March 30, 2025 • 31 mins
In this episode of Bleeding Daylight, host Rodney Olsen speaks with Cathy Garland, co-author of "Revelationship – Transformative Intimacy with Christ." Cathy shares profound insights about building an authentic relationship with God through His revelations in Scripture, suffering, and everyday experiences. She explores theological concepts like God's holiness, omnipresence, and the balance between divine order and human structure in faith communities.
Through her personal journey of relationship struggles, miscarriages, and physical injury, Cathy reveals how suffering became a powerful teacher in her spiritual walk. She challenges listeners to move beyond religious routine into genuine intimacy with God, explaining how effective prayer and discipleship can transform anxiety and renew our first love for Christ. This conversation offers both theological depth and practical application for believers at any stage of their faith journey.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(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 and thanks for listening.
There are dozens of other episodes waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:29):
If you're inspired, why not help others discover Bleeding Daylight too?
Share on social media or simply tell a friend.
Our relationships with others can only grow as we learn more about people and allow ourselves to be known.
Today's guest believes the same applies to our connection to God.
(00:50):
Today she'll talk about growing our relationship through authentic revelation.
Joining me today is Cathy Garland, a compelling storyteller and co-author of Revelationship – Transformative Intimacy with Christ alongside her father, Dr Randy Culver.
(01:15):
Through deeply personal experiences, Cathy discovered profound revelations about God's character that transformed her spiritual journey.
Her unique perspective bridges classic theological understanding with raw authentic faith.
Revelationship explores how God reveals himself in both life's darkest moments and daily walks, offering a fresh approach to experiencing divine intimacy.
(01:42):
I'm so pleased to have her as my guest today.
Cathy, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you for having me.
I'm excited.
People often say that Christianity isn't a religion but a relationship and yet it can be difficult imagining a relationship with the creator of the universe.
Now I know that you would point to the very first relationship between God and man described in Genesis.
(02:07):
How has that helped to form your understanding?
People ask us in reading the book, what's the most important revelation?
And I always tell them it's the first one because it's first.
And there's a reason it's first in the Bible.
For my purposes, understanding God reading Genesis is just chock full of revelations.
(02:32):
But in Genesis, the first chapter particularly, we see how God is the creator and his desires of a relationship.
And then in chapter two, we see the unfolding of the Garden of Eden and Eve selecting to make herself God.
You know, that's really technically, of course, what happened.
(02:54):
It wasn't just the fruit.
I get a lot of atheists who tell me how can a God punish people just because they ate some fruit?
And that's not the point.
The point was that she wanted her will, her way, her want over a relationship.
And that's she got her will, her way, her want.
And he did too.
Adam did as well.
(03:15):
And look at the disaster we have.
But God set us up.
The whole thing is a setup and not in the sense of a negative setup, but it's a setup that in the end, he's going to win us.
He's going to win us if we choose the correct path, which would be to not eat the fruit, not choose our own will, our own way, and to call out and ask for help, which if Eve had done that, we would be in a totally different situation.
(03:40):
If Adam had done that, we would be in a totally different situation.
But we did choose that path.
We wouldn't choose that path.
If we were given the same choice, we would probably choose the same path they did.
And for most of our lives, we generally do until God gets ahold of us.
But the other setup side is that he knew we were going to choose that path and he set us up so it might take longer, but he was going to win us in the end.
(04:05):
He sent his son to win us in the end.
So it's all about being known and the relationship.
And when we look at that, we see even from the beginning, as you say, he knew which way we would turn and he had a plan to draw us back into relationship.
And I know that you discovered new life as you walked through the Old Testament, which sometimes can feel a bit dry.
(04:33):
And yet you started to see that through different eyes.
Tell me about that experience.
I did the whole read through the Bible of the year many times, you know, growing up in church.
But the problem with that is I can't say that I ever truly feasted on it until I hit a certain point in my walk with God of a level of maturity.
And I began to really feast on it, like Madame Gingouyan says, or Bonhoeffer suggests that we ought to do.
(04:58):
And I was starting over reading the Bible and I was dreading reading the begats and the sacrifices and the blood and the kill this and the kill that.
And for a woman particularly, it's a little off-putting, especially all the sacrifices.
There's a lot of animals that get sacrificed.
And it's a lot of Israel turning away and constantly being knocked out.
(05:21):
It's hard reading and it's dry and it's dusty.
But the Holy Spirit really spoke to my heart.
He said, look for Christ, look for God revealing himself.
So I turned to Genesis 1.1 and it says in the beginning, God, first revelation created second revelation.
He hovered over the waters and he brooded.
(05:43):
The Hebrew word there is brooding, you know, so there's this two revelations instantaneous.
And I was like, oh, wait a second here.
This is going to be good.
And it was.
I teach interns to look at those two chapters and to find as many revelations of God in the first two chapters of Genesis.
And you can generally find about 30 to 40 just in those two chapters.
(06:05):
And Genesis is full of revelation.
I just didn't know it because I wasn't looking for them.
And the one that inspired me to do that is lying in the witch in the wardrobe.
The children go off half cocked and do their own thing and people die.
They should have stopped, look for Aslan, who is, of course, a type of Christ.
And if they had, they could have done what Aslan was doing.
(06:26):
They could have joined in with him.
So sort of the framework that I already had.
And when the Lord said, look for me, it immediately clicked.
Look for Aslan.
Same thing, you know.
And so that really helped me.
That first revelation that you talked about in the beginning, God, it seems that we have turned that upside down, that we have chosen the way of Eve and Adam, of this is about me.
(06:53):
And even in the church today, we tend to say, well, what's in it for me?
What has God done for me?
And yet, as you say, the scripture begins with those words in the beginning, God.
