April 20, 2025 • 31 mins
In this powerful episode of Bleeding Daylight, Rodney Olsen speaks with Rebecca Medina Stewart, a resilient author and trauma survivor whose journey from sexual assault victim to hope-filled advocate is transforming lives. After growing up in a fire-and-brimstone church that taught her to fear an angry God, Rebecca experienced a horrific sexual assault in college that led to 20 years of depression and spiritual darkness. Through her raw and honest testimony, she reveals how she finally found healing through returning to faith, discovering God's tenderness, and embracing spiritual disciplines that therapy alone couldn't provide.
Rebecca's 60-day devotional "Seen: Experiencing God's Tenderness After Brokenness" offers practical tools for trauma survivors seeking to get unstuck from dysfunction and pain. Her message resonates with anyone who has experienced trauma, loss, or mental health struggles, as she shares not only her own story but also accounts of others who have found healing in their darkest moments. This episode offers hope that even the deepest wounds can become platforms for spiritual transformation when we take that first step of faith.
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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.
Bleeding Daylight is a place to hear powerful stories of hope.
There are dozens of other episodes waiting for you at BleedingDaylight.net.
(00:30):
You can be an agent of hope and healing for others by sharing episodes through social media or word of mouth.
Is there a way to truly heal from deep trauma?
Can suffering be the catalyst to help us see God in a different light?
Today's guest has a difficult yet inspiring story of overcoming hurt to provide the keys to healing for others.
(01:03):
Rebecca Medina Stewart is a resilient author and trauma survivor who has seen her painful journey of sexual assault and years of depression transformed into a powerful testimony of hope.
Through her 60-day devotional scene, experiencing God's tenderness after brokenness, she points others towards the healing that she has experienced.
(01:26):
A former TV news reporter who found a way forward through faith in Jesus, she shares her story of restoration, demonstrating how personal brokenness can become a platform for spiritual transformation and how God's love can rebuild even the most shattered lives.
I'm so pleased that she is my guest today.
(01:46):
Rebecca, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Oh, thank you so much, Radhi, for having me.
I'm so glad to be here.
I know that you grew up in a church, but I understand that it wasn't a church that really demonstrated God's grace or God's love.
Can you tell me a little bit about how your upbringing shaped your idea of faith?
(02:08):
Absolutely, and that's such a great question, Rodney.
I grew up in a fire and brimstone kind of church.
Early on, I started to learn about the wrath and the anger and the punishment of God instead of really being in a place where they focused on the love and the forgiveness and the grace and the mercy of God.
(02:28):
I grew up with this idea of this really angry father in heaven who was watching everything that I was doing and just trying to pinpoint a time to see when I would mess up so he could just bring the hammer down over my head and punish me.
That was my early idea of who God was, and I learned many, many years later that that truly, while we do serve a God who is wrathful and will take care of vengeance for us on our behalf, I do also know that God is loving and kind and compassionate and good and wants the very best for His children, and that took me nearly two to three decades to learn.
(03:14):
When all we know of God is that wrath, I guess it can send us in two ways.
It can send us towards just trying to appease this God and trying so hard to do that and never, ever measuring up, or it can be something that just causes us to say, well, I'm never going to measure up, and so I'm just going to ignore it.
(03:37):
What was it for you?
Oh, it was the latter, for sure.
By the time I was 18, Rodney, I was ready to leave home.
I wanted nothing to do with home because I came from a very strict also Latin upbringing, so everything at home was strict, everything at church was strict, and I could not wait to get out of my house.
(03:58):
When I turned 18 and graduated from high school, I was off to college and didn't even turn back, and I remember even saying to myself in my senior year in high school, I will never walk into a church again.
There's no way I'm ever going to be this perfect child that God expects of me, and so therefore, I'm just going to live my life and I'm going to live it as wild as I can possibly live it.
(04:23):
That was my goal, to just be free.
I wanted freedom.
I wanted freedom from God.
I wanted freedom from my parents.
I just wanted to be free, so by the time I got to college, I literally was like an uncaged animal that first year in college, doing a lot of the crazy things that a lot of first-year students do in college, but I found out real quick just how destructive that really was for me.
(04:53):
And there was a particular instant, and I don't want to push too hard into this, but tell me what you feel comfortable telling me about that time that your world completely changed.
Sure.
I had just entered my second semester of my first year of college.
I was at a party one night with a girlfriend of mine, and we were out and about doing what college girls do.
(05:18):
We were at a frat party.
Sometime in the night, the friend who had taken me to the party asked me if I would take a ride with a friend of theirs to a second party and meet them there because she was arguing with her boyfriend and wanted some privacy to talk with him and that she would meet me at the other party.
Well, as a student, as a first-year student and just kind of living my life, I didn't even think twice of it.
(05:41):
I think oftentimes as young people, we think we're indestructible, and that's pretty much how I felt.
I never even hesitated and took the ride.
Well, long story short, I never got to the other party.
Instead, I was taken to a remote location and I was assaulted for hours there and then literally dropped off back in front of my home or the apartment that I lived in at the time.
(06:06):
That moment, those hours of darkness, those hours of fighting, pleading with God in my head to please somehow save me, they shaped the next nearly 20 years of my life.
And I literally spiraled into 20 years of darkness and despair and sadness, loneliness, and got to a point where I just, to be quite frank with you, I just didn't want to live anymore.
(06:34):
Those types of thoughts were becoming much more regular and it was starting to scare me.
And it was those thoughts that led me to finally reach out for some help, but it took 20 years for that to happen.
