January 5, 2025 • 30 mins
In this powerful episode of Bleeding Daylight, we meet Stephanie Jordan, an author and speaker whose journey through marriage, divorce, widowhood, and single motherhood has become a beacon of hope for others. From her early days as the only Christian in the local punk rock scene to becoming a successful business owner and mother of five, Stephanie's story is a testament to resilience and unwavering faith in the face of overwhelming challenges.
After experiencing a miraculous restoration of her marriage, Stephanie's world was shattered when her husband Jay suddenly passed away, leaving her with five children. Her raw honesty about wrestling with God's goodness in the midst of tragedy, and her eventual path to healing and purpose, offers profound insights for anyone navigating loss or questioning their faith. Through her book "The Death Tsunami" and her ministry work, Stephanie continues to transform her painful experiences into hope for others, showing how God can use our deepest wounds to help others heal. WEBLINKS Stephanie’s Website Instagram Facebook LinkedIn TikTok YouTube Amazon
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Transcript
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.
Thanks for listening today.
I really hope you'll enjoy this episode and that you'll be thinking of ways to share it with others.
If you want to hear more stories of lives transformed and people kicking against the darkness, head to bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:36):
One of the big questions many people ask around faith is, how can a good God allow suffering?
How do you keep saying that God is good when you're facing overwhelming trauma?
Today's guest has had to answer those questions in her own life and may help you find those answers for yourself.
(01:03):
Have you ever felt like life has thrown you so many curveballs that you can barely keep standing?
Are you wondering how someone can not just survive devastating loss and change, but emerge stronger and more purposeful?
Today we'll meet Stephanie Jordan, a remarkable author, speaker, and entrepreneur who has transformed her journey through marriage, divorce, widowhood, and single motherhood into a powerful ministry of hope and healing.
(01:30):
As an accomplished business owner, published author, and mother of five, Stephanie combines raw authenticity with deep spiritual wisdom to help others navigate life's most challenging transitions while growing closer to God.
Her story of resilience and unwavering faith captured in books like The Death Tsunami continue to inspire thousands to embrace both the struggles and victories of their own journeys.
(01:56):
Stephanie, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you for having me.
I'm so glad to be here.
Take me back to the 90s.
How did life look for you at that time?
I was in high school in the 90s, young, early 20s, and it was a lot of fun in the 90s.
But I didn't realize that I was a raging codependent.
(02:19):
That was something we didn't talk about a whole lot back then.
I made a lot of mess out of stuff by doing that.
I was the only Christian in the punk rock scene here in Birmingham, Alabama.
That was always an adventure because people would kind of make fun of me for being a Christian, and I'm like, make fun of me for something I don't choose.
(02:42):
You can't make fun of me for something I choose to be.
And so the 90s were great.
The world was still my oyster, and a lot could happen.
It's interesting that you're in this punk scene where you're not completely accepted because you're a Christian.
And I imagine that in the Christian world, there were people that wouldn't have accepted you because you're into punk and you can't go there.
(03:06):
So what was that like having to be across those two lifestyles, so to speak, where they didn't really understand each other?
That's so true.
I've always said I've lived on the outskirts of every culture.
That is so true.
There were punks that hated me because I was Christian.
There were Christians that hated me because I was a punk rocker.
(03:28):
But I always found a beauty in that awkward space.
For example, one of the places that we would hang out here in town was actually in front of a huge Methodist church, and there was a fountain.
And we would stay in that area a lot, and there would be Christians that would come out and minister.
(03:53):
And they would always be like, Stephanie, get over here and get them off of us, you know?
And I would tell them, I'm like, your tactics aren't working.
They legitimately do not care that they're going to hell, and they are embracing it, and they're just making fun of you in the process.
So your tactics are not relevant.
(04:13):
They're not going to get across to them what they need.
Really at the time, I guess I was too young myself, though I was a believer, and I always loved the Lord.
I was really too young, I guess, to know how to counter what they were saying, because it wasn't that I fully disagreed.
But the way that they came across was never fruitful.
(04:36):
It took me years to kind of realize why it wasn't fruitful.
There were a lot of Christians that obviously thought that if I really believed in Jesus, nobody sober wakes up and looks like this, right?
It was kind of this thing that Christians always thought I would want to be different, that I would stop wanting to look the way that I look.
(05:01):
I have a lip ring and vibrantly colored hair, or be as bold and kind of out there as my personality is.
Good gosh, my poor mom, she was like, how did you get to be so crass?
To be honest, I don't really know the answer of that, except that God kind of custom made me in this niche, because He knew what my life was going to look like, and secondly, to love on people and be able to speak a language to people that other people can't.
(05:35):
So my punk rock background and my rock and roll style really has given me a unique perspective on Jesus and my salvation and reaching people that don't agree.
In those early years, you were still trying to find your own way amidst these two different lifestyles, so to speak, and I guess that led you down some interesting pathways, and I know that you married early.
(06:02):
Tell me about that first marriage.
I came from teetotaling parents, right?
They didn't smoke, they didn't drink.
I was not around a party lifestyle at all growing up.
So when I came into the punk rock scene, all of a sudden, I'm around all these people partying all the time, just massive amounts of drugs and alcohol and debauchery and sex and all that sort of stuff.
(06:28):
I stayed on the clean side of it.
I was never drawn to that, but not because of me.
I was never drawn to that because God protected me from it.
He allowed me to be in the world but not of the world, and it really had nothing to do with me because I was such a mess.