How important is it if we are to build relationship with God that we realize it starts and ends with It's vital if we try to look for our own identity.
(07:17):
And it is a Christian saying, know your identity in God, know your identity in Christ.
But if they don't know God, they'll never know their identity in Christ.
It's like looking for your identity, completely lost in an ocean, a buoy lost in the ocean.
It's not going to work.
For example, when I work with women, counseling is sort of a wisdom counseling situation or a discipleship situation.
(07:41):
A lot of times they're anxious.
Anxiety is way higher than it used to be.
Anxiety seems to be the most prevalent thing, that and unforgiveness, I should say.
But anxiety is very prevalent for women.
I think they're on the front lines.
They're trying to raise children.
They're trying to juggle multiple roles, etc.
And their anxiety is high.
(08:03):
But if I introduce them to a theological concept that's highly practical, but takes a little bit to get your mind around, which is the omnipresence of God, it can absolutely change their anxiety levels.
So if I explain to them, God is not in a past, a present, or a future situation.
(08:25):
He is what we call eternally now.
He has no past.
He has no future.
He's only now.
It's always now to Him.
It might be our past, but He's already there.
And He's there at the same time as He is present with us.
And He's also present in the future, all at the same time, for all time, throughout time, because time has no boundaries for Him.
(08:48):
And if we
wrap our minds around the fact that God is still in the past, laying the foundations of the earth
right now, and still in our past, redeeming us, calling us from the sins that we were once
chasing after, but He's also present with us now, and He's also present in the future with the
victory, and we're standing there with Him, though we have not experienced it yet, but all at the
(09:15):
same time, they start to understand that not only is the future in God's hands, but He's already
there with the future in His hands, if that makes sense.
I can imagine some people are going to rewind that bit and listen to it a number of times to get their head around it.
And it is an interesting theological concept to get their head around.
(09:36):
And some people might say, well, that's all very well and good.
I know that Cathy grew up in a Christian home, and this is all theory, and it's fine.
And yet, your discovery of God, your discovery of that relationship, didn't just happen in that sort of isolated experience, did it?
You've walked through some very deep waters to get to where you are now.
(09:59):
Tell me about some of that.
Yeah.
When you're raised in the church, a daughter of a pastor, my parents were hippies, saved in the Jesus movement, so it wasn't the sort of traditional mainline church either.
It was Holy Spirit filled.
We believed in speaking in tongues and the gifts of the Spirit.
And it was pretty free as far as many of those kinds of things.
(10:23):
It wasn't a whole lot of rules.
I had to question it, though, at the age of about 13-ish, I would say, just about 13, I began to question whether or not Christianity was the right pathway.
It wasn't so much a question that God existed.
I just didn't know if their concept and how they were presenting Him was actually who He was.
(10:44):
And also, to be honest, there was some hypocrisy that I encountered.
The business mindset had kind of filtered into the church and taken over.
And we went from this sort of share everything, what is God doing in your life, knit group to a more business structure.
As a teenager observing that, it was very demoralizing to see that change.
(11:05):
So I did question.
But my dad, instead of panicking, he took me to the library.
He said, let's study this out.
And he got all these books on all these different religions.
We studied them.
And some of them were really easy to reject very quickly, but some of them were a little harder.
Buddhism took me longer to unravel, whereas the Muslim religion was chunked pretty fast.
(11:26):
But then, years later, people think, OK, so you grew up in church.
You had an easy life.
Well, not so fast.
I dated a man.
I married him on our honeymoon.
He told me he was addicted to pornography, that he wasn't going to have any more problems anymore.
He had kept that a secret.
He also told me he didn't want to have children and he never wanted to talk about it again.
(11:47):
So that was the beginning of some abuse and some lockdown.
You know, this is how it's going to be.
Within a few years, he divorced me.
During that time, that marriage, I lost my first child in miscarriage.
Several years later, I met a man who I fell in love with and later married.
He's my second husband.
Love him dearly.
But he broke up with me three times.
(12:09):
So there's that.
I broke my neck in a car accident.
I lost another child in miscarriage.
I waited 10 years for the birth of my son.
I could go on and on.
I mean, it's not an easy life, but through it all, the things that kept me were knowing God and knowing I was known by God.
(12:30):
The God who sees El Roy is the God who sees me and the injustice happening to me and the hardship I'm going through.
So the God who sees sees me.
It's extremely practical.
That is what I love about theology.
You're right.
A lot of people are saying, OK, that's scholars.
(12:51):
They want to talk about these high esoterical things.
No, no, no.
Theology is infinitely practical because our identity is rooted in who God is and theology is who God is.
Yeah, basically, theology is who we understand God to be.
It's interesting when we look at the fact that relationships are always fraught with danger, as you've just explained, and human relationships are always going to have hiccups along the way, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller.
(13:24):
How do we start to bridge that gap between our understanding of relationships because of the people around us that we have relationship with and a perfect relationship with a perfect father in God?
How do we start to get our mind around the fact that every other relationship has let me down in smaller or larger ways, and yet this is a relationship that is enduring and will not let me down?
(13:48):
You know, when I talk to people, I try to point them first to the holiness of God.
It's a concept we've lost and quite frankly was probably hijacked by people who wanted to control other people and created a whole definition of what holiness is, which is obeying laws, and holiness is not laws.
(14:09):
It's who God is and it's His very essence.
And so I will help people understand that holiness is His infinite perfection.
He can't do something wrong.
It's not possible.
His essence is perfection.
When people start there to understand a little bit about God's holiness, then they start to understand His holy otherness.
(14:33):
He's going to be so completely other than what we're used to that they can make room for Him to do things differently.
It's a holy love.
