May 19, 2024 • 27 mins
In this compelling episode of Bleeding Daylight, host Rodney Olsen welcomes Audrey Dutton, a blogger, online church leader, and podcast host, to share her journey from seeking spirituality in the occult to finding transformative truth in Jesus Christ. Audrey candidly recounts her upbringing surrounded by occult practices, her search for spiritual fulfillment through various alternative beliefs, and the tragedies that marked her life. Despite her initial scepticism and atheism, Audrey describes a powerful encounter with God that reshaped her understanding and led her on a path of healing and purpose.
Audrey's story is one of profound transformation, from darkness to light, as she navigates the complexities of her spiritual quest and ultimately finds solace and truth in Christ. Through her Eat Me, Drink Me podcast and online ministry, Audrey now seeks to encourage others to embrace their own encounters with God and find healing, restoration, and identity in Him. Join Rodney and Audrey as they delve into her remarkable journey and explore the hope and redemption found in the midst of life's darkest moments.
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(00:08):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome, I'm so very glad you're here.
Please connect with Bleeding Daylight on Facebook and Instagram.
Links and other episodes are at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:32):
Please share this and other episodes with others.
Searching for spirituality has taken many people down some very dark roads.
My guest today looked for truth in the occult and witchcraft, and her life was marked with tragedy.
Today, we'll explore her own journey to kick the darkness.
(01:03):
Audrey Dutton has long had an interest in spiritual things, but for many years she chased spirituality through witchcraft and the occult.
When it started to look like nothing would satisfy her search for greater meaning beyond this world, her life was dramatically changed.
Audrey is a blogger, helps lead an online church, and hosts the Eat Me, Drink Me podcast.
(01:25):
She's my guest today on Bleeding Daylight.
Audrey, thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you so much for having me, Rodney.
I want to explore your spiritual search, and I'm wondering when it was that you first started looking for some kind of meaning beyond this world.
Do you remember when you first began looking for answers in some kind of spirituality?
(01:45):
I grew up around it.
My mom was into the occult.
She often would watch witchcraft movies or get witchcraft books and try spells and things.
I grew up hearing her talking about her experiences with poltergeists and ghosts and UFOs and things like that.
I always craved to experience something like that for myself, but it just never did.
(02:08):
Anytime I was around someone else who was experiencing it, like one of my friends who tried to do a seance over me.
They did a satanic prayer, and they were feeling in the spirit this presence, but I couldn't feel anything.
I always just felt like something was missing.
(02:30):
I just kept on that journey, but then eventually I just gave up since I never actually experienced anything for myself.
I just became an atheist after a few years of that.
Where did the search take you as you're starting to look at different alternate spiritualities?
What were some of the things you tried along the way before you finally gave up?
(02:50):
I tried Wicca.
I tried a form of vampirism.
Not where you actually drink blood or anything, but it was more like energy vampire, but also having these spiritual experiences where you would be able to go into the spirit realm and commune with spirits and stuff.
(03:12):
I had some friends who believed they were reincarnated vampires.
I tried to figure that out because what they talked about, it seemed so real.
It sounded really wild and bizarre, but they seemed so genuine.
I wanted to try it, but it just never went anywhere for me.
(03:33):
I never tried Christianity.
I went to church a few times growing up, but I honestly just felt like Jesus was a made-up person just to make people feel better about themselves.
I never did any research into the history of Jesus.
I didn't ever try a specific religion or anything.
(03:54):
I just tried to have spiritual experiences.
I tried spells and things like that as well, and Ouija boards.
It just never went anywhere for me.
I felt like something was missing.
It wasn't the full truth.
That was a reoccurring thought I remember having.
This just doesn't seem like this is it.
There's this continual search, I guess not as much for spirituality, but as the experience of spirituality and nothing is happening, which convinced you eventually that there was nothing in the spirit world.
(04:26):
What did it make you think about those who were saying, yes, I'm experiencing something very real in this moment?
Did you think, well, are they just making it up?
What was your thought at that time?
For some of my friends, I did think that they were just making it up.
I felt like they were putting on a show.
But for my mom, I know that she had some legit encounters with spirits and ghosts and angels, so I really trusted her.
(04:53):
But the other stuff, I did write that off, basically.
Once you had decided, hey, there is no God out there, that you're an atheist, how did that express itself?
Did you just then turn completely away from anything spiritual?
Yeah, I just didn't even care about anything spiritual anymore.
(05:15):
I had just lost hope in it.
After my encounter with God, I don't believe that there really are atheists.
We try to believe that there's no God, but we're in denial, really.
I think it was just a matter of silencing any kind of desires that I had, any kind of longings that I had, and just felt like if there is a God, then he's not personal.
(05:36):
I just didn't care anymore, but I didn't think about God again for years.
I was into a lot of darker type of things.
Basically what I practiced was a form of modern-day Satanism.
