a process. I feel like people need to know that freedom is a process. Getting set free is a big deal and there’s so much grace for that process.
Gina:
Totally. I appreciate you sharing your story and sharing your process. And one of the key things in that revelation, that once you get set free from something, those relationships that were based on that negativity or that unforgiveness or that bitterness or that offense or whatever, they can’t be the same.
Part of what is challenging for you on your side is to not become arrogant and condescending and judging. How do you still love those people, but then also have the boundaries and be okay with letting go of relationships that maybe are going to go away or allowing some relationships to change.
There is a transformation that has to happen, where this is no longer somebody in my core, this is maybe somebody that I love, or I see around, or maybe we’re even involved in ministry together, but we’re no longer partnered in that same way. And that takes some maturity and it takes a dependence on Jesus, on the Holy Spirit.
Going All-In
Ruth:
I dealt with bitterness and unforgiveness in that deliverance session, but I didn’t deal with the other things that would now spring up as a result of the room being made inside of me for those other things to come up. One of my biggest things was rejection. You think about it your whole life. You’re told you’re one of a kind and you’re authentic, but be like everybody else.
I want to release this: It is okay if you don’t fit in. It’s not okay to be isolated and it’s not okay to say nobody understands me because those are lies. But it is a thousand percent okay if you are not called to fit into a mold because it takes all kinds of people to be fitly joined together. We are fitly joined together. We are not called to fit in together.
What came up for me was the mass amount of rejection that I now felt every time, and God would take them out of my life. I got it. But I never dealt with my little girl. The little girl that sat wounded every time, because I wasn’t invited to be in this friend group over here or this person chose my sister over me or, my parents liked these siblings and I would get blamed for something I did not do. So my little girl was always rejected.
Until I had an awareness of that and I said, “I can’t keep repeating this cycle.” We knew God wanted to fill our house with people, and in the season that we were in, we were in a church where our connect group was like 50 plus people. We were crammed in our little 1100 square foot house and we were doing a lot of stuff.
We thought, “God, imagine what you could do with more space.” He gave us this audacious vision where we would have people walking into our house and we would say, “Hey, write the verse down that God gave you for us in this season.” All of our walls were filled with Bible verses and declarations and scripture verses about what God was going to do for us.
If you go in my living room now and you look at the three panels hanging in there, my girlfriend transcribed all the Bible verses put them on panel. It’s a reminder of how much God loved us in that particular season to give us that vision.
Even though we thought it was for one thing, it ended up being for a completely different thing. In 2015, we started building our house. God said, “What do you want from me? And I said, “I want to raise the dead and I want to heal the sick. I want all of you, no matter what the cost.”
Gina:
Wait, hold on a second. I listened to Truth with Ruth. When you said that to God, “I want to raise the dead. I want to heal the sick. I want to, I want to go all in with you.” What did He say to you?
Ruth:
He said, “Then you’re going to have to say ‘No’ to some other things ‘Yes’ to me. And I said, “Okay, I can do that.” That’s why that’s why I stepped out of direct sales, because it’s pretty much an all or nothing thing. I’m not a half in girl. I’m an all in or nothing girl.
Building with God
Gina:
So you do have a ministry now called Abide, which has become way more than you or Ryan ever considered. It is a worship movement in San Diego. And you’re going to talk a little bit in a second about your house and what you did. 150 to 200 people gather here once every six weeks, andJustin and I have led worship here.
You have different worship teams from all over San Diego and different places come in and lead. And then that has evolved into Abide family dinners and into the women’s event. Then beyond that, there’s an Abide where?
Ruth:
Omaha, Birmingham, Sacramento, is starting family dinners in April, and then also in Rhode Island, they’re starting with family dinners in April as well.
Gina:
Crazy. So let’s go back. You breezed over it, but at the time 2015, you were at a church, you had a community group that was huge. Your husband’s in construction. There’s some capacity there.
And who God made you to be and the capacity He gave you to dream and have this vision of, “Hey, we could have more people at our house and we could see God do more things here.” You had a presumption of what that was for and what it was going to look like. why don’t you pick up the story there?