Stephen Charnock says it's the foundation of all His other attributes.
It's a holy love.
It's a holy justice.
It's a holy wrath.
That's a little harder to understand too, but once you understand holiness, you understand wrath.
(14:55):
Taking back what has been hijacked.
Holiness is important to our walk with God, not because we're going to achieve it on our own, but for the very simple fact that it's going to be His holiness that He imparts to us.
As abiding in the vine, He becomes our holiness.
He becomes our righteousness.
I know that a major plank of any relationship is communication, and our communication with God is through prayer.
(15:22):
Yet you're very keen in the book to point out that prayer shouldn't just be this begging for miracles that we've so often made it.
Can you walk us through that?
Yeah.
When I was growing up, I was all over the map on prayer, trying to figure it out, just like I was all over the map on trying to figure out purpose.
I must have gone to a number of youth conferences about how to hear the voice of God.
(15:46):
I can't even tell you how many times I listened to it, and it was very difficult to understand.
I understood that I could read the Bible, and that was very much the voice of God when He spoke.
But there's a lot of things in the Bible, like Abraham taking Hagar and kicking her out in the desert.
That's not God speaking.
So there's a lot that's not God speaking, and yet there's a lot in there that is God speaking.
(16:10):
I did have that, but I didn't really hear God's voice until I was about 20-ish, mid-20s, divorced, driving home, middle of a storm, very fed up with the current life I was living, which was all career and service to God and the church, but no relationship, no deep intimacy with Him, though I was doing all the things.
(16:41):
Before anybody asked, were you doing devotions?
Absolutely.
Was I reading the Bible?
Yes, I was.
Was I teaching the Bible?
Yes, I was, but I still lacked this depth.
So I was driving home, and I said to Him, Lord, can you just take me home?
I don't want to be here anymore.
Just take me home.
He spoke out of the passenger seat of my car, out loud, in a way that I had never experienced before and have not since, and He said, if you don't want your life, I do, which was a very clear message.
(17:15):
I almost drove off the side of the road and hit a tree, so I almost went home accidentally, but we had a bit of a conversation, but then I could recognize His voice in my head, because it was separate from, say, my father's voice telling me to remember to do this, or my mother's voice, or my own voice, or whatever, and so I could finally recognize His voice.
(17:39):
But then later, I also developed the ability to lean in and hear Him quickly.
So there's this, we pray and we wait a long time for an answer, but then there's times when we absolutely need to have an answer, and so I began to put myself in a position where I absolutely needed to have an answer.
These are sort of things like praying for mothers with sick children.
(18:03):
They need an answer.
There's not really any option, and so I would pray and intercede for them, and I would ask the Lord, what do you say about this situation?
And I only prayed what He said, and if He didn't say anything, I didn't pray anything, and that is a hard lesson to learn too.
Then, when I began to see extremely specific prayers answered, like He said, pray that their A1C rises to this level, I would pray that.
(18:31):
I'm not a nurse.
I just trusted, looked it up a little bit later to make sure I wasn't crazy, and absolutely, that was where it needed to be.
I prayed it.
I declared what I heard Him say.
I said, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I declare to this A1C to come into alignment with what the Holy Spirit has said, and then it would.
These miracles started happening, and so I began to trust that I was hearing from God.
(18:55):
Up to that point, it's a little hard to know, but if I put myself in a position to hear God, He speaks, I stand on it, and I don't say anything more.
We walk this balance between a God who wants to reveal Himself to us and wants to be known by us and Him being a God who hides.
(19:17):
Tell me about the God who hides.
Yes, there are instances in our life when the presence, the felt presence of God may not feel like it's close.
I have been through that when I broke my neck and I was on all those meds.
I could not feel God's presence.
It was the very first time in my whole life I hadn't felt God's presence.
(19:39):
There's other times, I think, when He sort of removes the presence, not to prove to Him that we'll follow Him, but so that we can be able to see what's in our heart.
Are we following God because of His benefits and because He's close and His presence is there and we feel Him, or are we obedient and able to follow even if we don't feel Him or hear Him on a particular topic or something like that?
(20:08):
Can we trust?
It's about trust.
It's sort of a trust exercise, I guess.
We want to discover who God is.
God wants to be discovered by us, and so we continually have this growing relationship where we get to know God.
As you say, God will speak through various ways.
He can speak in an audible voice.
He often speaks through the scriptures, but He will also talk through suffering.
(20:35):
You've touched on that a little bit, but how has your understanding of God actually grown through understanding Him through that suffering?
I think suffering is one of the best teachers.
It's not one we want to go out and sign up for, but it's the best teacher in some cases because if we don't have a need, then we're not going to be moved to care enough to ask Him for something we lack.
(21:05):
So if we don't have a lack, we won't ask Him to meet that need.
We won't ask Him to fill it with His own character and His attributes.
So suffering is the quickest way for us to silence all the things that do not matter.
When I have suffered, I don't care about my hair.
I don't care about makeup.
I don't care about what people think of me.
(21:27):
In certain cases, I just want to lay on the floor in a fetal position and cry because that's real.
I only want to hear from God.
Friends can try to comfort you and they can be there with you, and it's good to do that.
But what I really need is the one who sticks closer than a brother, and that's God.
In suffering, I reach for God.
(21:50):
I don't know that everybody's trained to lean into God during suffering, and in many cases, suffering does the opposite effect.
It pushes people away from God.
How could He do this to me?
Why has He done this?
Why did He send this to me, this suffering?
Even Job, when he suffered, threw some really interesting questions at the skies to have God respond to him, and God never did, of course, answer his question, but He did respond and He did come.
(22:18):
And I think that's the key.
God comes.