They follow these tenets of how to be a good person, a good morally respectable person, and as long as you're not hurting anyone else, then you do you.
(05:58):
That's basically how I lived my life.
I was Gothic.
I wore a lot of black and had upside-down crosses everywhere, and the Baphomet picture of the goat and stuff like that.
That was my style.
That would be of interest to a lot of people, in that there's this form of Satanism that is saying, here we want you to be a good moral person, because there would be a lot of people assuming that Satanism is all about being someone who's into evil things, and yet we know, if we're following Jesus, we know that all the enemy has to do is to keep us from following the correct path.
(06:40):
That doesn't seem to be so out of character to the enemy to just draw us away and say, no, you can be a good person without God.
That's exactly what it was, and I did strive for that.
I wanted to look as weird and as freaky as possible, but I wanted to be one of the nicest people that anyone had ever met.
I don't know why.
(07:01):
As you continued to grow up, you got to your late teens, and I guess at that point you thought that things were going well.
Tell me how things started to tumble down as you were in your late teens.
A year out of high school, I joined basic training to join the Army, and right before that I married my best friend.
(07:25):
Two days after we were married, he went back to his job.
Then I got ready to go to basic training.
I went states away to my training, and I was there for five weeks.
Five weeks in, I get woken up at 1130 at night.
They asked me to come downstairs with them, my drill sergeants.
(07:46):
We go down in this room, and they proceed to tell me that my husband was dead and they didn't know what happened.
It took two days for them to process things, but they were saying that they would just honorably discharge me, and then I could rejoin later on if I wanted to.
After that, I went back home, and a lot of it was just a blur.
(08:11):
The trauma was very intense.
For a whole month, I did any drug I could get my hand on.
I got drunk any time I could get drunk.
Before that, even though I was into a lot of dark things, and I looked like the kind of person that loved to party and drink and do drugs, I did not, because I grew up in a household where my father was constantly in and out of jail, and then jail escalated into prison for drugs.
(08:40):
My mom would take me around to parties and things like that.
When I grew up, I wanted to be sober-minded, but that next month, I did anything I could get my hands on to try and coat the pain, to try and feel something.
I started going to metaphysical stores or shops, and even to some person's house to try and figure out a way to stay connected to my husband, even though he was dead.
(09:05):
Yeah, I got pretty wild there for a month, but then Jesus stepped in after that.
It's interesting, in times of difficulty, in those times of grief, you seem to just go back to what you knew, what had been demonstrated, and that is, when you need to mask pain, you use substance, because you had seen that within your family.
(09:27):
You went there, and again, in the same way that you had searched for spirituality, and that didn't satisfy, you were now covering the pain using substances, and again, that's not helping, which leads us to this point where you encountered Jesus.
Tell us how that happened.
Yeah, so I ended up having this encounter with God
(09:51):
where I was sitting under the stars, and I had gotten a phone call,
and it was really bad news, and I just lost it, and I broke,
and I just started complaining about everything going on in my life,
and why did my husband have to die, and why did I get put with all of this debt,
(10:12):
and all these other things that just made me feel like I wanted to die,
and then that escalated into, why has life been so hard for my mom,
why has life been so hard for my dad, why has it been hard for all of us,
why her mom, and so on, because I grew up with my mom telling me stories
(10:33):
of her family and the trauma and abuse that happened with them,
and I knew about my dad's upbringing.
I just started throwing all this stuff out there.
Then I found myself saying, you can't be real.
I hate you, and then I started cussing God out.
I'm like, F you, I don't have anything to do with you.
(10:54):
There was no logic in it.
It just was all emotion.
It was my heart just pouring out, and it escalated from me just thinking and complaining about everything, and it turned personal.
I heard God say, not audibly, but in my heart, in my spirit, I heard Him say, if I'm not real, then why do you curse me?
(11:16):
It was like this light bulb went off, and I realized that I just had been in denial.
I knew that God was real, but I blamed Him for all the evil in the world.
I blamed Him for all these things happening to me and other people.
When I heard that, it was more than just those words.
There was a power with it.
(11:37):
There was a revelation that came with it.
There was an experience.
I heard, if I'm not real, then why do you curse me?
But it also brought in this whole encounter where He was showing me my whole life flashing before my eyes, and these times where He had intervened in my life, and how He had been there for me throughout my life, and that it wasn't His will for these things to happen to me.
(12:01):
It wasn't Him doing these things to me, and that I had my hand up to Him.
I had built this wall to where I couldn't see Him for who He really was, and it just kind of came in like a flood.
That is what many people would call my born-again experience, where I was instantaneously changed.
The way I saw things were totally shifted, and I got delivered from a lot of addictions and mentalities and things like that, and I started to just hear Holy Spirit more frequently and seeing prayers answered.
(12:36):
You mentioned before how you tried for this spiritual experience in occult practices, and nothing ever happened for you.
Did you, at that moment, start to look back and see, well, actually, this was God shielding me from some of those things that could be harmful?
