February 2, 2025 • 28 mins
In this powerful episode of Bleeding Daylight, Heather Bradley shares her transformative journey through the unimaginable loss of her infant son, Brennan. Facing profound grief, Heather discovered a deep spiritual renewal, turning her tragedy into a ministry of hope and healing through her work with Truth Freedom Ministry and her podcast, Leaving the Shallows.
Heather discusses how surrendering her pain to God became a catalyst for personal transformation and a mission to help others navigate their own challenging experiences. Her story illuminates the potential for spiritual growth through suffering, emphasizing that with faith, even the most devastating moments can become pathways to purpose, resilience, and a deeper connection with Jesus Christ.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:07):
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.
Sharing episodes of Bleeding Daylight with others helps more people hear inspirational stories of transformation.
(00:27):
Please consider how you'll share this episode as you listen.
There are dozens of other episodes waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
We all face trials and difficulties in life, but what do you do when the unthinkable happens?
Where do you turn when you're faced with unimaginable grief and trauma?
(00:51):
Today's guest has experienced her own unthinkable moment.
Today I'm in conversation with Heather Bradley, a woman who has transformed profound personal loss into a powerful ministry of hope and healing.
(01:13):
Founder of Truth Freedom Ministry and co-host of the Leaving the Shallows podcast, Heather brings a deeply compassionate perspective shaped by her own experience of losing her son Brennan and discovering spiritual purpose through her faith.
A pastoral care leader, Bible school graduate and mother of four, Heather's story is a testament to finding beauty amid life's most challenging moments.
(01:37):
Heather, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you so much.
I'm so excited to be here.
It's such an honor to get to know you today and join you in our conversation.
It's a fact of life that the most profound life-defining lessons do seem to come out of the deepest valleys in our lives.
And I'm wondering if you can take me back to that deep valley moment for you.
(02:00):
Yes, I'd love to share what I call my unthinkable story.
I did write a book called Unthinkable.
And in that book, I ask a question to the reader, what is your unthinkable story?
And I know in my own personal walk with Jesus and in life in general, we all have, it seems to be kind of a universal language, where we have had something happen to us that has the ability to define us and define who we are.
(02:29):
We can all relate somehow to some kind of pain and suffering and grief and loss.
In 1999, I had a son who was born with a heart defect.
And he was thriving pretty well.
And then around age four months, he stopped breathing.
We were sitting at home.
We had actually gone out that day to go to the grocery store.
(02:52):
At four months old, back in those days, you would go and buy their rice cereal and feed them their baby food for the first time.
So it was supposed to be a really exciting day.
But what ended up being a milestone for him and an exciting day turned into a day that's just literally etched in me forever.
And it turned into a defining moment and a very tragic moment because he stopped breathing in my living room.
(03:15):
I had to call 911, and the ambulance came.
And essentially, we ended up in the hospital, and within about four days, he passed away.
And we found out during that time that we were there that he was born with a heart defect.
My husband and I were in the hospital trying to pick up the pieces to all this.
And at one moment while we were there in the hospital, I had this epiphany because I thought maybe he was going to be healed.
(03:42):
You know, you always have hope in these situations.
Your mind just can't go to those unthinkable places, right?
That's not where we want to go.
They had kind of got him stable, and then at some point, he crashed again.
I remember them rushing us out of the room, and this fear just overtook me.
And I didn't know what to do.
(04:04):
And I found this little bathroom that was close to where his room was.
It was like a single bathroom.
And I walked in there, and I shut the door, and it was just me.
And I stared in the mirror, and I just felt like fear trembling over every part of my body.
All of a sudden, I realized I was thinking about God.
(04:26):
And I hadn't thought about God in a really long time.
Because as a little girl, I grew up knowing who Jesus was.
And I went to church, and I had my own experiences to know who He was.
But for years, I just knew about Him, but wasn't walking with Him and living my life for Him.
And I remember standing in that little bathroom thinking, why am I thinking about God right now?
(04:51):
As I was standing there with fear just like trembling over my body, not knowing what was about to happen, I heard from the Holy Spirit in my spirit, Heather, this is going to be about you coming back to me.
I didn't even know what to do with that at that moment.
My son ended up passing away.
We were just thrown into a tailspin of trauma, basically.
(05:15):
I remember leaving that hospital and going home that night.
I kept thinking about God.
My mom and sister were there.
They were running around the house.
I remember trying to put everything away that was Brennan's stuff.
But the thing was, you can't hide that, right?
We were there, and I knew everywhere I looked was a memory of Him, if that makes sense.
(05:36):
And so it's not like you just escape something like that.
We were pretty much in shock.
And I laid down in bed that night.
I felt my whole entire body, like I felt paralyzed.
I can't explain it.
It was like this heavy, heavy weight that had come upon me.
And I felt the Lord, Jesus Christ, come to me, and I got to see my son like in a vision.
(05:59):
I knew at that moment that Jesus had my son and that this was going to be really hard.
But I had to figure this out in Him.
It was a very powerful moment for me.
Of course, I'd love to say, Hey, that was it.
Jesus just healed me right then and then and bounced on in life like nothing happened.
But of course, that's not how these stories go.
(06:23):
I spent the next couple of years trying to process what happened and had PTSD, essentially, because it was so traumatic watching your child pass.
What I learned in that moment and what I experienced was a hand that reached down to me.
And it was God.
And He was saying, If you'll reach out to me, I'm going to take you through this.