When we're suffering and we hurl whatever questions we have to the sky, He comes, which is probably one of my favorite revelations of God, the God who comes.
I know that as people listen, they're going to be hearing things that they say, yep, I can agree with that.
(22:38):
Other things that perhaps you've said that are new to them, and they say, well, is that really what the Scripture says?
And you talk about the God who disturbs us.
You talk about a God who is ready to reveal Himself in surprising ways.
In fact, you even talk about the fact that sometimes, even in church, we limit the work of the Holy Spirit, and yet God wants to be a God who disturbs us in a good way.
(23:05):
Tell me about that.
A lot of people talk about services being orderly and God is a God of order, and certainly He shows Himself to be a God of order just through His creation.
There's a lot of order in creation.
If there wasn't that order, we'd all be incinerated, right?
So it's very important.
But I have noticed that man's order is not the same as God's order, and sometimes He needs to disturb us.
(23:31):
The way He moves in the Old Testament when we read about the fire that comes out of the tent of meeting and burns up all those people who thought that they ought to be the head chief, those are disturbing situations.
Even when Christ came, and we were used to it, when He comes, He comes in unexpected ways many times.
(23:56):
If we put ourselves in a place where we're dependent upon God, He has to move on our behalf.
Let's say a missionary in another country.
Why is it that the missionaries have such great stories?
Because they're in a place where if God doesn't come and God doesn't move, some really bad things could happen.
The way He comes is to prove He's so different than the way we expect.
(24:20):
In a service, unfortunately, we don't make a lot of room for the God who disturbs or the God who comes in.
I am tempted to believe in some churches, if He walked in and started doing all sorts of whatever He wanted to do, miraculous touching hearts, causing us to feel repentance, to get down on our knees, somebody somewhere is going to be tapping their watch saying they're ready to wrap things up.
(24:48):
I can't say that every Sunday service has got to be like that, but there has to be room for Him to come into our lives and disturb the status quo.
I know that we have to walk that balance between allowing the Spirit to move, but also keeping order, as you say.
How do we walk that bridge between allowing the Spirit to move and people who would use that for their own purposes?
(25:14):
We all have heard of stories of people saying, well, I believe God is saying this or that, and we know that that clearly doesn't line up with Scripture, or this is just them trying to have their way.
How can we be on our guard against that, and yet at the same time letting our guard down to God?
Discipleship is probably the best answer to your question, and I don't think we have much good discipleship in the church.
(25:39):
It is not a Bible study.
It is not accountability.
It is living life together, understanding that I ask you any question and you answer it, and together we are searching the Scriptures to know what He says about a thing.
And then if we hear from God bringing it and saying, what do y'all think about this?
(26:01):
This is what I think I heard, or I had this dream, and I think this is an interpretation, but I don't know, what do you think?
And then they pray about it, they receive some instruction, they feel the prompting of the Holy Spirit, there's agreement, ah, now we have a decision.
That kind of discipleship doesn't happen anymore, hardly at all.
I know that we've touched on a number of the themes that are present in the book that you co-authored with your father, Revelationship, but I'm wondering, who do you see as the main audience for that book?
(26:32):
Who is going to gain the most from grabbing themselves a hold of that book and reading it through?
The audience that seems to grab it the most are long-time Christians, people whose first love has languished.
They understand that they're supposed to learn from the church being community and in worship in the four walls of the church, but they don't necessarily know that they ought to be incorporating the other ways of experiencing God.
(27:03):
Particularly, nature has stood out to a lot of people who maybe they thought that going out in nature and experiencing God was pagan somehow.
That has been one of the number one things people have said.
Another one is the whispering to the hurting.
So anyone who has lived more than five minutes on this earth has suffered somehow, and knowing that God is close to them, whispering to them, calling them back on a path, reminding them of their purpose and their destiny and their calling in Him and reaffirming it to them.
(27:39):
Those have been the things that I think have stood out to people the most in renewing their first love and pursuing Him as He pursues them.
It must be wonderful when you hear from some people that aha moment of realizing, I can actually have a real relationship with the Creator of the universe.
(28:00):
Absolutely.
Yes.
And for them to realize that it's legitimate to experience Him maybe outside the four walls of the church.
And I've actually even talked to a few people who've been unchurched for quite a long time because of church hurt usually or something like that.
And then for them to start to come back into the fold, the community of the church, because they realized that what they experienced was not God.
(28:31):
They experienced humans being frail and making mistakes and being able to forgive, move past that and move back into the community.
And a big part of that is realizing that while God is perfect, humans are never going to be perfect this side of eternity.
And so we should continue to work alongside others.
(28:55):
And that's not negating church hurt, as you say.
There are people that have been hurt very deeply.
But finding a community that is not perfect but wants to meet with God is very important for us, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's important for the discipleship.
I don't think it's very easy to have a discipleship relationship outside of a community of believers.
(29:17):
I just don't see how that's possible.
It's not you and God.
It can't be.
It has to be you, God, and a community of others.
That's who the church is.
Cathy, I'm sure that there are people who will want to learn more of this journey that you've been on to grab hold of the book.
What's the easiest place for people to go to to find you?
(29:38):
Revelationship.net is the website.
And of course, that has the access to the book, though they can get the book anywhere, Amazon or wherever.
But also the devotional.
It has excerpts, large excerpts of the book.
And it has beautiful photography and graphics and questions and group discussion questions and immersive features to really make devotional come alive again, as well as a blog that I've been writing for 10 years.
(30:05):
It's full of five-minute meat so that a mom with busy children like myself can digest it while she's hiding away for a few minutes on her phone.
And then also there's ways to get a hold of me because I love to answer the hard questions.
If somebody contacts me and says, my issue is Sodom and Gomorrah, can you help me understand how that makes God look bad?