I just thought that maybe a quick stay in some therapy might help relieve me of these feelings and would make me functional again.
(06:59):
So I did that.
I tried the therapy.
I read the books and did those types of things thinking that all would be okay.
And for the next 20 years, I was on a roller coaster ride of emotions and feelings and darkness, and everything was constantly up and down.
After a certain period of time, I did become a functional person somewhat because the average individual and all of my coworkers, people who I associated with, they had no idea what was going on in my life.
(07:29):
I was on this ambitious track, which had become a very good coping mechanism for me.
Work, ambition, and alcohol.
Those three things became a coping mechanism for me and they helped me really mask the things that were going on in my spirit, the darkness that I was living in.
(07:49):
And I would be great for about a week or two.
And then I would literally tumble down into this dark place and I would be there for a period of weeks, taking a lot of time off of work.
As soon as I come back up for air after this dark spell, then I get back to work and I was great again for another three months.
It was just a yo-yo effect in my life and it became so dysfunctional and so sad.
(08:15):
After 20 years of that up and down, I finally said, I've got to change something.
I had done the therapy and I'd read the books, but I was not well.
For as much as I was hurt by the foundation church that I was raised in, I always knew there was a God.
There was never a time that I didn't believe that there was a God.
And I knew somehow, I just knew instinctively in the back of my mind, if I set foot in a church again, maybe, just maybe he could heal me.
(08:45):
Maybe, just maybe he could fix me.
I walked into a church and for the first few months I sat in the very back row and I would listen to the worship team and cry and didn't know why I was crying.
Or I'd listen to a sermon by the preacher and I'd be angry and I'd walk out of there early thinking how could this pastor, how could this preacher talk to me about a loving, wonderful God when look at my life, look at what I've lived through, look at what I had to survive.
(09:14):
And I still am not well.
How is there any such thing as a loving God?
But 20 years later, after I took that first step, little by little, God started to chip away at the really, really thick concrete walls that I had built around my heart.
And he started to work in me and started to answer my question of why, why, where were you?
(09:40):
He started to slowly answer those questions.
And as I dug into the spiritual disciplines, as I really started to open up the Word of God and started to do some devotional work and actually started to pray and talk to Jesus, everything changed.
It was a radical, radical transformation in my life, but it was slow.
(10:04):
It was radical, but it was slow.
I have to always preface that because people think, oh, well, you know, she just hopped back into church and, you know, overnight she was just fine and dandy.
No, it was many, many, many more years after that before I was free, really free.
There's a lot of unlearning that has to happen as well because you have this particular image of God.
(10:29):
And I find it interesting that even during the time of the assault, you're calling out to God.
I'm wondering what went through your mind in the days after that.
Was it a case of, well, this wrathful, vengeful God is actually bringing some kind of revenge on me for not following him?
Was that what you were thinking that, well, I must deserve this and God is punishing me?
(10:53):
Oh, yes.
You hit the nail on the head, Robbie.
In the days that followed the assault, I spent several weeks sort of in a state of shock.
I was dealing with lawyers because I did press charges.
We did go to court.
My attacker did go to prison.
Those first few days were sort of a whirlwind.
I didn't really know what was going on around me.
(11:17):
And I would even say the first two days after the assault, the first couple of days, it was almost a catatonic state.
I wasn't talking to anyone.
I wouldn't say anything.
I didn't get out of bed.
Really, when I think about those early days, it still just moves me inside because I remember the pain of that.
For the years that followed, I felt that this was God's punishment.
(11:39):
He punished me for living this crazy life.
He punished me for the sinful choices that I was making in my life.
I've come to really understand that the Lord was not punishing me for those things.
However, choices that we make in our life do have consequences.
(12:00):
And I was in fact putting myself in really dangerous situations and places.
That doesn't excuse what happened to me in no way, shape or form.
But I will say that the environments that I was putting myself in were not healthy and they were not safe for me.
That definitely played a role into what eventually happened to me.
(12:25):
So yes, I did feel as though I was on the receiving end of God's wrath.
But He is so graceful and so merciful that I know now looking back that all of these things that were going on inside of me, my initial pleading with God to save me from this situation and even my courage to walk into a church again, all those things were just God reminding me that He had never left me.
(12:53):
I had left Him, but He was calling me back to Him the whole time, calling me back, waiting for me with His arms open, not waiting to punish me, not with a hammer behind His back, but instead He was waiting for me to come back and make my way into His loving arms where there was healing and comfort and love, so much love.
(13:15):
I felt those things after 20 years and making my way back to the foot of His cross.
In those initial days when you were going along to that church, sitting at the back, listening, sometimes weeping uncontrollably, not knowing why, other times being angry at the preacher, sometimes taking in what the preacher is saying, that was, I guess, the first part of that healing journey.
(13:40):
But when was it for you that you started to see an inkling, just a little bit of, I think I'm turning a corner, I think something is about to begin here?
Oh, wow, that's such a great question.
You know, I was sitting in the back of this church and every week I was just wrestling, wrestling with God, wrestling with God.
(14:03):
About a year into that, there was a Sunday where the prayer partners were at the foot of the stage at the end of the service, and as I got up to leave, I recognized one of those prayer partners.
He was someone whose family I had known for many years, and they were a family of preachers.
I couldn't believe it was someone from my past, very close friends of ours, of my family's.
(14:28):
I couldn't believe that this person was at the foot of that stage in this city, far away from home.
And when I walked up to say hello, he was so elated to see me.
His wife came over and grabbed me and hugged me.