(06:43):
And it was so powerful that I've literally had a passion and a love for Jesus ever since then.
But what I'm super passionate about and what I love, because I gained so much freedom and so much purpose from surrendering this painful tragedy story at the feet of Jesus and what He gave me in return.
(07:04):
I've been so passionate over the years to help other people in their hard places to get unstuck and to know that there's hope and to know that if they can surrender their pain at the feet of Jesus and grab ahold of His hand, that He's going to supernaturally give them an exchange.
He's going to walk them through the tragedy.
(07:24):
And I always say, in this world, nobody has to ask the question.
There's suffering, right?
Really, we just suffer to suffer.
It could be very hopeless.
But in Jesus Christ, we don't suffer to suffer.
We can identify in His suffering.
There's a scripture in Philippians 3.10, and it states, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and may share in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death.
(07:53):
I know that we often just want to focus on the mountaintop experiences with Jesus, the good things He gives us, and all of that is amazing.
And it is so true.
But we can't deny this other side of our human nature and our walk with Jesus and how He had to get up on that cross and how He had to suffer.
And it looked really bad.
(08:14):
When my son died, it looked really bad.
It looked like all was lost and that the world had ended.
And that's the same thing that it looked like when Jesus had to get up on that cross.
And oftentimes, we get stuck in that place.
We can't move from the bad thing, right?
We just stay there.
But when we can move to the other side of the cross, where the power of His resurrection is and the hope, then our life is radically changed.
(08:37):
And the thing that I love about Jesus so much is He suffered well.
We can learn so much from Him.
He suffered so well, and it was because He was obedient to the Father.
There's purpose in our suffering.
It doesn't have to be wasted.
It draws us closer to Jesus.
It makes us more like Him.
It's bringing about something in us.
That's what I learned from Him in that process, is that the tragedy could have defined me, and it defined so many people.
(09:02):
And that's where the devil, the enemy, wants to come in, the kingdom of darkness.
He wants to trap us in there.
But there's a scripture I love in the Bible, and it says, what the enemy means for harm, God uses for good.
But we've got to allow Him to use these painful stories for good by surrendering it to Him, inviting Him in, and allowing Him to take us through it.
(09:24):
We forget sometimes that there's so much power in our suffering if we'll only, with humbleness and humility, come to the cross with it and allow the Lord to heal us so that we gain that freedom and purpose.
And then what do we get to do?
We get to go minister to others.
We get to go help others get set free and get them to where they need to go.
Jesus wants to come and set us free so that we can be about the business of other people.
(09:48):
That's a kingdom mindset.
You mentioned that your book is called Unthinkable, and you talk about everyone having that unthinkable moment.
I'm wondering how you navigate that because it's not just your unthinkable moment, but it's an unthinkable moment for your husband.
You mentioned that your mom and your sister are busy around the house.
(10:10):
It's their unthinkable moment too.
How do we navigate our own unthinkable moment when it's impacting so many others around us?
When I was in the depths of that unthinkable moment, I had a daughter at the time, a little girl.
I had a husband who did not grow up in the church or even knew anything about Jesus Christ.
(10:32):
I had my mom there, my sister, the aunt, the grandma.
I mean, we had the extended family.
We had people at my husband's work.
It's amazing that in a situation like that, how many people rally around you and come to you.
But people have actually asked me, and I've often thought about, they're like, how can you walk through that and be okay with that story at this point?
(10:53):
Because they're trying to navigate this, and they're also being affected by these stories and their own places.
God sees such a bigger picture.
His ways are higher than us, right, is what the scriptures tell us.
And I believe in that moment, God could have come down into that little hospital room and healed Brennan.
He could have done anything.
But I do believe that he saw a bigger picture.
(11:15):
And one of my other favorite scriptures is 2 Corinthians 4, 17.
And it says, For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is internal.
I love that.
The Lord is telling us that what we go through here is light and momentary.
(11:39):
It's such a short time.
And so when he looked down and could see this bigger picture in my life, yes, it was painful.
Yes, it hurt.
Just like Jesus.
He knew what he was going to walk through.
So out of this unthinkable story, my whole entire family was radically saved and came to Jesus Christ.
We've never been the same.
And not only that, it had a big implication with people my husband worked with.
(12:02):
God saw a bigger picture there than just that light and momentary affliction that we were going to walk through.
He could look down and know that he could radically heal and change, and that the story would radically help others walk through their pain.
Because that's the thing.
When you're going through something really hard, what are you looking for more than anything?
(12:23):
You're looking for a lifeline.
You're looking for hope.
You're looking for someone to say, you can get through this.
Here's the way.
It happened for me, and I know the answer.
People need that.
They've got to have hope in their stories.
When we allow the Lord to heal us in this, then we are the ones that get to turn around and say, hey, I've been there.
(12:48):
I know my story may not be your story, but pain, suffering, all that, it's a universal language.
We can all relate to suffering to some degree in different ways in our own lives.
And it does not have to be the same story, but people need hope.
Just help me know that this isn't it.
(13:09):
This isn't where I'm going to stay stuck for the rest of my life, because it can feel that way.
And you mentioned that lifeline, that you need someone who can lead you forward, and you've had the opportunity to do that for others now.
Who was the lifeline for you at that time?
I'll be honest with you.
At that moment, other than my family, I didn't have anyone.
(13:33):
I didn't know anybody who had walked through something like I did.
I was a brand new believer, barely coming to a church to create relationships and find my way in that.
With everything in me at that moment in time, I had got up every day and I said, Jesus, if you don't show up, I've got nothing.