(30:31):
What does it say about him?
Can we answer that question?
And I'm happy to dive in on questions like that.
Cathy, I'm sure that people will want to contact you.
So I'm going to make sure that the links to your website and to the book are available at bleedingdaylight.net in the show notes.
And I just want to say thank you so much for the conversation that we've had today.
(30:53):
Thank you.
I've enjoyed it thoroughly.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
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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 and thanks for listening.
There are dozens of other episodes waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:29):
If you're inspired, why not help others discover Bleeding Daylight too?
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Our relationships with others can only grow as we learn more about people and allow ourselves to be known.
Today's guest believes the same applies to our connection to God.
(00:50):
Today she'll talk about growing our relationship through authentic revelation.
Joining me today is Cathy Garland, a compelling storyteller and co-author of Revelationship – Transformative Intimacy with Christ alongside her father, Dr Randy Culver.
(01:15):
Through deeply personal experiences, Cathy discovered profound revelations about God's character that transformed her spiritual journey.
Her unique perspective bridges classic theological understanding with raw authentic faith.
Revelationship explores how God reveals himself in both life's darkest moments and daily walks, offering a fresh approach to experiencing divine intimacy.
(01:42):
I'm so pleased to have her as my guest today.
Cathy, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you for having me.
I'm excited.
People often say that Christianity isn't a religion but a relationship and yet it can be difficult imagining a relationship with the creator of the universe.
Now I know that you would point to the very first relationship between God and man described in Genesis.
(02:07):
How has that helped to form your understanding?
People ask us in reading the book, what's the most important revelation?
And I always tell them it's the first one because it's first.
And there's a reason it's first in the Bible.
For my purposes, understanding God reading Genesis is just chock full of revelations.
(02:32):
But in Genesis, the first chapter particularly, we see how God is the creator and his desires of a relationship.
And then in chapter two, we see the unfolding of the Garden of Eden and Eve selecting to make herself God.
You know, that's really technically, of course, what happened.
(02:54):
It wasn't just the fruit.
I get a lot of atheists who tell me how can a God punish people just because they ate some fruit?
And that's not the point.
The point was that she wanted her will, her way, her want over a relationship.
And that's she got her will, her way, her want.
And he did too.
Adam did as well.
(03:15):
And look at the disaster we have.
But God set us up.
The whole thing is a setup and not in the sense of a negative setup, but it's a setup that in the end, he's going to win us.
He's going to win us if we choose the correct path, which would be to not eat the fruit, not choose our own will, our own way, and to call out and ask for help, which if Eve had done that, we would be in a totally different situation.
(03:40):
If Adam had done that, we would be in a totally different situation.
But we did choose that path.
We wouldn't choose that path.
If we were given the same choice, we would probably choose the same path they did.
And for most of our lives, we generally do until God gets ahold of us.
But the other setup side is that he knew we were going to choose that path and he set us up so it might take longer, but he was going to win us in the end.
(04:05):
He sent his son to win us in the end.
So it's all about being known and the relationship.
And when we look at that, we see even from the beginning, as you say, he knew which way we would turn and he had a plan to draw us back into relationship.
And I know that you discovered new life as you walked through the Old Testament, which sometimes can feel a bit dry.
(04:33):
And yet you started to see that through different eyes.
Tell me about that experience.
I did the whole read through the Bible of the year many times, you know, growing up in church.
But the problem with that is I can't say that I ever truly feasted on it until I hit a certain point in my walk with God of a level of maturity.
And I began to really feast on it, like Madame Gingouyan says, or Bonhoeffer suggests that we ought to do.
(04:58):
And I was starting over reading the Bible and I was dreading reading the begats and the sacrifices and the blood and the kill this and the kill that.
And for a woman particularly, it's a little off-putting, especially all the sacrifices.
There's a lot of animals that get sacrificed.
And it's a lot of Israel turning away and constantly being knocked out.
(05:21):
It's hard reading and it's dry and it's dusty.
But the Holy Spirit really spoke to my heart.
He said, look for Christ, look for God revealing himself.
So I turned to Genesis 1.1 and it says in the beginning, God, first revelation created second revelation.
He hovered over the waters and he brooded.
(05:43):
The Hebrew word there is brooding, you know, so there's this two revelations instantaneous.
And I was like, oh, wait a second here.
This is going to be good.
And it was.
I teach interns to look at those two chapters and to find as many revelations of God in the first two chapters of Genesis.
And you can generally find about 30 to 40 just in those two chapters.
(06:05):
And Genesis is full of revelation.
I just didn't know it because I wasn't looking for them.
And the one that inspired me to do that is lying in the witch in the wardrobe.
The children go off half cocked and do their own thing and people die.
They should have stopped, look for Aslan, who is, of course, a type of Christ.
And if they had, they could have done what Aslan was doing.
(06:26):
They could have joined in with him.
So sort of the framework that I already had.
And when the Lord said, look for me, it immediately clicked.
Look for Aslan.
Same thing, you know.
And so that really helped me.
That first revelation that you talked about in the beginning, God, it seems that we have turned that upside down, that we have chosen the way of Eve and Adam, of this is about me.
(06:53):
And even in the church today, we tend to say, well, what's in it for me?
What has God done for me?
And yet, as you say, the scripture begins with those words in the beginning, God.
How important is it if we are to build relationship with God that we realize it starts and ends with It's vital if we try to look for our own identity.
(07:17):
And it is a Christian saying, know your identity in God, know your identity in Christ.
But if they don't know God, they'll never know their identity in Christ.
It's like looking for your identity, completely lost in an ocean, a buoy lost in the ocean.
It's not going to work.