I've wondered about that.
I did think that way for a long time, but I also feel like part of it was because I was genuinely seeking truth.
(13:04):
I didn't want to make myself believe in something.
I didn't want to come up with something just because it felt good or sounded good.
I really wanted it to prove itself to me.
I do believe God's hand was in my life too.
Like I said, He showed me that, and I had Christian grandparents who prayed for me all the time, and I had other friends that I know were praying for me too.
(13:25):
I do believe that God was shielding me, but I also think a big part of it too was that I was just desperately seeking truth, but I never even saw Jesus as an option when it came to true spirituality.
So you're at this point where you've made this decision to follow Jesus because He's proved Himself real to you, but you haven't had an upbringing where Jesus has been a part of that.
(13:52):
So where do you go from there?
Where do you go to start to connect with people who also know Jesus?
Thankfully, I had been invited to a church before this experience with a co-worker of mine.
For the first time ever, I met Christians who I felt like I could relate to, I guess.
I felt like I wouldn't be judged going to this church.
A lot of people had piercings and tattoos.
(14:13):
They came out of a background similar to mine.
I just went back there after this encounter had happened.
They talked about the power of the Holy Spirit.
They talked about our identity in Christ, and they talked about angels and demons.
They talked about supernatural things, which is something I didn't hear about when I went to churches the few times that I went, or at least not that I remembered.
(14:39):
So I was very intrigued by the things they talked about.
I just started reading my Bible a lot and listening to worship music.
I listened to worship music more than I read the Bible, because I had this thing actually where reading would put me in a form of hypnosis or something.
The motion of my eyes going back and forth would cause me to fall asleep anytime I read.
(15:03):
Well, then I got prayer a few months after this encounter, and I was totally healed of that.
So then I just started devouring my Bible.
So many questions that I had started to be answered, and I started to see that Jesus was the truth of everything that I'd ever desired or was looking for.
(15:24):
Now it must be hard for you to compare because you weren't brought up in a Christian home, but I guess there's a reality that comes from learning about Jesus and knowing who God is through the scriptures rather than adopting the kind of cultural Christianity that people that have been going to church all their lives might encounter.
(15:46):
There wasn't any of those preconceived ideas, were there?
That's an amazing question.
I am very thankful for that actually, but I did get caught up in the culture for two years.
Not that the culture is always bad or anything, but it caused me to read the scriptures through the lens of what I was being taught at my church, which was only a partial truth.
(16:13):
It wasn't the full picture of the gospel, and I didn't realize that until I was reading through the whole Bible for myself after two years of being a Christian.
Up to that point, I was just always preaching and evangelizing the way I was taught to, and I just listened to everything that my pastor had to say because I just thought, you know, I don't know anything, and they know everything.
(16:35):
They've been Christians longer than me, so I just listened to everything they had to say.
But after two years, God showed me that I had gotten caught up in just going along with what they said and not listening to him for myself.
Then that opened up a whole can of worms with my church because I started asking questions about scriptures that they didn't like.
(16:58):
They didn't want to hear about, and that just brought in a whole new shift and took me deeper into that intimacy that I had with the Lord in the mountains with no indoctrination whatsoever.
I just started to see even more amazing miracles and having just more amazing, beautiful encounters with the Lord.
(17:20):
It brought a lot more solidification to my understanding of God and theology.
Now we know that scripture does tell us that we should check things against scripture but also to have wise counsel around us.
Yes.
How do you see that then to find those who can give you wise counsel but also ensuring that you're staying on task with the scripture rather than just taking on board what others are saying?
(17:48):
I knew that it's biblical to have wise counsel and everything, so I would pray for God to bring confirmation to me about the things he was revealing to me in scripture.
It was amazing how teachings would end up on my iPod.
I had these friends who moved back from Florida, and they started having a Bible study.
(18:08):
When I went over there, they talked about everything that God was showing me in the scriptures already.
The church that I was going to at the time, it basically ended up becoming a cult.
The situation is different than most churches.
I think most churches, they have their own counsel to help keep the pastors accountable and all of that, whereas at this church, it was like the one pastor was the end-all be-all.
(18:36):
It's his way or the highway kind of a thing.
Yeah, I think just really every time that I saw something that I felt was contradicting to what I had been taught and I felt confused about, I journaled a lot, so I would write out what I was experiencing.
I would write out my questions, and then I would ask Holy Spirit to lead me into all truth.
(18:57):
Holy Spirit leads us into all truth.
The Bible says the Holy Spirit is our teacher.
I really leaned on those verses, and I would read scriptures that were prayers, and I would pray those scriptures over me.
I would meditate on them, really focus on them, and spend that time with the Lord.
Through those times, God was giving me healthy theology and showing me His heart for myself and for other people, and really solidifying the gospel and what has happened to me because of what happened to Christ.
(19:29):
Then He just kept bringing confirmation.