(13:55):
Because He was my literal lifeline.
And I read the word, I prayed, and like I said, it was a couple of years of walking through PTSD.
Obviously, each morning I was able to get up.
And as hard as it was, I found mercy there and His grace and His hand extending down.
But at that time, I didn't have anyone who was like, Hey, let me help you.
(14:18):
I've been there.
And I think that's one of the reasons why, the hard things I've gone through in life, I've really wanted to turn around and help others find that place, because I didn't have it.
We don't always have someone, but the bottom line is for me, I obviously learned that Jesus was enough and was everything.
And He can be enough and He is everything.
(14:41):
And He works through us, His children.
And we should be about that.
We should be about extending that hand and helping others.
But at that time, I didn't have that.
I was desperate at the feet of Jesus.
That's why I think that He knew, and He meets us where we are, and He knew that I was saying, If you don't show up, I've got nothing here.
(15:02):
You've got to show up.
You've got to show me all the things here.
I've got to know you.
When my son died, I wasn't in the Word of God, and I didn't have it all memorized, and I didn't have anything.
But this is how amazing that God works and the Holy Spirit.
Because there's a scripture in 2 Samuel 12, and it's a story about King David.
(15:25):
And I'm not going to read the whole scripture.
You can go read it.
It's really long.
But I'll get to the point of it.
It's a story about King David, and he had sinned, and he knew he had sinned against God.
And a prophet, Nathan, came to call him out and all the things.
Well, in the midst of all this craziness, he has a son.
The baby ends up passing away in this story.
King David is fasting and praying and hoping the child will be healed, and just mourning and falling apart.
(15:51):
After King David finds out his son died, he gets up and he moves on with life.
And they're like, this is so weird.
Why were you falling apart while there was still hope?
Because now you're like moving on after this doesn't add up.
And right after my son died, I don't know how the Lord got me that scripture, but he did.
And there's this one little verse, and it says, King David says, Can I bring him back again?
(16:15):
I will go to him.
He's referring to his son.
But he will not return to me.
And the Lord brought me that scripture supernaturally.
That's the only way I can explain it.
And all of a sudden it became my obsession.
It was like, Jesus, my son is with you.
You've shown me this.
I don't know how to get to you.
I got to figure all this out.
(16:36):
But my son is there and I'm going there too.
And it's like what David was saying, because you're filled with grief and you're like, I want to go where they are because the grief is so, so intense.
But in that place was God's mercy.
And he met me in that space.
And he knew that maybe my intention at that moment was, I need to get to my son.
And Jesus is the way.
(16:57):
That's where he really spoke to me and got my attention and radically, radically changed my life and my husband's too.
The statistics of people who lose a child is like crazy, like 99%, 98% of people don't make it.
They usually end in divorce.
The statistics are really high.
That's a miracle in and of itself.
(17:19):
And I'm not saying it was easy.
I'm just saying that because we submitted to God, he radically saved us and changed the story into something much different than it could have turned out to be.
I'm sure you never wanted the death of your son, but out of it has come so much.
Tell me about Truth Freedom Ministry.
(17:39):
I have an online social media ministry, and it's called Truth Freedom Ministry.
And it's really about the word of God.
It's about truth and who Jesus is brings you freedom, because that's my thing.
I love the scripture in 2 Corinthians 3, 17.
It's about where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
Years ago, the name came to me.
(18:00):
I just heard the Lord really just tell me, go online, that's where people are, and begin to encourage people with the word.
And that's how I began to write.
I just started writing almost like a devotional, like, what's the scripture you want me to share?
What do you want me to share, Lord?
And at one time, I had a bunch of writers with me.
It's kind of morphed to this, where it's just me now.
But it's just an online space.
(18:22):
I just encourage people in the hard things and how to get through them and just to grow deeper roots with Jesus Christ and kind of help them along the way.
I have a podcast too that I co-host with my good friend Jackie, and it's called Leaving the Shallows.
We just have conversations just like this, and we really concentrate on the scriptures and really try to equip our listeners to get out of the shallow end of Christianity and to go really deeper with God and to really take Him and trust Him and go out there on a limb and really get a grounding for the word of God.
(18:57):
So it's just ministry, helping others to get closer to Jesus, which is just my heart, to dig deeper and make Him your everything.
It's interesting that you combine truth and freedom in the title of your ministry, because some people think that freedom is just a feeling that's disconnected from everything, and yet, without truth, we don't have that freedom, do we?
(19:21):
No.
It's amazing what we can tell ourself in our human nature, our logic, and what the kingdom of darkness, the enemy, wants to trap us in.
We think, oh, if I follow God, then I'm going to have all these limits on my life, or I'm not going to have freedom to do this, but it's the power of the Holy Spirit in us.
(19:41):
That's the gift.
He said, Jesus said, I'm giving you literally a down payment of what's to come.
He did not leave us or forsake us here.
He gave us a down payment, and that's the Spirit inside of us.
And that, to me, empowers us to live as Jesus does, to live as He wants us to do, to overcome our strongholds, our fears, our limitations, whatever's trapping us in our sinful nature.
(20:10):
Are we perfect?
No.
We have a whole lifetime to get going where we're going, but we should be able to look back every year of our life, I would think, and say, man, God brought me here.
I'm over here now.
I'm not over there anymore.
And that's really our process of working it out.
The Bible also talks about the battle is in our mind.
(20:31):
It's our mindset.