Ruth:
Even prior to that, I had a vision probably a couple years before we tore our old house down. I was sitting on top of a mountain because I like hiking and I was looking out over San Diego and all of a sudden I see little popcorn, pop, pop, pop, all over houses. And it’s like little kernels popping and God’s like, “That’s what I’m going to do all over this city.”
And I was like, “Oh sweet, the church I’m at is going to have connect groups everywhere.” I literally could only think inside of where I was at. I shared it with a few people in the church I was in and they were excited. Nobody is teaching me to think ahead, I’m teaching myself.
I’m going to conferences. I’m doing my own thing. That’s the process to the house build. God can’t expand my tent pegs, if I don’t actually deal with my tent pegs, which is myself. He understands that the second my physical tent pegs expand, if my spiritual tent peg, being my body, does not have the capacity to move outward with my physical one, then what’s going to happen is my house is going to implode.
His desire for us is not to implode, it’s to expand. I got that vision a couple years before, and then we started tearing our house down in 2015. In that season we had a mother and her two girls living with us. We did not move out of the house and we tore the entire house down except for three bedrooms and two bathrooms.
We have this little section of house we’re living in and we built the house over our house until we had to knock the inside down so we would have sort of a shelter. We had bed bugs in that season, my entire house was infested with bed bugs. Didn’t know it until I took my bed apart, and it was awful.
I had eight people living in three bedrooms because we felt like we were supposed to help this person. I was cooking in a back room or in my front yard. People never stopped coming over. A young man befriended our family, and we took him in as a surrogate son, and he was here every night till two in the morning. I’m not getting any sleep, I’m building a house.
My capacity for anything other than what I was in the middle of was limited. All the ministry I had been in, in our current church, I had sort of taken myself out of because I can’t do everything. I could only do what was in front of me. In that season, I said, “I can’t have anyone who sucks me dry. Any negativity has to be out of my life because I have to keep my mindset so positive in this dirt hole that I’m living in.”
We had chickens, three dogs that would bark. You name it guys, it was going on. People were planning their weddings at our house post build. We had deadlines. We started in January, and in September we were still laying flagstone in the backyard and planting the majority of the plants that were in our yard while my best friend was getting married.
And we were setting up her reception that day. In the middle of all this Orion ended up with a slipped disc in his back. He was in immense pain and taking painkillers. He couldn’t move. We had no insurance, and he had to get surgery.
I thought, “Well, because God told us to do this, it is going to be awesome.” But it was not easy. This is a good word for someone. Know your capacity, know what you can do and what you can’t do, and don’t apologize for it. Just stay true to the vision that God’s put in front of you.
Gina:
And all of that in total dependence on God. There’s no way to stand there without Him. It’s in those places that you have to know that this is what you’re supposed to be doing, and that God’s present with you even in the dirt with the bed bugs and the slipped disc.
Ruth:
It was ridiculous. Then imagine, okay, if you can keep imagining, like close your eyes and start imagining with me. We finished this build. We have this reception at our house for my friend. It was awesome. Imagine you finish building this house, and you think, “Oh my, the dream is alive. The house is built.”
And we’re trying to figure out this whole plan on how everything’s going to get managed. We took the loan, we did the whole house thing to get the house done, which is fine and all that, but nothing panned out the way it was supposed to. The appraisal for the house didn’t come back for what it should have.
I’m like “What the heck, Jesus.” And then to top it off, we were still in the current church we were in, and we would go, “Hey, we’re going to do a barbecue for this event.” We’d have 75 people show up our house would be full, all the time, for every event that we would throw. People would rotate through and go out and we’re living the vision. We’re doing everything that God showed us. We were going to be doing, until we weren’t…
Check out the rest of the conversation: Finding Your Authentic Sound of Worship & How to Bless a City
Want to learn more about Dreaming with God? Check out this similar conversation I had with Rheanna Downey.
Check out the Dwell Meditations