As we said our hellos and caught up a little bit, he said to me, Rebecca, I have to invite you to the midweek prayer service that we do.
(14:49):
It's early in the morning.
We meet in the sanctuary and the pastor comes to that.
We do a little bit of worship, but we pray.
I really think you should come to that.
And I looked at him and I said, Oh no, I don't think you want me there.
And so I said, no, no, no, I don't think that's a good idea.
And that went on.
That invite kept coming for a number of weeks.
(15:11):
Finally, I was running out of excuses and lies as to why I couldn't go.
He caught me one Sunday.
He said, you really should come, Rebecca.
I didn't have one more excuse to give him.
So I said, okay, I'll be here.
As a journalist, I worked nightside.
So I worked like 2 to 11 and I did live shots at night.
So I had the whole morning free.
So really, I never had an excuse, Rodney.
(15:31):
I was just lying.
I finally attended the midweek prayer service.
There was something about the intimacy of just how small that group was, where I felt like God was just meeting me in that place.
And I felt the presence of God there.
(15:53):
So, so real.
It was almost as if I could reach out and touch the spirit of God.
I'd never felt anything like that in my life.
And had this real encounter with the God of the universe.
It was in this prayer time that he started to soften my heart, number one.
(16:14):
But number two, I started to replay some of the things that had happened on the night of my attack.
And as I was going back, sometimes in prayer and meditation, as he was showing me some of these things, I realized he was everywhere in that.
(16:38):
Meaning, I could see his thumbprint throughout my life story, but most especially throughout this time, this horrific time in my life.
I remember very vividly on the night of my attack, when I couldn't fight any longer.
I spent hours fighting.
And when I couldn't fight any longer, I finally just turned my face to the side and I fixed my eyes on the light coming out from underneath the door.
(17:06):
And I remember in prayer, the Lord telling me, my daughter, I was in that light.
I was in that light.
I cried with you.
I suffered with you.
It was horrible.
I know it was horrible, but I'm here with you.
And I was there with you then, and I'm here with you now, and I'm never leaving you.
So he started to show me all these little places of my life where he had been the whole time.
(17:30):
And I realized that God had never really left me.
He had never really gone.
And I realized that God was much more loving than I ever had been taught.
He was much more merciful and graceful and that he loved me unconditionally.
It was through this prayer time and this quiet time in which I was starting to understand these things.
(17:55):
And that changed everything.
It was that experience, Rodney, that led me to go and see a Christian counselor.
It was a full cache of tools.
It was prayer.
It was the Word of God.
It was a church community.
It was all these things that I started to tap into.
And once I started to do that, it was almost as if God opened up the windows of heaven and started to pour out healing over my spirit.
(18:24):
And it was little by little and over the course of years that I really started to experience healing.
But the most healing I experienced was when I started to share my story.
When you start to share a really hard story, whatever fears you have because of that story, whatever shame or guilt you feel, you really start to chip away at that when you start to help other people with your story.
(18:53):
And God really does something special with that.
I have heard from a number of people that it's at that point where they have the courage and they decide now is the right time to start sharing their story that God does do something amazing.
And that suddenly the shame that the enemy wants to keep putting on us, despite the healing we've experienced, just falls away.
(19:19):
If someone has been through a difficult experience, how can they know when is the right time to share and where should they start sharing?
Because we know that sometimes it's too soon.
We know that sometimes the place that we're sharing these stories is not right or the people that we're sharing it with are not the right people.
How did you decide now is the time and this is the place?
(19:44):
Oh, that's an excellent, excellent question.
Excellent.
I began to share my story in a place where I felt safe.
And that's number one.
Whenever you're going to share a hard story or a very personal story, you should do it in a place of safety.
You should do it in a place of like-minded individuals.
(20:06):
Who you share anything with, we should all use some wisdom.
But in particular, when you're sharing a hard story, number one, if the story is still raw, it's still so raw.
If you're just starting the recovery process, I don't know that that's the time to start actually sharing that story in a life group or a church or things like that.
(20:29):
I think you need to work through what you're feeling.
I think you need to work with a counselor, a professional through the feelings and through the things that you've experienced.
Once you've worked through those things and shared your story with a professional, with a counselor, a Christian counselor, it is only after you start to work through those things that then you probably can start the process of sharing in another place of safety.
(20:53):
For me, I was volunteering with a small group at my church.
My husband and I were working with young adults.
It was never my intent ever to share my story, period, but let alone share it in a group setting.
But the Lord really started tugging on my heart about sharing my testimony and what he was doing in my life.
(21:16):
Even then, I was just like, heck no, this is never going to happen, Lord.
Listen, I'm so grateful for what you've done for me, but this is just not in my plan.
Well, not long after that, the pastor, who has been a wonderful mentor to my husband and I, he took us out one night.
And at the time, I'd already started writing some devotionals for that group.
(21:38):
And he said to me, he says, you know, Rebecca, I think you really need to share with the group.
I think it's time.
You write so beautifully.
I think it's time to do this.
And I remember at that moment, feeling like it was the Lord's doing, like this was where the Lord was leading me all along.
And there was something about that conversation where I knew, I just knew in my spirit that that's exactly where the Lord was leaving me.
(22:05):
Initially, I just looked at him and I said, geez, I really don't want to do this.
I really don't want to do this.
He said, Rebecca, I know you don't want to do it, but why don't you pray about it for a little bit.
Pray about it for a few weeks and we'll talk again.
I said, OK.
So I did that.
I prayed about this.
I prayed about the idea of this and over the fear and everything I was feeling because he never said to me what he wanted me to share.