So when we have the power of the Holy Spirit in us to choose to do what God would have us do and walk in that, and we have the authority of Jesus Christ in us, and we have the scriptures, and I always say it's like re-wallpapering our mind.
God says to renew our mind and our battlefields there.
And if we don't know the scriptures, if we don't know what the actual word says, then when the thoughts come that want to trap us and keep us not in freedom, that's for sure, that's bondage that we can tend to believe the lies of the enemy.
(21:04):
But when we know the word of God and it becomes how we think, it's our mindset is literally renewed.
Then it starts to become in our DNA.
It's who we are.
We just start thinking like this.
The Bible says we have the mind of Christ, and then it becomes to our hands is what I always say.
Then we start living like that and it becomes who we are.
So the word is powerful.
(21:24):
It's alive.
It transform us.
It does not return void.
The words that we sow in our prayer and the scriptures, we sow the S O W.
I love that scripture, like about the sowing and reaping concept that Jesus taught us, because what we speak and what we say and what we pray, it's the power to bring a harvest.
And we have to believe and stand on that word.
(21:44):
And that's where freedom comes.
It's not the truth that I believe.
It's not the truth that you believe.
It's not the truth that the news tells us or anybody it's coming in an encounter with the living God and having our spirit born again, coming alive.
That allows us to see the word of God and who he is and where we encounter this truth that has the power to bring us the freedom that we can walk in as overcomers in this lifetime.
(22:15):
And we don't have to wait to someday to experience that we're experiencing him now.
I want to come back to your book unthinkable, which came out of your own unthinkable moment.
Who do you think the book is really suited to?
Is it people that have already gone through that moment or is it going to be helpful for a wider audience?
(22:36):
I think my book is for the person who's definitely gone through something painful or tragic, or they're suffering from something they can't get unstuck from.
I think that if you've gone through something like that in your life and you're like, I am feeling defined by this and I don't know how to gain momentum.
(23:00):
I don't know how to move forward.
This book is going to reveal to you the truth of Jesus Christ and what he can do for you in that situation when you surrender and grab a hold of his hand.
And it's definitely going to have you walking towards him into freedom.
And I also think it's for a person who has walked through something and maybe they have overcome it, but they just want to maybe go a little deeper with processing that and what Jesus maybe did for them.
(23:31):
And maybe they need to go deeper in it or they want to use it as a ministry tool.
I've had women ask me, do you have discussion questions?
Can I use this book in my group at church?
I keep copies on hand because the Holy Spirit leads me all the time.
I meet people all the time and he'll say, give that person a book.
I didn't write the book so that I could go and sell it and be like, Hey, I'm an author.
(23:53):
I did it out of obedience to the Holy Spirit.
And to me, it's a ministry tool and I know that it's helping others get freedom.
Where I work right now, there was a lady that came who just lost her husband immediately.
I knew right where she was.
The Holy Spirit's like, go get one of your books and share it with her.
And I did.
And I told her a little bit of why I was giving it to her.
(24:14):
And in that moment, what I love about that is she was like, God sees me.
God sees me right now.
And this is hard.
And this girl has her own story, but Jesus met her there.
And okay, now I have some hope.
I love that more than anything.
I want to touch on your podcast.
Once again, you mentioned it.
What are some of the topics that you have covered in the Leaving the Shallows podcast?
(24:38):
Oh, man, we've covered a lot of things.
We've talked a lot about our own personal stories, but we always go deep in biblical stories.
Like we've talked about how to handle transition, how to handle when God asks you to lay something down that, you know, that he clearly gave you a vision for the Bible stories like Abraham and stuff who were given visions and dreams and callings.
(25:01):
And then sometimes we get these things, as you know, and it's all of a sudden our life takes a different turn.
We like to navigate those kinds of conversations.
We tackle hard things.
Why is there suffering?
Why did Jesus have to die the way he did?
We like to tackle people's questions and then just give them some truth in it.
(25:21):
So sometimes we'll ask our audience, Hey, send us in a question or something and we'll try to tackle it.
And we don't come at it.
Like we're some major theologian Bible scholars.
What we love on our podcast is we'll say, okay, I think I know something about that, but then we'll go study it deeply and then come on there and say, we don't have all the answers, but this is what we're learning too.
(25:45):
And this is what the Lord has shown us.
I've shared other testimonies.
I love to speak about gaining our authority and freedom over the enemy.
Don't let him take us down in those places and teaching people a little about spiritual warfare, those types of topics, just kind of just whatever the Lord leads us in.
We're very Holy spirit led.
Just Lord, what do you want us to talk about next time?
(26:07):
Cause we're learning too.
And we're kind of taking our audience on a journey.
Like let's all learn this together.
I imagine that as people ask questions and you have to study deeply that God is using that to build into you as well.
Yes.
It's growing our faith deeper.
We're trying to help people grow their faith, get them to get closer to Jesus.
(26:29):
While we're saying, we're also learning here.
This isn't like you just, Oh, I arrived one day and I know everything there is because you know, I got a podcast, my friend Jack, you know, we love to talk about Jesus.
That's just the thing.
So we like to have conversations about it all.
And we're like, come along with us for the ride.
We're learning all the things too.
There's a lot that you're involved in.
(26:51):
Certainly there is truth, freedom, ministry, leaving the shallows podcast.
And of course your book unthinkable.
If people want to get in touch with you, where's the easiest place for people to find you?
Instagram is a great place.
You can go to truth, freedom ministry.
That's my handle there.