I would find teachings about it.
Yeah, I just kept taking it back to Holy Spirit.
These were your early years, learning about God, learning about Jesus, learning about the Holy Spirit and His part in your life.
Where did life take you from there?
I had been praying to meet more people that believed the way that God was leading me into, and one of those people ended up being who I'm married to now.
(19:58):
His name is John, and we just loved going out and praying for people together all the time.
He lived in Nebraska, and I was living in Texas.
We would just call each other every day and talk about the people we prayed for.
We would read the Bible together, and we just became best friends.
I went on a mission trip.
When I was there, God gave me a dream of going to Nebraska and doing ministry with John and his family.
(20:24):
I knew that the next mission I had was to come to Nebraska, and I thought it was just going to be a quick trip, come up here, do some ministry, go back home.
I had so many people telling me I needed to leave this church, that it was a cult and that it wasn't healthy for me to be there, but I loved my family there.
I didn't want to be another one of those people that just got up and left.
I wanted to stay through it, and I wanted to be there for my friends to help them too, because God was trying to show all of us these things, and they just were really intimidated by the fear tactics that the church used to cause a lot of us to kind of cower under their teachings.
(21:00):
So God had to bring me to Nebraska to get me away from there, and then I couldn't go back.
Every time I tried to go back home, my car would break down or my battery would die.
It was just all these things that happened.
During those times, me and John were getting closer, just connecting more.
Every time we would go out to evangelize, it was a dream that I'd actually had coming to pass, like while I was sleeping type of dream.
(21:28):
I started having these dreams a lot when I came up here, and they started to come to pass.
We just really worked well together in ministry.
We were working on a house of prayer that his parents had, and since then, God has just opened up this whole community of like-minded believers from all over the world, and so that's why I help teach online, Jubilee Church online, and we focus on the finished works of what Jesus really did on the cross and through His resurrection.
(22:00):
We go on mission trips, but I focus in on our identity in Christ, helping other people grow in who they really are as a child of God and understanding what happened to them and what that co-crucifixion really means, what the co-resurrection really means, and that's just what I'm really passionate about.
(22:21):
You've mentioned there the teaching that you do as part of that online church.
I mentioned in the introduction that you're also a blogger, so you're constantly writing and helping people.
Tell me a little more about the Eat Me, Drink Me podcast.
What's that all about?
That is a play on words with Alice in Wonderland and how the concept of going down the rabbit hole and entering into Wonderland, but it's Jesus's Wonderland, and then it also is a parallel of communion.
(22:52):
When we partake in Christ, we are partaking in the kingdom.
He says that when we eat of Him, we drink of Him, when we feast on Him, we are feasting on the bread of life.
We are drinking in the bliss of our salvation.
My podcast is about following Holy Spirit and encouraging other people to follow Holy Spirit, no matter who they are, where they're at in their life, what they've done, what they haven't done, knowing that each individual person is important to the Lord, each individual person is loved by God, and that Holy Spirit is working in their life.
(23:29):
Hopefully, through listening to the podcast, they're encouraged in how to see Holy Spirit working in their life more, to open their eyes and their ears to hearing and seeing what God is doing, and to lead them into living a life that their heart has felt like they have desired, just like I used to, but I didn't know that Jesus was the way, the truth, and the life.
(23:52):
You've had a number of guests on that podcast.
Tell me about the sorts of guests that you've invited to be a part of that.
I interview people who have had encounters with God that have totally transformed their theology, that have transformed how they see God, whether they were raised in a religious home or a Christian home, or they were raised atheist.
(24:17):
They all, in some way, have had a personal encounter with Holy Spirit.
They have come to see God as Trinitarian, so it is a Trinitarian podcast.
We believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
They all usually have some kind of testimony and a message to encourage the listeners in how to either apply or rest in the reality of what they experience for themselves also applies to those that are listening.
(24:48):
God's not a respecter of persons in the sense that He holds out on one, blesses one, and doesn't bless another.
We know that God hasn't finished with you yet.
What do you think He has in store for you in the coming days and years?
Yeah, He's been putting out in my heart to write some books.
We have some land, too, that we are developing.
(25:09):
It's called Food for Rest, and it's a play on food forest because we also, me and my husband are passionate about permaculture, so we want to heal the land and people and create a safe space for people to come to for inner healing.
We already have that in motion.
People come out and stuff, but we want to grow that more.
(25:31):
That's kind of the focus is creating an environment on our farm for people to come and get inner healing from trauma, physical healing, but also theological healing, healing and understanding the character of God and God's will for people's lives, and doing the podcast and books.
(25:51):
Audrey, I'm sure that there are people listening who would like to get in touch with you, to listen to the podcast, to read your works through your blog.
Where's the easiest place for people to find you?
The eatmedrinkmepodcast.net is my website, and I have links to different resources, so if you want to message me, you can.
(26:15):
You can email me.