(22:29):
He never explained that to me.
But I knew in my heart that the Lord was leading me to share my story.
And when that day finally came, I'll never forget the feeling of the Holy Spirit just absolutely taking control of that conversation and allowing me to share that story.
And the young women and the young men, sadly, who had been victimized as children or even as adults, came up to me afterwards.
(22:59):
There were people in tears all wanting to just share their story with me.
And I realized in that moment what God was doing and why he needed me to do that.
That story isn't just for me.
That story is for every person who has ever experienced trauma.
We don't experience horrific things on this side of eternity just so that we can live and suffer in them.
(23:26):
Though the enemy means those things to harm us and keep us from our purpose, God means to turn those things around for his purpose and for his glory.
And it took me a long time to learn that, a long, long time.
But when I finally understood that that was my purpose all along and I stepped into it wholeheartedly, it changed my whole life.
(23:52):
The shame and the guilt, gone.
And when I went to go write the book about trauma, it was a whole different set of fears.
The fears of potentially my attacker finding me, locating me, coming after me, coming after me personally, coming after me on social media.
I had all these fears and the Lord dealt with those.
(24:16):
There isn't a single thing that we go through on this side of eternity that the Lord will not take our hand and lead us through and guide us through.
He is a good and loving and merciful God.
And when we know that and we just grab hold of him and say, God, I'm in this with you.
Take me where you want to take me.
(24:37):
I am your servant.
I am going to follow you and you can lead me where you want me to go.
When you take that step of obedience, radical transformation is the only thing left.
And it's beautiful and it's whole and it's complete, as complete as it can be on this side of eternity.
You've mentioned that it took you 20 years to get to the beginning of your healing and then it continued for a number of years.
(25:05):
And I'm very aware that there are so many people that have had traumas of various kinds.
And whether it's been for a few months that they've been trying to push that down or like yourself, a couple of decades, there's still no end in sight.
Are these the people that you wrote that book for so that they could find the healing that you found?
(25:26):
Yes, yes.
The thing that I've learned about dysfunction and trauma is that it's a hard place to leave.
It's a hard place to come out of and it's a very easy place to get stuck in.
And I learned the longer I stayed in that place of pain and suffering, the longer that I stayed in a place of refusing to take that step into a spiritual direction of healing, even refusing to go back to counseling and refusing that kind of help, the deeper and deeper and deeper my rabbit hole became and the darker it got and the more despair I experienced.
(26:06):
Dysfunction is a really easy place to stay in.
It's hard to want to talk about the things that have hurt you.
It's really hard to want to go back and relive those moments.
The after effects of what we suffer is really everything that is pent up inside us that helped us to survive those horrific moments of our lives.
(26:26):
What I wrote in my book were really the tools that helped me get unstuck.
It isn't just my story.
There are stories of women who've lost their children.
There are mental health stories.
I have a whole section in my book about a woman who has struggled with suicidal ideations from the time that she was eight years old.
(26:48):
She wakes up every morning and she wrestles with the urge to want to end her life.
But she knows that there's a mission for her here on this earth, and she fights that urge every single day.
Suicide, the loss of a child, domestic violence.
I deal with all of these hard stories in my book.
(27:10):
There is a common theme of the spiritual disciplines.
I did therapy for a long time before I set foot in a church again.
It would get me functional to a certain degree, but I just never felt healed.
I never felt whole again, and I was constantly sinking back into that place of depression and suffering.
I just couldn't shape the dark cloud.
(27:32):
What I started to understand and learn is that, yes, it's going to take a while.
It's one of those things where you just got to keep at it.
You got to keep praying.
You got to keep talking to the Lord.
You got to stay in the word.
You've got to get back around your church community.
You got to get back around a small group, or maybe it's the lifeline type group, for survivors or recovery groups.
(27:55):
But those things work.
And then when you add Jesus in the mix, oh my goodness, it is radical healing, radical transformation.
I wish I could tell your audience, if you just get saved, if you just get on your knees and ask the Lord to invade your life in a beautiful way, you're going to wake up tomorrow morning and everything is going to be great.
(28:16):
No, that is not the case.
The Bible tells us that on this side of eternity, there will be suffering.
There will be trials and tribulations.
The Bible never promises us a pain-free life, and the enemy is alive and well in this world.
The evil that he has unleashed on this planet will touch us at some point in our lives.
(28:40):
What I've written in this book does have real tools in it.
Does have real stories of hope, to give you hope that there is healing, there is wholeness, there is transformation.
But you got to start somewhere.
And I believe that somewhere is in a relationship with Christ himself.
(29:01):
That's what brought me out of 20 years of darkness.
In the book, every story is followed by a day of meditation and prayer.
I write out these really visual, beautiful pictures of God sitting beside you in front of a beautiful lake or of Jesus himself, you know, walking you through this dark tunnel and out into this beautiful clearing.
(29:24):
They really help you go into this prayerful, meditative space with God.
It is in that space of prayer where he really works on our heart.
He really chips away at the hard exteriors and the concrete walls that we have built in our lives to protect us, to protect ourselves.
(29:45):
I receive emails every day from people who have read the book and who have said to me, Rebecca, oh my goodness, this story has really, really moved me.
Oh my goodness, Rebecca, this meditation was exactly what I needed to move me forward into a place of courage where I could actually take that first step of healing.
The book is Seen Experiencing God's Tenderness After Brokenness, and as you say, it's something that is going to help a whole range of people get unstuck.
(30:15):
I will put links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net to make sure that people can find the book.