For example, when I work with women, counseling is sort of a wisdom counseling situation or a discipleship situation.
(07:41):
A lot of times they're anxious.
Anxiety is way higher than it used to be.
Anxiety seems to be the most prevalent thing, that and unforgiveness, I should say.
But anxiety is very prevalent for women.
I think they're on the front lines.
They're trying to raise children.
They're trying to juggle multiple roles, etc.
And their anxiety is high.
(08:03):
But if I introduce them to a theological concept that's highly practical, but takes a little bit to get your mind around, which is the omnipresence of God, it can absolutely change their anxiety levels.
So if I explain to them, God is not in a past, a present, or a future situation.
(08:25):
He is what we call eternally now.
He has no past.
He has no future.
He's only now.
It's always now to Him.
It might be our past, but He's already there.
And He's there at the same time as He is present with us.
And He's also present in the future, all at the same time, for all time, throughout time, because time has no boundaries for Him.
(08:48):
And if we
wrap our minds around the fact that God is still in the past, laying the foundations of the earth
right now, and still in our past, redeeming us, calling us from the sins that we were once
chasing after, but He's also present with us now, and He's also present in the future with the
victory, and we're standing there with Him, though we have not experienced it yet, but all at the
(09:15):
same time, they start to understand that not only is the future in God's hands, but He's already
there with the future in His hands, if that makes sense.
I can imagine some people are going to rewind that bit and listen to it a number of times to get their head around it.
And it is an interesting theological concept to get their head around.
(09:36):
And some people might say, well, that's all very well and good.
I know that Cathy grew up in a Christian home, and this is all theory, and it's fine.
And yet, your discovery of God, your discovery of that relationship, didn't just happen in that sort of isolated experience, did it?
You've walked through some very deep waters to get to where you are now.
(09:59):
Tell me about some of that.
Yeah.
When you're raised in the church, a daughter of a pastor, my parents were hippies, saved in the Jesus movement, so it wasn't the sort of traditional mainline church either.
It was Holy Spirit filled.
We believed in speaking in tongues and the gifts of the Spirit.
And it was pretty free as far as many of those kinds of things.
(10:23):
It wasn't a whole lot of rules.
I had to question it, though, at the age of about 13-ish, I would say, just about 13, I began to question whether or not Christianity was the right pathway.
It wasn't so much a question that God existed.
I just didn't know if their concept and how they were presenting Him was actually who He was.
(10:44):
And also, to be honest, there was some hypocrisy that I encountered.
The business mindset had kind of filtered into the church and taken over.
And we went from this sort of share everything, what is God doing in your life, knit group to a more business structure.
As a teenager observing that, it was very demoralizing to see that change.
(11:05):
So I did question.
But my dad, instead of panicking, he took me to the library.
He said, let's study this out.
And he got all these books on all these different religions.
We studied them.
And some of them were really easy to reject very quickly, but some of them were a little harder.
Buddhism took me longer to unravel, whereas the Muslim religion was chunked pretty fast.
(11:26):
But then, years later, people think, OK, so you grew up in church.
You had an easy life.
Well, not so fast.
I dated a man.
I married him on our honeymoon.
He told me he was addicted to pornography, that he wasn't going to have any more problems anymore.
He had kept that a secret.
He also told me he didn't want to have children and he never wanted to talk about it again.
(11:47):
So that was the beginning of some abuse and some lockdown.
You know, this is how it's going to be.
Within a few years, he divorced me.
During that time, that marriage, I lost my first child in miscarriage.
Several years later, I met a man who I fell in love with and later married.
He's my second husband.
Love him dearly.
But he broke up with me three times.
(12:09):
So there's that.
I broke my neck in a car accident.
I lost another child in miscarriage.
I waited 10 years for the birth of my son.
I could go on and on.
I mean, it's not an easy life, but through it all, the things that kept me were knowing God and knowing I was known by God.
(12:30):
The God who sees El Roy is the God who sees me and the injustice happening to me and the hardship I'm going through.
So the God who sees sees me.
It's extremely practical.
That is what I love about theology.
You're right.
A lot of people are saying, OK, that's scholars.
(12:51):
They want to talk about these high esoterical things.
No, no, no.
Theology is infinitely practical because our identity is rooted in who God is and theology is who God is.
Yeah, basically, theology is who we understand God to be.
It's interesting when we look at the fact that relationships are always fraught with danger, as you've just explained, and human relationships are always going to have hiccups along the way, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller.
(13:24):
How do we start to bridge that gap between our understanding of relationships because of the people around us that we have relationship with and a perfect relationship with a perfect father in God?
How do we start to get our mind around the fact that every other relationship has let me down in smaller or larger ways, and yet this is a relationship that is enduring and will not let me down?
(13:48):
You know, when I talk to people, I try to point them first to the holiness of God.
It's a concept we've lost and quite frankly was probably hijacked by people who wanted to control other people and created a whole definition of what holiness is, which is obeying laws, and holiness is not laws.
(14:09):
It's who God is and it's His very essence.
And so I will help people understand that holiness is His infinite perfection.
He can't do something wrong.
It's not possible.
His essence is perfection.
When people start there to understand a little bit about God's holiness, then they start to understand His holy otherness.
(14:33):
He's going to be so completely other than what we're used to that they can make room for Him to do things differently.
It's a holy love.
Stephen Charnock says it's the foundation of all His other attributes.
It's a holy love.
It's a holy justice.
It's a holy wrath.
That's a little harder to understand too, but once you understand holiness, you understand wrath.
(14:55):
Taking back what has been hijacked.
Holiness is important to our walk with God, not because we're going to achieve it on our own, but for the very simple fact that it's going to be His holiness that He imparts to us.
As abiding in the vine, He becomes our holiness.