I have a page full of resources if you want to learn more about what I'm saying or what I've shared today from other people who are more well-known than I am.
I love to talk to people.
I'm more than willing to discuss and to be a listening ear and to be an encouraging sister in Christ.
(26:36):
I want to say thank you so much for spending some time with us today, sharing just a part of your story, and I'm sure there will be listeners who will want to jump in and connect with you to hear a bit more of that story.
And thank you for being part of Bleeding Daylight today.
Thank you for having me.
It was such an honour.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
(26:57):
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome, I'm so very glad you're here.
Please connect with Bleeding Daylight on Facebook and Instagram.
Links and other episodes are at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:32):
Please share this and other episodes with others.
Searching for spirituality has taken many people down some very dark roads.
My guest today looked for truth in the occult and witchcraft, and her life was marked with tragedy.
Today, we'll explore her own journey to kick the darkness.
(01:03):
Audrey Dutton has long had an interest in spiritual things, but for many years she chased spirituality through witchcraft and the occult.
When it started to look like nothing would satisfy her search for greater meaning beyond this world, her life was dramatically changed.
Audrey is a blogger, helps lead an online church, and hosts the Eat Me, Drink Me podcast.
(01:25):
She's my guest today on Bleeding Daylight.
Audrey, thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you so much for having me, Rodney.
I want to explore your spiritual search, and I'm wondering when it was that you first started looking for some kind of meaning beyond this world.
Do you remember when you first began looking for answers in some kind of spirituality?
(01:45):
I grew up around it.
My mom was into the occult.
She often would watch witchcraft movies or get witchcraft books and try spells and things.
I grew up hearing her talking about her experiences with poltergeists and ghosts and UFOs and things like that.
I always craved to experience something like that for myself, but it just never did.
(02:08):
Anytime I was around someone else who was experiencing it, like one of my friends who tried to do a seance over me.
They did a satanic prayer, and they were feeling in the spirit this presence, but I couldn't feel anything.
I always just felt like something was missing.
(02:30):
I just kept on that journey, but then eventually I just gave up since I never actually experienced anything for myself.
I just became an atheist after a few years of that.
Where did the search take you as you're starting to look at different alternate spiritualities?
What were some of the things you tried along the way before you finally gave up?
(02:50):
I tried Wicca.
I tried a form of vampirism.
Not where you actually drink blood or anything, but it was more like energy vampire, but also having these spiritual experiences where you would be able to go into the spirit realm and commune with spirits and stuff.
(03:12):
I had some friends who believed they were reincarnated vampires.
I tried to figure that out because what they talked about, it seemed so real.
It sounded really wild and bizarre, but they seemed so genuine.
I wanted to try it, but it just never went anywhere for me.
(03:33):
I never tried Christianity.
I went to church a few times growing up, but I honestly just felt like Jesus was a made-up person just to make people feel better about themselves.
I never did any research into the history of Jesus.
I didn't ever try a specific religion or anything.
(03:54):
I just tried to have spiritual experiences.
I tried spells and things like that as well, and Ouija boards.
It just never went anywhere for me.
I felt like something was missing.
It wasn't the full truth.
That was a reoccurring thought I remember having.
This just doesn't seem like this is it.
There's this continual search, I guess not as much for spirituality, but as the experience of spirituality and nothing is happening, which convinced you eventually that there was nothing in the spirit world.
(04:26):
What did it make you think about those who were saying, yes, I'm experiencing something very real in this moment?
Did you think, well, are they just making it up?
What was your thought at that time?
For some of my friends, I did think that they were just making it up.
I felt like they were putting on a show.
But for my mom, I know that she had some legit encounters with spirits and ghosts and angels, so I really trusted her.
(04:53):
But the other stuff, I did write that off, basically.
Once you had decided, hey, there is no God out there, that you're an atheist, how did that express itself?
Did you just then turn completely away from anything spiritual?
Yeah, I just didn't even care about anything spiritual anymore.
(05:15):
I had just lost hope in it.
After my encounter with God, I don't believe that there really are atheists.
We try to believe that there's no God, but we're in denial, really.
I think it was just a matter of silencing any kind of desires that I had, any kind of longings that I had, and just felt like if there is a God, then he's not personal.
(05:36):
I just didn't care anymore, but I didn't think about God again for years.
I was into a lot of darker type of things.
Basically what I practiced was a form of modern-day Satanism.
They follow these tenets of how to be a good person, a good morally respectable person, and as long as you're not hurting anyone else, then you do you.
(05:58):
That's basically how I lived my life.
I was Gothic.
I wore a lot of black and had upside-down crosses everywhere, and the Baphomet picture of the goat and stuff like that.
That was my style.
That would be of interest to a lot of people, in that there's this form of Satanism that is saying, here we want you to be a good moral person, because there would be a lot of people assuming that Satanism is all about being someone who's into evil things, and yet we know, if we're following Jesus, we know that all the enemy has to do is to keep us from following the correct path.