I just want to say, Rebecca, thank you so much for writing the book and thank you so much for your time today on Bleeding Daylight.
I've really appreciated it.
Rodney, thank you so much for having me.
I'm so grateful to be here and I'm so grateful for your message and I just love the title of your show.
(30:37):
I just think that it speaks volumes.
And as soon as I saw it, I said, oh my goodness, this is definitely a place where I need to be.
Your message is beautiful.
Your message is hopeful.
And there is hope in this dark and broken world.
There's hope, but we have to be the ones to move and take that first step of faith.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
(31:01):
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.
Bleeding Daylight is a place to hear powerful stories of hope.
There are dozens of other episodes waiting for you at BleedingDaylight.net.
(00:30):
You can be an agent of hope and healing for others by sharing episodes through social media or word of mouth.
Is there a way to truly heal from deep trauma?
Can suffering be the catalyst to help us see God in a different light?
Today's guest has a difficult yet inspiring story of overcoming hurt to provide the keys to healing for others.
(01:03):
Rebecca Medina Stewart is a resilient author and trauma survivor who has seen her painful journey of sexual assault and years of depression transformed into a powerful testimony of hope.
Through her 60-day devotional scene, experiencing God's tenderness after brokenness, she points others towards the healing that she has experienced.
(01:26):
A former TV news reporter who found a way forward through faith in Jesus, she shares her story of restoration, demonstrating how personal brokenness can become a platform for spiritual transformation and how God's love can rebuild even the most shattered lives.
I'm so pleased that she is my guest today.
(01:46):
Rebecca, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Oh, thank you so much, Radhi, for having me.
I'm so glad to be here.
I know that you grew up in a church, but I understand that it wasn't a church that really demonstrated God's grace or God's love.
Can you tell me a little bit about how your upbringing shaped your idea of faith?
(02:08):
Absolutely, and that's such a great question, Rodney.
I grew up in a fire and brimstone kind of church.
Early on, I started to learn about the wrath and the anger and the punishment of God instead of really being in a place where they focused on the love and the forgiveness and the grace and the mercy of God.
(02:28):
I grew up with this idea of this really angry father in heaven who was watching everything that I was doing and just trying to pinpoint a time to see when I would mess up so he could just bring the hammer down over my head and punish me.
That was my early idea of who God was, and I learned many, many years later that that truly, while we do serve a God who is wrathful and will take care of vengeance for us on our behalf, I do also know that God is loving and kind and compassionate and good and wants the very best for His children, and that took me nearly two to three decades to learn.
(03:14):
When all we know of God is that wrath, I guess it can send us in two ways.
It can send us towards just trying to appease this God and trying so hard to do that and never, ever measuring up, or it can be something that just causes us to say, well, I'm never going to measure up, and so I'm just going to ignore it.
(03:37):
What was it for you?
Oh, it was the latter, for sure.
By the time I was 18, Rodney, I was ready to leave home.
I wanted nothing to do with home because I came from a very strict also Latin upbringing, so everything at home was strict, everything at church was strict, and I could not wait to get out of my house.
(03:58):
When I turned 18 and graduated from high school, I was off to college and didn't even turn back, and I remember even saying to myself in my senior year in high school, I will never walk into a church again.
There's no way I'm ever going to be this perfect child that God expects of me, and so therefore, I'm just going to live my life and I'm going to live it as wild as I can possibly live it.
(04:23):
That was my goal, to just be free.
I wanted freedom.
I wanted freedom from God.
I wanted freedom from my parents.
I just wanted to be free, so by the time I got to college, I literally was like an uncaged animal that first year in college, doing a lot of the crazy things that a lot of first-year students do in college, but I found out real quick just how destructive that really was for me.
(04:53):
And there was a particular instant, and I don't want to push too hard into this, but tell me what you feel comfortable telling me about that time that your world completely changed.
Sure.
I had just entered my second semester of my first year of college.
I was at a party one night with a girlfriend of mine, and we were out and about doing what college girls do.
(05:18):
We were at a frat party.
Sometime in the night, the friend who had taken me to the party asked me if I would take a ride with a friend of theirs to a second party and meet them there because she was arguing with her boyfriend and wanted some privacy to talk with him and that she would meet me at the other party.
Well, as a student, as a first-year student and just kind of living my life, I didn't even think twice of it.
(05:41):
I think oftentimes as young people, we think we're indestructible, and that's pretty much how I felt.
I never even hesitated and took the ride.
Well, long story short, I never got to the other party.
Instead, I was taken to a remote location and I was assaulted for hours there and then literally dropped off back in front of my home or the apartment that I lived in at the time.
(06:06):
That moment, those hours of darkness, those hours of fighting, pleading with God in my head to please somehow save me, they shaped the next nearly 20 years of my life.
And I literally spiraled into 20 years of darkness and despair and sadness, loneliness, and got to a point where I just, to be quite frank with you, I just didn't want to live anymore.
(06:34):
Those types of thoughts were becoming much more regular and it was starting to scare me.
And it was those thoughts that led me to finally reach out for some help, but it took 20 years for that to happen.
I just thought that maybe a quick stay in some therapy might help relieve me of these feelings and would make me functional again.
(06:59):
So I did that.
I tried the therapy.
I read the books and did those types of things thinking that all would be okay.
And for the next 20 years, I was on a roller coaster ride of emotions and feelings and darkness, and everything was constantly up and down.
After a certain period of time, I did become a functional person somewhat because the average individual and all of my coworkers, people who I associated with, they had no idea what was going on in my life.
(07:29):
I was on this ambitious track, which had become a very good coping mechanism for me.