He becomes our righteousness.
I know that a major plank of any relationship is communication, and our communication with God is through prayer.
(15:22):
Yet you're very keen in the book to point out that prayer shouldn't just be this begging for miracles that we've so often made it.
Can you walk us through that?
Yeah.
When I was growing up, I was all over the map on prayer, trying to figure it out, just like I was all over the map on trying to figure out purpose.
I must have gone to a number of youth conferences about how to hear the voice of God.
(15:46):
I can't even tell you how many times I listened to it, and it was very difficult to understand.
I understood that I could read the Bible, and that was very much the voice of God when He spoke.
But there's a lot of things in the Bible, like Abraham taking Hagar and kicking her out in the desert.
That's not God speaking.
So there's a lot that's not God speaking, and yet there's a lot in there that is God speaking.
(16:10):
I did have that, but I didn't really hear God's voice until I was about 20-ish, mid-20s, divorced, driving home, middle of a storm, very fed up with the current life I was living, which was all career and service to God and the church, but no relationship, no deep intimacy with Him, though I was doing all the things.
(16:41):
Before anybody asked, were you doing devotions?
Absolutely.
Was I reading the Bible?
Yes, I was.
Was I teaching the Bible?
Yes, I was, but I still lacked this depth.
So I was driving home, and I said to Him, Lord, can you just take me home?
I don't want to be here anymore.
Just take me home.
He spoke out of the passenger seat of my car, out loud, in a way that I had never experienced before and have not since, and He said, if you don't want your life, I do, which was a very clear message.
(17:15):
I almost drove off the side of the road and hit a tree, so I almost went home accidentally, but we had a bit of a conversation, but then I could recognize His voice in my head, because it was separate from, say, my father's voice telling me to remember to do this, or my mother's voice, or my own voice, or whatever, and so I could finally recognize His voice.
(17:39):
But then later, I also developed the ability to lean in and hear Him quickly.
So there's this, we pray and we wait a long time for an answer, but then there's times when we absolutely need to have an answer, and so I began to put myself in a position where I absolutely needed to have an answer.
These are sort of things like praying for mothers with sick children.
(18:03):
They need an answer.
There's not really any option, and so I would pray and intercede for them, and I would ask the Lord, what do you say about this situation?
And I only prayed what He said, and if He didn't say anything, I didn't pray anything, and that is a hard lesson to learn too.
Then, when I began to see extremely specific prayers answered, like He said, pray that their A1C rises to this level, I would pray that.
(18:31):
I'm not a nurse.
I just trusted, looked it up a little bit later to make sure I wasn't crazy, and absolutely, that was where it needed to be.
I prayed it.
I declared what I heard Him say.
I said, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I declare to this A1C to come into alignment with what the Holy Spirit has said, and then it would.
These miracles started happening, and so I began to trust that I was hearing from God.
(18:55):
Up to that point, it's a little hard to know, but if I put myself in a position to hear God, He speaks, I stand on it, and I don't say anything more.
We walk this balance between a God who wants to reveal Himself to us and wants to be known by us and Him being a God who hides.
(19:17):
Tell me about the God who hides.
Yes, there are instances in our life when the presence, the felt presence of God may not feel like it's close.
I have been through that when I broke my neck and I was on all those meds.
I could not feel God's presence.
It was the very first time in my whole life I hadn't felt God's presence.
(19:39):
There's other times, I think, when He sort of removes the presence, not to prove to Him that we'll follow Him, but so that we can be able to see what's in our heart.
Are we following God because of His benefits and because He's close and His presence is there and we feel Him, or are we obedient and able to follow even if we don't feel Him or hear Him on a particular topic or something like that?
(20:08):
Can we trust?
It's about trust.
It's sort of a trust exercise, I guess.
We want to discover who God is.
God wants to be discovered by us, and so we continually have this growing relationship where we get to know God.
As you say, God will speak through various ways.
He can speak in an audible voice.
He often speaks through the scriptures, but He will also talk through suffering.
(20:35):
You've touched on that a little bit, but how has your understanding of God actually grown through understanding Him through that suffering?
I think suffering is one of the best teachers.
It's not one we want to go out and sign up for, but it's the best teacher in some cases because if we don't have a need, then we're not going to be moved to care enough to ask Him for something we lack.
(21:05):
So if we don't have a lack, we won't ask Him to meet that need.
We won't ask Him to fill it with His own character and His attributes.
So suffering is the quickest way for us to silence all the things that do not matter.
When I have suffered, I don't care about my hair.
I don't care about makeup.
I don't care about what people think of me.
(21:27):
In certain cases, I just want to lay on the floor in a fetal position and cry because that's real.
I only want to hear from God.
Friends can try to comfort you and they can be there with you, and it's good to do that.
But what I really need is the one who sticks closer than a brother, and that's God.
In suffering, I reach for God.
(21:50):
I don't know that everybody's trained to lean into God during suffering, and in many cases, suffering does the opposite effect.
It pushes people away from God.
How could He do this to me?
Why has He done this?
Why did He send this to me, this suffering?
Even Job, when he suffered, threw some really interesting questions at the skies to have God respond to him, and God never did, of course, answer his question, but He did respond and He did come.
(22:18):
And I think that's the key.
God comes.
When we're suffering and we hurl whatever questions we have to the sky, He comes, which is probably one of my favorite revelations of God, the God who comes.
I know that as people listen, they're going to be hearing things that they say, yep, I can agree with that.
(22:38):
Other things that perhaps you've said that are new to them, and they say, well, is that really what the Scripture says?
And you talk about the God who disturbs us.
You talk about a God who is ready to reveal Himself in surprising ways.