But I also have a website, truth, freedom, ministry.com.
(27:13):
And you can find all the things there.
That's probably the easiest.
And you can find my book on Amazon.
And I will put links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you very easily.
Heather, it's been a delight to talk to you.
Thank you for being so open with your story and using it to help other people become unstuck.
(27:33):
It's been a delight to have you.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
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.
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.
Sharing episodes of Bleeding Daylight with others helps more people hear inspirational stories of transformation.
(00:27):
Please consider how you'll share this episode as you listen.
There are dozens of other episodes waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
We all face trials and difficulties in life, but what do you do when the unthinkable happens?
Where do you turn when you're faced with unimaginable grief and trauma?
(00:51):
Today's guest has experienced her own unthinkable moment.
Today I'm in conversation with Heather Bradley, a woman who has transformed profound personal loss into a powerful ministry of hope and healing.
(01:13):
Founder of Truth Freedom Ministry and co-host of the Leaving the Shallows podcast, Heather brings a deeply compassionate perspective shaped by her own experience of losing her son Brennan and discovering spiritual purpose through her faith.
A pastoral care leader, Bible school graduate and mother of four, Heather's story is a testament to finding beauty amid life's most challenging moments.
(01:37):
Heather, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you so much.
I'm so excited to be here.
It's such an honor to get to know you today and join you in our conversation.
It's a fact of life that the most profound life-defining lessons do seem to come out of the deepest valleys in our lives.
And I'm wondering if you can take me back to that deep valley moment for you.
(02:00):
Yes, I'd love to share what I call my unthinkable story.
I did write a book called Unthinkable.
And in that book, I ask a question to the reader, what is your unthinkable story?
And I know in my own personal walk with Jesus and in life in general, we all have, it seems to be kind of a universal language, where we have had something happen to us that has the ability to define us and define who we are.
(02:29):
We can all relate somehow to some kind of pain and suffering and grief and loss.
In 1999, I had a son who was born with a heart defect.
And he was thriving pretty well.
And then around age four months, he stopped breathing.
We were sitting at home.
We had actually gone out that day to go to the grocery store.
(02:52):
At four months old, back in those days, you would go and buy their rice cereal and feed them their baby food for the first time.
So it was supposed to be a really exciting day.
But what ended up being a milestone for him and an exciting day turned into a day that's just literally etched in me forever.
And it turned into a defining moment and a very tragic moment because he stopped breathing in my living room.
(03:15):
I had to call 911, and the ambulance came.
And essentially, we ended up in the hospital, and within about four days, he passed away.
And we found out during that time that we were there that he was born with a heart defect.
My husband and I were in the hospital trying to pick up the pieces to all this.
And at one moment while we were there in the hospital, I had this epiphany because I thought maybe he was going to be healed.
(03:42):
You know, you always have hope in these situations.
Your mind just can't go to those unthinkable places, right?
That's not where we want to go.
They had kind of got him stable, and then at some point, he crashed again.
I remember them rushing us out of the room, and this fear just overtook me.
And I didn't know what to do.
(04:04):
And I found this little bathroom that was close to where his room was.
It was like a single bathroom.
And I walked in there, and I shut the door, and it was just me.
And I stared in the mirror, and I just felt like fear trembling over every part of my body.
All of a sudden, I realized I was thinking about God.
(04:26):
And I hadn't thought about God in a really long time.
Because as a little girl, I grew up knowing who Jesus was.
And I went to church, and I had my own experiences to know who He was.
But for years, I just knew about Him, but wasn't walking with Him and living my life for Him.
And I remember standing in that little bathroom thinking, why am I thinking about God right now?
(04:51):
As I was standing there with fear just like trembling over my body, not knowing what was about to happen, I heard from the Holy Spirit in my spirit, Heather, this is going to be about you coming back to me.
I didn't even know what to do with that at that moment.
My son ended up passing away.
We were just thrown into a tailspin of trauma, basically.
(05:15):
I remember leaving that hospital and going home that night.
I kept thinking about God.
My mom and sister were there.
They were running around the house.
I remember trying to put everything away that was Brennan's stuff.
But the thing was, you can't hide that, right?
We were there, and I knew everywhere I looked was a memory of Him, if that makes sense.
(05:36):
And so it's not like you just escape something like that.
We were pretty much in shock.
And I laid down in bed that night.
I felt my whole entire body, like I felt paralyzed.
I can't explain it.
It was like this heavy, heavy weight that had come upon me.
And I felt the Lord, Jesus Christ, come to me, and I got to see my son like in a vision.
(05:59):
I knew at that moment that Jesus had my son and that this was going to be really hard.
But I had to figure this out in Him.
It was a very powerful moment for me.
Of course, I'd love to say, Hey, that was it.
Jesus just healed me right then and then and bounced on in life like nothing happened.
But of course, that's not how these stories go.
(06:23):
I spent the next couple of years trying to process what happened and had PTSD, essentially, because it was so traumatic watching your child pass.
What I learned in that moment and what I experienced was a hand that reached down to me.
And it was God.
And He was saying, If you'll reach out to me, I'm going to take you through this.
(06:43):
And it was so powerful that I've literally had a passion and a love for Jesus ever since then.
But what I'm super passionate about and what I love, because I gained so much freedom and so much purpose from surrendering this painful tragedy story at the feet of Jesus and what He gave me in return.
(07:04):
I've been so passionate over the years to help other people in their hard places to get unstuck and to know that there's hope and to know that if they can surrender their pain at the feet of Jesus and grab ahold of His hand, that He's going to supernaturally give them an exchange.