Work, ambition, and alcohol.
Those three things became a coping mechanism for me and they helped me really mask the things that were going on in my spirit, the darkness that I was living in.
(07:49):
And I would be great for about a week or two.
And then I would literally tumble down into this dark place and I would be there for a period of weeks, taking a lot of time off of work.
As soon as I come back up for air after this dark spell, then I get back to work and I was great again for another three months.
It was just a yo-yo effect in my life and it became so dysfunctional and so sad.
(08:15):
After 20 years of that up and down, I finally said, I've got to change something.
I had done the therapy and I'd read the books, but I was not well.
For as much as I was hurt by the foundation church that I was raised in, I always knew there was a God.
There was never a time that I didn't believe that there was a God.
And I knew somehow, I just knew instinctively in the back of my mind, if I set foot in a church again, maybe, just maybe he could heal me.
(08:45):
Maybe, just maybe he could fix me.
I walked into a church and for the first few months I sat in the very back row and I would listen to the worship team and cry and didn't know why I was crying.
Or I'd listen to a sermon by the preacher and I'd be angry and I'd walk out of there early thinking how could this pastor, how could this preacher talk to me about a loving, wonderful God when look at my life, look at what I've lived through, look at what I had to survive.
(09:14):
And I still am not well.
How is there any such thing as a loving God?
But 20 years later, after I took that first step, little by little, God started to chip away at the really, really thick concrete walls that I had built around my heart.
And he started to work in me and started to answer my question of why, why, where were you?
(09:40):
He started to slowly answer those questions.
And as I dug into the spiritual disciplines, as I really started to open up the Word of God and started to do some devotional work and actually started to pray and talk to Jesus, everything changed.
It was a radical, radical transformation in my life, but it was slow.
(10:04):
It was radical, but it was slow.
I have to always preface that because people think, oh, well, you know, she just hopped back into church and, you know, overnight she was just fine and dandy.
No, it was many, many, many more years after that before I was free, really free.
There's a lot of unlearning that has to happen as well because you have this particular image of God.
(10:29):
And I find it interesting that even during the time of the assault, you're calling out to God.
I'm wondering what went through your mind in the days after that.
Was it a case of, well, this wrathful, vengeful God is actually bringing some kind of revenge on me for not following him?
Was that what you were thinking that, well, I must deserve this and God is punishing me?
(10:53):
Oh, yes.
You hit the nail on the head, Robbie.
In the days that followed the assault, I spent several weeks sort of in a state of shock.
I was dealing with lawyers because I did press charges.
We did go to court.
My attacker did go to prison.
Those first few days were sort of a whirlwind.
I didn't really know what was going on around me.
(11:17):
And I would even say the first two days after the assault, the first couple of days, it was almost a catatonic state.
I wasn't talking to anyone.
I wouldn't say anything.
I didn't get out of bed.
Really, when I think about those early days, it still just moves me inside because I remember the pain of that.
For the years that followed, I felt that this was God's punishment.
(11:39):
He punished me for living this crazy life.
He punished me for the sinful choices that I was making in my life.
I've come to really understand that the Lord was not punishing me for those things.
However, choices that we make in our life do have consequences.
(12:00):
And I was in fact putting myself in really dangerous situations and places.
That doesn't excuse what happened to me in no way, shape or form.
But I will say that the environments that I was putting myself in were not healthy and they were not safe for me.
That definitely played a role into what eventually happened to me.
(12:25):
So yes, I did feel as though I was on the receiving end of God's wrath.
But He is so graceful and so merciful that I know now looking back that all of these things that were going on inside of me, my initial pleading with God to save me from this situation and even my courage to walk into a church again, all those things were just God reminding me that He had never left me.
(12:53):
I had left Him, but He was calling me back to Him the whole time, calling me back, waiting for me with His arms open, not waiting to punish me, not with a hammer behind His back, but instead He was waiting for me to come back and make my way into His loving arms where there was healing and comfort and love, so much love.
(13:15):
I felt those things after 20 years and making my way back to the foot of His cross.
In those initial days when you were going along to that church, sitting at the back, listening, sometimes weeping uncontrollably, not knowing why, other times being angry at the preacher, sometimes taking in what the preacher is saying, that was, I guess, the first part of that healing journey.
(13:40):
But when was it for you that you started to see an inkling, just a little bit of, I think I'm turning a corner, I think something is about to begin here?
Oh, wow, that's such a great question.
You know, I was sitting in the back of this church and every week I was just wrestling, wrestling with God, wrestling with God.
(14:03):
About a year into that, there was a Sunday where the prayer partners were at the foot of the stage at the end of the service, and as I got up to leave, I recognized one of those prayer partners.
He was someone whose family I had known for many years, and they were a family of preachers.
I couldn't believe it was someone from my past, very close friends of ours, of my family's.
(14:28):
I couldn't believe that this person was at the foot of that stage in this city, far away from home.
And when I walked up to say hello, he was so elated to see me.
His wife came over and grabbed me and hugged me.
As we said our hellos and caught up a little bit, he said to me, Rebecca, I have to invite you to the midweek prayer service that we do.
(14:49):
It's early in the morning.
We meet in the sanctuary and the pastor comes to that.
We do a little bit of worship, but we pray.
I really think you should come to that.
And I looked at him and I said, Oh no, I don't think you want me there.
And so I said, no, no, no, I don't think that's a good idea.
And that went on.
That invite kept coming for a number of weeks.
(15:11):
Finally, I was running out of excuses and lies as to why I couldn't go.
He caught me one Sunday.