(06:40):
That doesn't seem to be so out of character to the enemy to just draw us away and say, no, you can be a good person without God.
That's exactly what it was, and I did strive for that.
I wanted to look as weird and as freaky as possible, but I wanted to be one of the nicest people that anyone had ever met.
I don't know why.
(07:01):
As you continued to grow up, you got to your late teens, and I guess at that point you thought that things were going well.
Tell me how things started to tumble down as you were in your late teens.
A year out of high school, I joined basic training to join the Army, and right before that I married my best friend.
(07:25):
Two days after we were married, he went back to his job.
Then I got ready to go to basic training.
I went states away to my training, and I was there for five weeks.
Five weeks in, I get woken up at 1130 at night.
They asked me to come downstairs with them, my drill sergeants.
(07:46):
We go down in this room, and they proceed to tell me that my husband was dead and they didn't know what happened.
It took two days for them to process things, but they were saying that they would just honorably discharge me, and then I could rejoin later on if I wanted to.
After that, I went back home, and a lot of it was just a blur.
(08:11):
The trauma was very intense.
For a whole month, I did any drug I could get my hand on.
I got drunk any time I could get drunk.
Before that, even though I was into a lot of dark things, and I looked like the kind of person that loved to party and drink and do drugs, I did not, because I grew up in a household where my father was constantly in and out of jail, and then jail escalated into prison for drugs.
(08:40):
My mom would take me around to parties and things like that.
When I grew up, I wanted to be sober-minded, but that next month, I did anything I could get my hands on to try and coat the pain, to try and feel something.
I started going to metaphysical stores or shops, and even to some person's house to try and figure out a way to stay connected to my husband, even though he was dead.
(09:05):
Yeah, I got pretty wild there for a month, but then Jesus stepped in after that.
It's interesting, in times of difficulty, in those times of grief, you seem to just go back to what you knew, what had been demonstrated, and that is, when you need to mask pain, you use substance, because you had seen that within your family.
(09:27):
You went there, and again, in the same way that you had searched for spirituality, and that didn't satisfy, you were now covering the pain using substances, and again, that's not helping, which leads us to this point where you encountered Jesus.
Tell us how that happened.
Yeah, so I ended up having this encounter with God
(09:51):
where I was sitting under the stars, and I had gotten a phone call,
and it was really bad news, and I just lost it, and I broke,
and I just started complaining about everything going on in my life,
and why did my husband have to die, and why did I get put with all of this debt,
(10:12):
and all these other things that just made me feel like I wanted to die,
and then that escalated into, why has life been so hard for my mom,
why has life been so hard for my dad, why has it been hard for all of us,
why her mom, and so on, because I grew up with my mom telling me stories
(10:33):
of her family and the trauma and abuse that happened with them,
and I knew about my dad's upbringing.
I just started throwing all this stuff out there.
Then I found myself saying, you can't be real.
I hate you, and then I started cussing God out.
I'm like, F you, I don't have anything to do with you.
(10:54):
There was no logic in it.
It just was all emotion.
It was my heart just pouring out, and it escalated from me just thinking and complaining about everything, and it turned personal.
I heard God say, not audibly, but in my heart, in my spirit, I heard Him say, if I'm not real, then why do you curse me?
(11:16):
It was like this light bulb went off, and I realized that I just had been in denial.
I knew that God was real, but I blamed Him for all the evil in the world.
I blamed Him for all these things happening to me and other people.
When I heard that, it was more than just those words.
There was a power with it.
(11:37):
There was a revelation that came with it.
There was an experience.
I heard, if I'm not real, then why do you curse me?
But it also brought in this whole encounter where He was showing me my whole life flashing before my eyes, and these times where He had intervened in my life, and how He had been there for me throughout my life, and that it wasn't His will for these things to happen to me.
(12:01):
It wasn't Him doing these things to me, and that I had my hand up to Him.
I had built this wall to where I couldn't see Him for who He really was, and it just kind of came in like a flood.
That is what many people would call my born-again experience, where I was instantaneously changed.
The way I saw things were totally shifted, and I got delivered from a lot of addictions and mentalities and things like that, and I started to just hear Holy Spirit more frequently and seeing prayers answered.
(12:36):
You mentioned before how you tried for this spiritual experience in occult practices, and nothing ever happened for you.
Did you, at that moment, start to look back and see, well, actually, this was God shielding me from some of those things that could be harmful?
I've wondered about that.
I did think that way for a long time, but I also feel like part of it was because I was genuinely seeking truth.
(13:04):
I didn't want to make myself believe in something.
I didn't want to come up with something just because it felt good or sounded good.
I really wanted it to prove itself to me.
I do believe God's hand was in my life too.
Like I said, He showed me that, and I had Christian grandparents who prayed for me all the time, and I had other friends that I know were praying for me too.