In fact, you even talk about the fact that sometimes, even in church, we limit the work of the Holy Spirit, and yet God wants to be a God who disturbs us in a good way.
(23:05):
Tell me about that.
A lot of people talk about services being orderly and God is a God of order, and certainly He shows Himself to be a God of order just through His creation.
There's a lot of order in creation.
If there wasn't that order, we'd all be incinerated, right?
So it's very important.
But I have noticed that man's order is not the same as God's order, and sometimes He needs to disturb us.
(23:31):
The way He moves in the Old Testament when we read about the fire that comes out of the tent of meeting and burns up all those people who thought that they ought to be the head chief, those are disturbing situations.
Even when Christ came, and we were used to it, when He comes, He comes in unexpected ways many times.
(23:56):
If we put ourselves in a place where we're dependent upon God, He has to move on our behalf.
Let's say a missionary in another country.
Why is it that the missionaries have such great stories?
Because they're in a place where if God doesn't come and God doesn't move, some really bad things could happen.
The way He comes is to prove He's so different than the way we expect.
(24:20):
In a service, unfortunately, we don't make a lot of room for the God who disturbs or the God who comes in.
I am tempted to believe in some churches, if He walked in and started doing all sorts of whatever He wanted to do, miraculous touching hearts, causing us to feel repentance, to get down on our knees, somebody somewhere is going to be tapping their watch saying they're ready to wrap things up.
(24:48):
I can't say that every Sunday service has got to be like that, but there has to be room for Him to come into our lives and disturb the status quo.
I know that we have to walk that balance between allowing the Spirit to move, but also keeping order, as you say.
How do we walk that bridge between allowing the Spirit to move and people who would use that for their own purposes?
(25:14):
We all have heard of stories of people saying, well, I believe God is saying this or that, and we know that that clearly doesn't line up with Scripture, or this is just them trying to have their way.
How can we be on our guard against that, and yet at the same time letting our guard down to God?
Discipleship is probably the best answer to your question, and I don't think we have much good discipleship in the church.
(25:39):
It is not a Bible study.
It is not accountability.
It is living life together, understanding that I ask you any question and you answer it, and together we are searching the Scriptures to know what He says about a thing.
And then if we hear from God bringing it and saying, what do y'all think about this?
(26:01):
This is what I think I heard, or I had this dream, and I think this is an interpretation, but I don't know, what do you think?
And then they pray about it, they receive some instruction, they feel the prompting of the Holy Spirit, there's agreement, ah, now we have a decision.
That kind of discipleship doesn't happen anymore, hardly at all.
I know that we've touched on a number of the themes that are present in the book that you co-authored with your father, Revelationship, but I'm wondering, who do you see as the main audience for that book?
(26:32):
Who is going to gain the most from grabbing themselves a hold of that book and reading it through?
The audience that seems to grab it the most are long-time Christians, people whose first love has languished.
They understand that they're supposed to learn from the church being community and in worship in the four walls of the church, but they don't necessarily know that they ought to be incorporating the other ways of experiencing God.
(27:03):
Particularly, nature has stood out to a lot of people who maybe they thought that going out in nature and experiencing God was pagan somehow.
That has been one of the number one things people have said.
Another one is the whispering to the hurting.
So anyone who has lived more than five minutes on this earth has suffered somehow, and knowing that God is close to them, whispering to them, calling them back on a path, reminding them of their purpose and their destiny and their calling in Him and reaffirming it to them.
(27:39):
Those have been the things that I think have stood out to people the most in renewing their first love and pursuing Him as He pursues them.
It must be wonderful when you hear from some people that aha moment of realizing, I can actually have a real relationship with the Creator of the universe.
(28:00):
Absolutely.
Yes.
And for them to realize that it's legitimate to experience Him maybe outside the four walls of the church.
And I've actually even talked to a few people who've been unchurched for quite a long time because of church hurt usually or something like that.
And then for them to start to come back into the fold, the community of the church, because they realized that what they experienced was not God.
(28:31):
They experienced humans being frail and making mistakes and being able to forgive, move past that and move back into the community.
And a big part of that is realizing that while God is perfect, humans are never going to be perfect this side of eternity.
And so we should continue to work alongside others.
(28:55):
And that's not negating church hurt, as you say.
There are people that have been hurt very deeply.
But finding a community that is not perfect but wants to meet with God is very important for us, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's important for the discipleship.
I don't think it's very easy to have a discipleship relationship outside of a community of believers.
(29:17):
I just don't see how that's possible.
It's not you and God.
It can't be.
It has to be you, God, and a community of others.
That's who the church is.
Cathy, I'm sure that there are people who will want to learn more of this journey that you've been on to grab hold of the book.
What's the easiest place for people to go to to find you?
(29:38):
Revelationship.net is the website.
And of course, that has the access to the book, though they can get the book anywhere, Amazon or wherever.
But also the devotional.
It has excerpts, large excerpts of the book.
And it has beautiful photography and graphics and questions and group discussion questions and immersive features to really make devotional come alive again, as well as a blog that I've been writing for 10 years.
(30:05):
It's full of five-minute meat so that a mom with busy children like myself can digest it while she's hiding away for a few minutes on her phone.
And then also there's ways to get a hold of me because I love to answer the hard questions.
If somebody contacts me and says, my issue is Sodom and Gomorrah, can you help me understand how that makes God look bad?
(30:31):
What does it say about him?
Can we answer that question?
And I'm happy to dive in on questions like that.
Cathy, I'm sure that people will want to contact you.
So I'm going to make sure that the links to your website and to the book are available at bleedingdaylight.net in the show notes.
And I just want to say thank you so much for the conversation that we've had today.
(30:53):
Thank you.
I've enjoyed it thoroughly.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
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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