He said, you really should come, Rebecca.
I didn't have one more excuse to give him.
So I said, okay, I'll be here.
As a journalist, I worked nightside.
So I worked like 2 to 11 and I did live shots at night.
So I had the whole morning free.
So really, I never had an excuse, Rodney.
(15:31):
I was just lying.
I finally attended the midweek prayer service.
There was something about the intimacy of just how small that group was, where I felt like God was just meeting me in that place.
And I felt the presence of God there.
(15:53):
So, so real.
It was almost as if I could reach out and touch the spirit of God.
I'd never felt anything like that in my life.
And had this real encounter with the God of the universe.
It was in this prayer time that he started to soften my heart, number one.
(16:14):
But number two, I started to replay some of the things that had happened on the night of my attack.
And as I was going back, sometimes in prayer and meditation, as he was showing me some of these things, I realized he was everywhere in that.
(16:38):
Meaning, I could see his thumbprint throughout my life story, but most especially throughout this time, this horrific time in my life.
I remember very vividly on the night of my attack, when I couldn't fight any longer.
I spent hours fighting.
And when I couldn't fight any longer, I finally just turned my face to the side and I fixed my eyes on the light coming out from underneath the door.
(17:06):
And I remember in prayer, the Lord telling me, my daughter, I was in that light.
I was in that light.
I cried with you.
I suffered with you.
It was horrible.
I know it was horrible, but I'm here with you.
And I was there with you then, and I'm here with you now, and I'm never leaving you.
So he started to show me all these little places of my life where he had been the whole time.
(17:30):
And I realized that God had never really left me.
He had never really gone.
And I realized that God was much more loving than I ever had been taught.
He was much more merciful and graceful and that he loved me unconditionally.
It was through this prayer time and this quiet time in which I was starting to understand these things.
(17:55):
And that changed everything.
It was that experience, Rodney, that led me to go and see a Christian counselor.
It was a full cache of tools.
It was prayer.
It was the Word of God.
It was a church community.
It was all these things that I started to tap into.
And once I started to do that, it was almost as if God opened up the windows of heaven and started to pour out healing over my spirit.
(18:24):
And it was little by little and over the course of years that I really started to experience healing.
But the most healing I experienced was when I started to share my story.
When you start to share a really hard story, whatever fears you have because of that story, whatever shame or guilt you feel, you really start to chip away at that when you start to help other people with your story.
(18:53):
And God really does something special with that.
I have heard from a number of people that it's at that point where they have the courage and they decide now is the right time to start sharing their story that God does do something amazing.
And that suddenly the shame that the enemy wants to keep putting on us, despite the healing we've experienced, just falls away.
(19:19):
If someone has been through a difficult experience, how can they know when is the right time to share and where should they start sharing?
Because we know that sometimes it's too soon.
We know that sometimes the place that we're sharing these stories is not right or the people that we're sharing it with are not the right people.
How did you decide now is the time and this is the place?
(19:44):
Oh, that's an excellent, excellent question.
Excellent.
I began to share my story in a place where I felt safe.
And that's number one.
Whenever you're going to share a hard story or a very personal story, you should do it in a place of safety.
You should do it in a place of like-minded individuals.
(20:06):
Who you share anything with, we should all use some wisdom.
But in particular, when you're sharing a hard story, number one, if the story is still raw, it's still so raw.
If you're just starting the recovery process, I don't know that that's the time to start actually sharing that story in a life group or a church or things like that.
(20:29):
I think you need to work through what you're feeling.
I think you need to work with a counselor, a professional through the feelings and through the things that you've experienced.
Once you've worked through those things and shared your story with a professional, with a counselor, a Christian counselor, it is only after you start to work through those things that then you probably can start the process of sharing in another place of safety.
(20:53):
For me, I was volunteering with a small group at my church.
My husband and I were working with young adults.
It was never my intent ever to share my story, period, but let alone share it in a group setting.
But the Lord really started tugging on my heart about sharing my testimony and what he was doing in my life.
(21:16):
Even then, I was just like, heck no, this is never going to happen, Lord.
Listen, I'm so grateful for what you've done for me, but this is just not in my plan.
Well, not long after that, the pastor, who has been a wonderful mentor to my husband and I, he took us out one night.
And at the time, I'd already started writing some devotionals for that group.
(21:38):
And he said to me, he says, you know, Rebecca, I think you really need to share with the group.
I think it's time.
You write so beautifully.
I think it's time to do this.
And I remember at that moment, feeling like it was the Lord's doing, like this was where the Lord was leading me all along.
And there was something about that conversation where I knew, I just knew in my spirit that that's exactly where the Lord was leaving me.
(22:05):
Initially, I just looked at him and I said, geez, I really don't want to do this.
I really don't want to do this.
He said, Rebecca, I know you don't want to do it, but why don't you pray about it for a little bit.
Pray about it for a few weeks and we'll talk again.
I said, OK.
So I did that.
I prayed about this.
I prayed about the idea of this and over the fear and everything I was feeling because he never said to me what he wanted me to share.
(22:29):
He never explained that to me.
But I knew in my heart that the Lord was leading me to share my story.
And when that day finally came, I'll never forget the feeling of the Holy Spirit just absolutely taking control of that conversation and allowing me to share that story.
And the young women and the young men, sadly, who had been victimized as children or even as adults, came up to me afterwards.
(22:59):
There were people in tears all wanting to just share their story with me.
And I realized in that moment what God was doing and why he needed me to do that.
That story isn't just for me.
That story is for every person who has ever experienced trauma.