He's going to walk them through the tragedy.
(07:24):
And I always say, in this world, nobody has to ask the question.
There's suffering, right?
Really, we just suffer to suffer.
It could be very hopeless.
But in Jesus Christ, we don't suffer to suffer.
We can identify in His suffering.
There's a scripture in Philippians 3.10, and it states, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and may share in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death.
(07:53):
I know that we often just want to focus on the mountaintop experiences with Jesus, the good things He gives us, and all of that is amazing.
And it is so true.
But we can't deny this other side of our human nature and our walk with Jesus and how He had to get up on that cross and how He had to suffer.
And it looked really bad.
(08:14):
When my son died, it looked really bad.
It looked like all was lost and that the world had ended.
And that's the same thing that it looked like when Jesus had to get up on that cross.
And oftentimes, we get stuck in that place.
We can't move from the bad thing, right?
We just stay there.
But when we can move to the other side of the cross, where the power of His resurrection is and the hope, then our life is radically changed.
(08:37):
And the thing that I love about Jesus so much is He suffered well.
We can learn so much from Him.
He suffered so well, and it was because He was obedient to the Father.
There's purpose in our suffering.
It doesn't have to be wasted.
It draws us closer to Jesus.
It makes us more like Him.
It's bringing about something in us.
That's what I learned from Him in that process, is that the tragedy could have defined me, and it defined so many people.
(09:02):
And that's where the devil, the enemy, wants to come in, the kingdom of darkness.
He wants to trap us in there.
But there's a scripture I love in the Bible, and it says, what the enemy means for harm, God uses for good.
But we've got to allow Him to use these painful stories for good by surrendering it to Him, inviting Him in, and allowing Him to take us through it.
(09:24):
We forget sometimes that there's so much power in our suffering if we'll only, with humbleness and humility, come to the cross with it and allow the Lord to heal us so that we gain that freedom and purpose.
And then what do we get to do?
We get to go minister to others.
We get to go help others get set free and get them to where they need to go.
Jesus wants to come and set us free so that we can be about the business of other people.
(09:48):
That's a kingdom mindset.
You mentioned that your book is called Unthinkable, and you talk about everyone having that unthinkable moment.
I'm wondering how you navigate that because it's not just your unthinkable moment, but it's an unthinkable moment for your husband.
You mentioned that your mom and your sister are busy around the house.
(10:10):
It's their unthinkable moment too.
How do we navigate our own unthinkable moment when it's impacting so many others around us?
When I was in the depths of that unthinkable moment, I had a daughter at the time, a little girl.
I had a husband who did not grow up in the church or even knew anything about Jesus Christ.
(10:32):
I had my mom there, my sister, the aunt, the grandma.
I mean, we had the extended family.
We had people at my husband's work.
It's amazing that in a situation like that, how many people rally around you and come to you.
But people have actually asked me, and I've often thought about, they're like, how can you walk through that and be okay with that story at this point?
(10:53):
Because they're trying to navigate this, and they're also being affected by these stories and their own places.
God sees such a bigger picture.
His ways are higher than us, right, is what the scriptures tell us.
And I believe in that moment, God could have come down into that little hospital room and healed Brennan.
He could have done anything.
But I do believe that he saw a bigger picture.
(11:15):
And one of my other favorite scriptures is 2 Corinthians 4, 17.
And it says, For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is internal.
I love that.
The Lord is telling us that what we go through here is light and momentary.
(11:39):
It's such a short time.
And so when he looked down and could see this bigger picture in my life, yes, it was painful.
Yes, it hurt.
Just like Jesus.
He knew what he was going to walk through.
So out of this unthinkable story, my whole entire family was radically saved and came to Jesus Christ.
We've never been the same.
And not only that, it had a big implication with people my husband worked with.
(12:02):
God saw a bigger picture there than just that light and momentary affliction that we were going to walk through.
He could look down and know that he could radically heal and change, and that the story would radically help others walk through their pain.
Because that's the thing.
When you're going through something really hard, what are you looking for more than anything?
(12:23):
You're looking for a lifeline.
You're looking for hope.
You're looking for someone to say, you can get through this.
Here's the way.
It happened for me, and I know the answer.
People need that.
They've got to have hope in their stories.
When we allow the Lord to heal us in this, then we are the ones that get to turn around and say, hey, I've been there.
(12:48):
I know my story may not be your story, but pain, suffering, all that, it's a universal language.
We can all relate to suffering to some degree in different ways in our own lives.
And it does not have to be the same story, but people need hope.
Just help me know that this isn't it.
(13:09):
This isn't where I'm going to stay stuck for the rest of my life, because it can feel that way.
And you mentioned that lifeline, that you need someone who can lead you forward, and you've had the opportunity to do that for others now.
Who was the lifeline for you at that time?
I'll be honest with you.
At that moment, other than my family, I didn't have anyone.
(13:33):
I didn't know anybody who had walked through something like I did.
I was a brand new believer, barely coming to a church to create relationships and find my way in that.
With everything in me at that moment in time, I had got up every day and I said, Jesus, if you don't show up, I've got nothing.
(13:55):
Because He was my literal lifeline.
And I read the word, I prayed, and like I said, it was a couple of years of walking through PTSD.
Obviously, each morning I was able to get up.
And as hard as it was, I found mercy there and His grace and His hand extending down.
But at that time, I didn't have anyone who was like, Hey, let me help you.