(13:25):
I do believe that God was shielding me, but I also think a big part of it too was that I was just desperately seeking truth, but I never even saw Jesus as an option when it came to true spirituality.
So you're at this point where you've made this decision to follow Jesus because He's proved Himself real to you, but you haven't had an upbringing where Jesus has been a part of that.
(13:52):
So where do you go from there?
Where do you go to start to connect with people who also know Jesus?
Thankfully, I had been invited to a church before this experience with a co-worker of mine.
For the first time ever, I met Christians who I felt like I could relate to, I guess.
I felt like I wouldn't be judged going to this church.
A lot of people had piercings and tattoos.
(14:13):
They came out of a background similar to mine.
I just went back there after this encounter had happened.
They talked about the power of the Holy Spirit.
They talked about our identity in Christ, and they talked about angels and demons.
They talked about supernatural things, which is something I didn't hear about when I went to churches the few times that I went, or at least not that I remembered.
(14:39):
So I was very intrigued by the things they talked about.
I just started reading my Bible a lot and listening to worship music.
I listened to worship music more than I read the Bible, because I had this thing actually where reading would put me in a form of hypnosis or something.
The motion of my eyes going back and forth would cause me to fall asleep anytime I read.
(15:03):
Well, then I got prayer a few months after this encounter, and I was totally healed of that.
So then I just started devouring my Bible.
So many questions that I had started to be answered, and I started to see that Jesus was the truth of everything that I'd ever desired or was looking for.
(15:24):
Now it must be hard for you to compare because you weren't brought up in a Christian home, but I guess there's a reality that comes from learning about Jesus and knowing who God is through the scriptures rather than adopting the kind of cultural Christianity that people that have been going to church all their lives might encounter.
(15:46):
There wasn't any of those preconceived ideas, were there?
That's an amazing question.
I am very thankful for that actually, but I did get caught up in the culture for two years.
Not that the culture is always bad or anything, but it caused me to read the scriptures through the lens of what I was being taught at my church, which was only a partial truth.
(16:13):
It wasn't the full picture of the gospel, and I didn't realize that until I was reading through the whole Bible for myself after two years of being a Christian.
Up to that point, I was just always preaching and evangelizing the way I was taught to, and I just listened to everything that my pastor had to say because I just thought, you know, I don't know anything, and they know everything.
(16:35):
They've been Christians longer than me, so I just listened to everything they had to say.
But after two years, God showed me that I had gotten caught up in just going along with what they said and not listening to him for myself.
Then that opened up a whole can of worms with my church because I started asking questions about scriptures that they didn't like.
(16:58):
They didn't want to hear about, and that just brought in a whole new shift and took me deeper into that intimacy that I had with the Lord in the mountains with no indoctrination whatsoever.
I just started to see even more amazing miracles and having just more amazing, beautiful encounters with the Lord.
(17:20):
It brought a lot more solidification to my understanding of God and theology.
Now we know that scripture does tell us that we should check things against scripture but also to have wise counsel around us.
Yes.
How do you see that then to find those who can give you wise counsel but also ensuring that you're staying on task with the scripture rather than just taking on board what others are saying?
(17:48):
I knew that it's biblical to have wise counsel and everything, so I would pray for God to bring confirmation to me about the things he was revealing to me in scripture.
It was amazing how teachings would end up on my iPod.
I had these friends who moved back from Florida, and they started having a Bible study.
(18:08):
When I went over there, they talked about everything that God was showing me in the scriptures already.
The church that I was going to at the time, it basically ended up becoming a cult.
The situation is different than most churches.
I think most churches, they have their own counsel to help keep the pastors accountable and all of that, whereas at this church, it was like the one pastor was the end-all be-all.
(18:36):
It's his way or the highway kind of a thing.
Yeah, I think just really every time that I saw something that I felt was contradicting to what I had been taught and I felt confused about, I journaled a lot, so I would write out what I was experiencing.
I would write out my questions, and then I would ask Holy Spirit to lead me into all truth.
(18:57):
Holy Spirit leads us into all truth.
The Bible says the Holy Spirit is our teacher.
I really leaned on those verses, and I would read scriptures that were prayers, and I would pray those scriptures over me.
I would meditate on them, really focus on them, and spend that time with the Lord.
Through those times, God was giving me healthy theology and showing me His heart for myself and for other people, and really solidifying the gospel and what has happened to me because of what happened to Christ.
(19:29):
Then He just kept bringing confirmation.
I would find teachings about it.
Yeah, I just kept taking it back to Holy Spirit.
These were your early years, learning about God, learning about Jesus, learning about the Holy Spirit and His part in your life.
Where did life take you from there?
I had been praying to meet more people that believed the way that God was leading me into, and one of those people ended up being who I'm married to now.
(19:58):
His name is John, and we just loved going out and praying for people together all the time.
He lived in Nebraska, and I was living in Texas.
We would just call each other every day and talk about the people we prayed for.