We don't experience horrific things on this side of eternity just so that we can live and suffer in them.
(23:26):
Though the enemy means those things to harm us and keep us from our purpose, God means to turn those things around for his purpose and for his glory.
And it took me a long time to learn that, a long, long time.
But when I finally understood that that was my purpose all along and I stepped into it wholeheartedly, it changed my whole life.
(23:52):
The shame and the guilt, gone.
And when I went to go write the book about trauma, it was a whole different set of fears.
The fears of potentially my attacker finding me, locating me, coming after me, coming after me personally, coming after me on social media.
I had all these fears and the Lord dealt with those.
(24:16):
There isn't a single thing that we go through on this side of eternity that the Lord will not take our hand and lead us through and guide us through.
He is a good and loving and merciful God.
And when we know that and we just grab hold of him and say, God, I'm in this with you.
Take me where you want to take me.
(24:37):
I am your servant.
I am going to follow you and you can lead me where you want me to go.
When you take that step of obedience, radical transformation is the only thing left.
And it's beautiful and it's whole and it's complete, as complete as it can be on this side of eternity.
You've mentioned that it took you 20 years to get to the beginning of your healing and then it continued for a number of years.
(25:05):
And I'm very aware that there are so many people that have had traumas of various kinds.
And whether it's been for a few months that they've been trying to push that down or like yourself, a couple of decades, there's still no end in sight.
Are these the people that you wrote that book for so that they could find the healing that you found?
(25:26):
Yes, yes.
The thing that I've learned about dysfunction and trauma is that it's a hard place to leave.
It's a hard place to come out of and it's a very easy place to get stuck in.
And I learned the longer I stayed in that place of pain and suffering, the longer that I stayed in a place of refusing to take that step into a spiritual direction of healing, even refusing to go back to counseling and refusing that kind of help, the deeper and deeper and deeper my rabbit hole became and the darker it got and the more despair I experienced.
(26:06):
Dysfunction is a really easy place to stay in.
It's hard to want to talk about the things that have hurt you.
It's really hard to want to go back and relive those moments.
The after effects of what we suffer is really everything that is pent up inside us that helped us to survive those horrific moments of our lives.
(26:26):
What I wrote in my book were really the tools that helped me get unstuck.
It isn't just my story.
There are stories of women who've lost their children.
There are mental health stories.
I have a whole section in my book about a woman who has struggled with suicidal ideations from the time that she was eight years old.
(26:48):
She wakes up every morning and she wrestles with the urge to want to end her life.
But she knows that there's a mission for her here on this earth, and she fights that urge every single day.
Suicide, the loss of a child, domestic violence.
I deal with all of these hard stories in my book.
(27:10):
There is a common theme of the spiritual disciplines.
I did therapy for a long time before I set foot in a church again.
It would get me functional to a certain degree, but I just never felt healed.
I never felt whole again, and I was constantly sinking back into that place of depression and suffering.
I just couldn't shape the dark cloud.
(27:32):
What I started to understand and learn is that, yes, it's going to take a while.
It's one of those things where you just got to keep at it.
You got to keep praying.
You got to keep talking to the Lord.
You got to stay in the word.
You've got to get back around your church community.
You got to get back around a small group, or maybe it's the lifeline type group, for survivors or recovery groups.
(27:55):
But those things work.
And then when you add Jesus in the mix, oh my goodness, it is radical healing, radical transformation.
I wish I could tell your audience, if you just get saved, if you just get on your knees and ask the Lord to invade your life in a beautiful way, you're going to wake up tomorrow morning and everything is going to be great.
(28:16):
No, that is not the case.
The Bible tells us that on this side of eternity, there will be suffering.
There will be trials and tribulations.
The Bible never promises us a pain-free life, and the enemy is alive and well in this world.
The evil that he has unleashed on this planet will touch us at some point in our lives.
(28:40):
What I've written in this book does have real tools in it.
Does have real stories of hope, to give you hope that there is healing, there is wholeness, there is transformation.
But you got to start somewhere.
And I believe that somewhere is in a relationship with Christ himself.
(29:01):
That's what brought me out of 20 years of darkness.
In the book, every story is followed by a day of meditation and prayer.
I write out these really visual, beautiful pictures of God sitting beside you in front of a beautiful lake or of Jesus himself, you know, walking you through this dark tunnel and out into this beautiful clearing.
(29:24):
They really help you go into this prayerful, meditative space with God.
It is in that space of prayer where he really works on our heart.
He really chips away at the hard exteriors and the concrete walls that we have built in our lives to protect us, to protect ourselves.
(29:45):
I receive emails every day from people who have read the book and who have said to me, Rebecca, oh my goodness, this story has really, really moved me.
Oh my goodness, Rebecca, this meditation was exactly what I needed to move me forward into a place of courage where I could actually take that first step of healing.
The book is Seen Experiencing God's Tenderness After Brokenness, and as you say, it's something that is going to help a whole range of people get unstuck.
(30:15):
I will put links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net to make sure that people can find the book.
I just want to say, Rebecca, thank you so much for writing the book and thank you so much for your time today on Bleeding Daylight.
I've really appreciated it.
Rodney, thank you so much for having me.
I'm so grateful to be here and I'm so grateful for your message and I just love the title of your show.
(30:37):
I just think that it speaks volumes.
And as soon as I saw it, I said, oh my goodness, this is definitely a place where I need to be.
Your message is beautiful.
Your message is hopeful.
And there is hope in this dark and broken world.
There's hope, but we have to be the ones to move and take that first step of faith.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
(31:01):
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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