(14:18):
I've been there.
And I think that's one of the reasons why, the hard things I've gone through in life, I've really wanted to turn around and help others find that place, because I didn't have it.
We don't always have someone, but the bottom line is for me, I obviously learned that Jesus was enough and was everything.
And He can be enough and He is everything.
(14:41):
And He works through us, His children.
And we should be about that.
We should be about extending that hand and helping others.
But at that time, I didn't have that.
I was desperate at the feet of Jesus.
That's why I think that He knew, and He meets us where we are, and He knew that I was saying, If you don't show up, I've got nothing here.
(15:02):
You've got to show up.
You've got to show me all the things here.
I've got to know you.
When my son died, I wasn't in the Word of God, and I didn't have it all memorized, and I didn't have anything.
But this is how amazing that God works and the Holy Spirit.
Because there's a scripture in 2 Samuel 12, and it's a story about King David.
(15:25):
And I'm not going to read the whole scripture.
You can go read it.
It's really long.
But I'll get to the point of it.
It's a story about King David, and he had sinned, and he knew he had sinned against God.
And a prophet, Nathan, came to call him out and all the things.
Well, in the midst of all this craziness, he has a son.
The baby ends up passing away in this story.
King David is fasting and praying and hoping the child will be healed, and just mourning and falling apart.
(15:51):
After King David finds out his son died, he gets up and he moves on with life.
And they're like, this is so weird.
Why were you falling apart while there was still hope?
Because now you're like moving on after this doesn't add up.
And right after my son died, I don't know how the Lord got me that scripture, but he did.
And there's this one little verse, and it says, King David says, Can I bring him back again?
(16:15):
I will go to him.
He's referring to his son.
But he will not return to me.
And the Lord brought me that scripture supernaturally.
That's the only way I can explain it.
And all of a sudden it became my obsession.
It was like, Jesus, my son is with you.
You've shown me this.
I don't know how to get to you.
I got to figure all this out.
(16:36):
But my son is there and I'm going there too.
And it's like what David was saying, because you're filled with grief and you're like, I want to go where they are because the grief is so, so intense.
But in that place was God's mercy.
And he met me in that space.
And he knew that maybe my intention at that moment was, I need to get to my son.
And Jesus is the way.
(16:57):
That's where he really spoke to me and got my attention and radically, radically changed my life and my husband's too.
The statistics of people who lose a child is like crazy, like 99%, 98% of people don't make it.
They usually end in divorce.
The statistics are really high.
That's a miracle in and of itself.
(17:19):
And I'm not saying it was easy.
I'm just saying that because we submitted to God, he radically saved us and changed the story into something much different than it could have turned out to be.
I'm sure you never wanted the death of your son, but out of it has come so much.
Tell me about Truth Freedom Ministry.
(17:39):
I have an online social media ministry, and it's called Truth Freedom Ministry.
And it's really about the word of God.
It's about truth and who Jesus is brings you freedom, because that's my thing.
I love the scripture in 2 Corinthians 3, 17.
It's about where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
Years ago, the name came to me.
(18:00):
I just heard the Lord really just tell me, go online, that's where people are, and begin to encourage people with the word.
And that's how I began to write.
I just started writing almost like a devotional, like, what's the scripture you want me to share?
What do you want me to share, Lord?
And at one time, I had a bunch of writers with me.
It's kind of morphed to this, where it's just me now.
But it's just an online space.
(18:22):
I just encourage people in the hard things and how to get through them and just to grow deeper roots with Jesus Christ and kind of help them along the way.
I have a podcast too that I co-host with my good friend Jackie, and it's called Leaving the Shallows.
We just have conversations just like this, and we really concentrate on the scriptures and really try to equip our listeners to get out of the shallow end of Christianity and to go really deeper with God and to really take Him and trust Him and go out there on a limb and really get a grounding for the word of God.
(18:57):
So it's just ministry, helping others to get closer to Jesus, which is just my heart, to dig deeper and make Him your everything.
It's interesting that you combine truth and freedom in the title of your ministry, because some people think that freedom is just a feeling that's disconnected from everything, and yet, without truth, we don't have that freedom, do we?
(19:21):
No.
It's amazing what we can tell ourself in our human nature, our logic, and what the kingdom of darkness, the enemy, wants to trap us in.
We think, oh, if I follow God, then I'm going to have all these limits on my life, or I'm not going to have freedom to do this, but it's the power of the Holy Spirit in us.
(19:41):
That's the gift.
He said, Jesus said, I'm giving you literally a down payment of what's to come.
He did not leave us or forsake us here.
He gave us a down payment, and that's the Spirit inside of us.
And that, to me, empowers us to live as Jesus does, to live as He wants us to do, to overcome our strongholds, our fears, our limitations, whatever's trapping us in our sinful nature.
(20:10):
Are we perfect?
No.
We have a whole lifetime to get going where we're going, but we should be able to look back every year of our life, I would think, and say, man, God brought me here.
I'm over here now.
I'm not over there anymore.
And that's really our process of working it out.
The Bible also talks about the battle is in our mind.
(20:31):
It's our mindset.
So when we have the power of the Holy Spirit in us to choose to do what God would have us do and walk in that, and we have the authority of Jesus Christ in us, and we have the scriptures, and I always say it's like re-wallpapering our mind.
God says to renew our mind and our battlefields there.
And if we don't know the scriptures, if we don't know what the actual word says, then when the thoughts come that want to trap us and keep us not in freedom, that's for sure, that's bondage that we can tend to believe the lies of the enemy.