We would read the Bible together, and we just became best friends.
I went on a mission trip.
When I was there, God gave me a dream of going to Nebraska and doing ministry with John and his family.
(20:24):
I knew that the next mission I had was to come to Nebraska, and I thought it was just going to be a quick trip, come up here, do some ministry, go back home.
I had so many people telling me I needed to leave this church, that it was a cult and that it wasn't healthy for me to be there, but I loved my family there.
I didn't want to be another one of those people that just got up and left.
I wanted to stay through it, and I wanted to be there for my friends to help them too, because God was trying to show all of us these things, and they just were really intimidated by the fear tactics that the church used to cause a lot of us to kind of cower under their teachings.
(21:00):
So God had to bring me to Nebraska to get me away from there, and then I couldn't go back.
Every time I tried to go back home, my car would break down or my battery would die.
It was just all these things that happened.
During those times, me and John were getting closer, just connecting more.
Every time we would go out to evangelize, it was a dream that I'd actually had coming to pass, like while I was sleeping type of dream.
(21:28):
I started having these dreams a lot when I came up here, and they started to come to pass.
We just really worked well together in ministry.
We were working on a house of prayer that his parents had, and since then, God has just opened up this whole community of like-minded believers from all over the world, and so that's why I help teach online, Jubilee Church online, and we focus on the finished works of what Jesus really did on the cross and through His resurrection.
(22:00):
We go on mission trips, but I focus in on our identity in Christ, helping other people grow in who they really are as a child of God and understanding what happened to them and what that co-crucifixion really means, what the co-resurrection really means, and that's just what I'm really passionate about.
(22:21):
You've mentioned there the teaching that you do as part of that online church.
I mentioned in the introduction that you're also a blogger, so you're constantly writing and helping people.
Tell me a little more about the Eat Me, Drink Me podcast.
What's that all about?
That is a play on words with Alice in Wonderland and how the concept of going down the rabbit hole and entering into Wonderland, but it's Jesus's Wonderland, and then it also is a parallel of communion.
(22:52):
When we partake in Christ, we are partaking in the kingdom.
He says that when we eat of Him, we drink of Him, when we feast on Him, we are feasting on the bread of life.
We are drinking in the bliss of our salvation.
My podcast is about following Holy Spirit and encouraging other people to follow Holy Spirit, no matter who they are, where they're at in their life, what they've done, what they haven't done, knowing that each individual person is important to the Lord, each individual person is loved by God, and that Holy Spirit is working in their life.
(23:29):
Hopefully, through listening to the podcast, they're encouraged in how to see Holy Spirit working in their life more, to open their eyes and their ears to hearing and seeing what God is doing, and to lead them into living a life that their heart has felt like they have desired, just like I used to, but I didn't know that Jesus was the way, the truth, and the life.
(23:52):
You've had a number of guests on that podcast.
Tell me about the sorts of guests that you've invited to be a part of that.
I interview people who have had encounters with God that have totally transformed their theology, that have transformed how they see God, whether they were raised in a religious home or a Christian home, or they were raised atheist.
(24:17):
They all, in some way, have had a personal encounter with Holy Spirit.
They have come to see God as Trinitarian, so it is a Trinitarian podcast.
We believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
They all usually have some kind of testimony and a message to encourage the listeners in how to either apply or rest in the reality of what they experience for themselves also applies to those that are listening.
(24:48):
God's not a respecter of persons in the sense that He holds out on one, blesses one, and doesn't bless another.
We know that God hasn't finished with you yet.
What do you think He has in store for you in the coming days and years?
Yeah, He's been putting out in my heart to write some books.
We have some land, too, that we are developing.
(25:09):
It's called Food for Rest, and it's a play on food forest because we also, me and my husband are passionate about permaculture, so we want to heal the land and people and create a safe space for people to come to for inner healing.
We already have that in motion.
People come out and stuff, but we want to grow that more.
(25:31):
That's kind of the focus is creating an environment on our farm for people to come and get inner healing from trauma, physical healing, but also theological healing, healing and understanding the character of God and God's will for people's lives, and doing the podcast and books.
(25:51):
Audrey, I'm sure that there are people listening who would like to get in touch with you, to listen to the podcast, to read your works through your blog.
Where's the easiest place for people to find you?
The eatmedrinkmepodcast.net is my website, and I have links to different resources, so if you want to message me, you can.
(26:15):
You can email me.
I have a page full of resources if you want to learn more about what I'm saying or what I've shared today from other people who are more well-known than I am.
I love to talk to people.
I'm more than willing to discuss and to be a listening ear and to be an encouraging sister in Christ.
(26:36):
I want to say thank you so much for spending some time with us today, sharing just a part of your story, and I'm sure there will be listeners who will want to jump in and connect with you to hear a bit more of that story.
And thank you for being part of Bleeding Daylight today.
Thank you for having me.
It was such an honour.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
(26:57):
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
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