(21:04):
But when we know the word of God and it becomes how we think, it's our mindset is literally renewed.
Then it starts to become in our DNA.
It's who we are.
We just start thinking like this.
The Bible says we have the mind of Christ, and then it becomes to our hands is what I always say.
Then we start living like that and it becomes who we are.
So the word is powerful.
(21:24):
It's alive.
It transform us.
It does not return void.
The words that we sow in our prayer and the scriptures, we sow the S O W.
I love that scripture, like about the sowing and reaping concept that Jesus taught us, because what we speak and what we say and what we pray, it's the power to bring a harvest.
And we have to believe and stand on that word.
(21:44):
And that's where freedom comes.
It's not the truth that I believe.
It's not the truth that you believe.
It's not the truth that the news tells us or anybody it's coming in an encounter with the living God and having our spirit born again, coming alive.
That allows us to see the word of God and who he is and where we encounter this truth that has the power to bring us the freedom that we can walk in as overcomers in this lifetime.
(22:15):
And we don't have to wait to someday to experience that we're experiencing him now.
I want to come back to your book unthinkable, which came out of your own unthinkable moment.
Who do you think the book is really suited to?
Is it people that have already gone through that moment or is it going to be helpful for a wider audience?
(22:36):
I think my book is for the person who's definitely gone through something painful or tragic, or they're suffering from something they can't get unstuck from.
I think that if you've gone through something like that in your life and you're like, I am feeling defined by this and I don't know how to gain momentum.
(23:00):
I don't know how to move forward.
This book is going to reveal to you the truth of Jesus Christ and what he can do for you in that situation when you surrender and grab a hold of his hand.
And it's definitely going to have you walking towards him into freedom.
And I also think it's for a person who has walked through something and maybe they have overcome it, but they just want to maybe go a little deeper with processing that and what Jesus maybe did for them.
(23:31):
And maybe they need to go deeper in it or they want to use it as a ministry tool.
I've had women ask me, do you have discussion questions?
Can I use this book in my group at church?
I keep copies on hand because the Holy Spirit leads me all the time.
I meet people all the time and he'll say, give that person a book.
I didn't write the book so that I could go and sell it and be like, Hey, I'm an author.
(23:53):
I did it out of obedience to the Holy Spirit.
And to me, it's a ministry tool and I know that it's helping others get freedom.
Where I work right now, there was a lady that came who just lost her husband immediately.
I knew right where she was.
The Holy Spirit's like, go get one of your books and share it with her.
And I did.
And I told her a little bit of why I was giving it to her.
(24:14):
And in that moment, what I love about that is she was like, God sees me.
God sees me right now.
And this is hard.
And this girl has her own story, but Jesus met her there.
And okay, now I have some hope.
I love that more than anything.
I want to touch on your podcast.
Once again, you mentioned it.
What are some of the topics that you have covered in the Leaving the Shallows podcast?
(24:38):
Oh, man, we've covered a lot of things.
We've talked a lot about our own personal stories, but we always go deep in biblical stories.
Like we've talked about how to handle transition, how to handle when God asks you to lay something down that, you know, that he clearly gave you a vision for the Bible stories like Abraham and stuff who were given visions and dreams and callings.
(25:01):
And then sometimes we get these things, as you know, and it's all of a sudden our life takes a different turn.
We like to navigate those kinds of conversations.
We tackle hard things.
Why is there suffering?
Why did Jesus have to die the way he did?
We like to tackle people's questions and then just give them some truth in it.
(25:21):
So sometimes we'll ask our audience, Hey, send us in a question or something and we'll try to tackle it.
And we don't come at it.
Like we're some major theologian Bible scholars.
What we love on our podcast is we'll say, okay, I think I know something about that, but then we'll go study it deeply and then come on there and say, we don't have all the answers, but this is what we're learning too.
(25:45):
And this is what the Lord has shown us.
I've shared other testimonies.
I love to speak about gaining our authority and freedom over the enemy.
Don't let him take us down in those places and teaching people a little about spiritual warfare, those types of topics, just kind of just whatever the Lord leads us in.
We're very Holy spirit led.
Just Lord, what do you want us to talk about next time?
(26:07):
Cause we're learning too.
And we're kind of taking our audience on a journey.
Like let's all learn this together.
I imagine that as people ask questions and you have to study deeply that God is using that to build into you as well.
Yes.
It's growing our faith deeper.
We're trying to help people grow their faith, get them to get closer to Jesus.
(26:29):
While we're saying, we're also learning here.
This isn't like you just, Oh, I arrived one day and I know everything there is because you know, I got a podcast, my friend Jack, you know, we love to talk about Jesus.
That's just the thing.
So we like to have conversations about it all.
And we're like, come along with us for the ride.
We're learning all the things too.
There's a lot that you're involved in.
(26:51):
Certainly there is truth, freedom, ministry, leaving the shallows podcast.
And of course your book unthinkable.
If people want to get in touch with you, where's the easiest place for people to find you?
Instagram is a great place.
You can go to truth, freedom ministry.
That's my handle there.
But I also have a website, truth, freedom, ministry.com.
(27:13):
And you can find all the things there.
That's probably the easiest.
And you can find my book on Amazon.
And I will put links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you very easily.
Heather, it's been a delight to talk to you.
Thank you for being so open with your story and using it to help other people become unstuck.
(27:33):
It's been a delight to have you.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
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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