I should have wanted to destroy myself with all those things, and He just kept His protective covering hand over me and allowed me to experience the pain and the hurt that all of that causes without succumbing to it.
(07:02):
Having
teetotaling parents and then going to that contrast of a lot of debauchery, I knew what I didn't want
to look like, which is either of them, and I felt like I found a really good kind of middle ground
that fit who I am as a person, but also aligns with who Christ exemplifies in the Bible, which is
(07:26):
somebody that could sit around and have a good drink and a good conversation with some ragtag crew,
but also uphold these standards of living a life and shining the Father down.
That's kind of what ended up happening, but it was really a God thing.
It wasn't a Stephanie thing.
(07:47):
It was supernatural above my own comprehension at the time.
So that's where you met your first husband.
Tell me about that.
He was a total raging alcoholic, talking about the debauchery, and I just thought he would grow out of it.
We got married a month before my 22nd birthday, and he had just turned 22.
(08:08):
We were just a few months apart.
I had no idea anything about alcoholism.
I just thought it was something that he did and that he would grow out of it and grow up, and it didn't work that way at all.
He had the total polar opposite childhood where he had an alcoholic father, a lot of abuse, and a lot of struggle.
(08:31):
My codependency was like, oh, I can love him better.
I can love him into wanting to be okay, and I learned that wasn't true very quickly.
So where did that lead with this alcoholic husband, and you're just trying to make your way in life and a little bit, I guess, naive probably to some of the things that you had landed yourself in.
(08:55):
So where did that lead you?
Yeah, I was totally naive to all of it.
Marriage, relationships, alcoholism, growing up, all of it.
He was in jail on average every three months of our marriage for public intoxication, lots of public intoxication charges.
(09:16):
He got wrapped into this really bad group of people.
And now I just told you I came from the punk rock scene and a lot of debauchery, right?
So when I say that it's a bad group of people, you can imagine there's a level that I am referring to in the fact that I did not even feel comfortable hanging out with these people.
(09:41):
And I asked him to not hang out with these people, and he refused.
That was kind of a shift, a beginning of the end, if you will.
He beat me up.
I was so dumbfounded it happened.
(10:01):
I didn't come from that lifestyle.
So when he got violent, that changed the ballgame.
And I was really so dumbfounded it happened, it was almost like I disassociated it.
He ended up leaving the state for a little while, and then he came back July 19th of 2001.
(10:22):
I had just found out I was pregnant with my oldest son on July 3rd.
And on July 19th, he beat me up, and I thought he was going to kill me.
The next day, he pulled me down onto his lap.
I was getting ready for work, and I was putting some jewelry on, and he pulled me down on his lap, and he said, don't think I won't do it again.
(10:44):
I knew then that I wasn't going to live through that marriage.
And I left.
I had an angel.
She owned the salon I was working at at the time.
When I got there, you could tell I had gotten my butt kicked.
And she was like, oh my gosh, what has happened to you?
(11:05):
I can't let you go home.
And she let me come and stay at her house for a month.
She didn't charge me rent.
She never asked anything from me.
She never tried to make me figure it out, what steps I was going to take.
I tried to work the marriage out for two years, but he never got any help.
And probably one regret that I have is I never had him arrested for it.
(11:28):
But I don't even know if that would have made much of a difference.
But I never lived with him again after that.
And especially at this stage, it's not only your own welfare that you're concerned about, but you have another life now as well, don't you?
Yeah.
So that night that he was violent, I told God in that moment, I said, if you get me and my baby out of here alive, I will never come back.
(11:53):
And I actually called my oldest son.
He's 22 now.
I call him my lighthouse because he was a beacon in a very dark place.
It was really because of him that I had the strength to not go back.
I hear women say all the time, if somebody laid a hand on me, I would this.
(12:15):
And I'm like, no, you wouldn't.
Not if it's your husband.
We're nurturers by nature.
It is not in your nature to harm your spouse and who you love.
My son gave me the strength because I could never let that happen to him.
Never.
And so he gave me the strength to walk away and stay away.
(12:36):
God then led you into another marriage.
And I guess you must have thought at that stage that this is it for life.
Tell me about that time.
It was really kind of crazy.
So I tried to work my marriage out with my first husband, like I said, for two years.
And I told God, I said, look, I will stay married to him for the next 40 years of my life if that's what you want me to do.
(13:00):
I made a covenant, but if you can find it in your grace and mercy, please deliver me.
And after two years, God delivered me from that marriage.
And so I divorced him.
A couple of weeks after my divorce was final, I ran into Jay, who was a punk rocker and hated me because I was a Christian.
(13:22):
We knew each other as teens.
He hated God.
He was totally anti-God.
Jay's whole goal was to OD on his 21st birthday in New Orleans.
That was his life's ambition.
God rewrote his story and he was baptized in New Orleans on his 21st birthday.
(13:44):
So indeed he did die, but it was to himself.
That was a couple of years before we ran into each other.
So we ran into each other at a punk show.
We started talking and he told me he was a Christian and I didn't believe him.
I was like, he's so full of crap.
He's just hitting on me.
He's just flirting with me.
He's not even remotely telling the truth.
(14:08):
We were both like, gosh, we would love to have a ministry toward punk rockers here and all this sort of stuff.
He asked for my phone number and I wanted to throw it off a number so badly because I knew this dude.
I knew all about this guy and he was trouble.
It was like God wouldn't let me.
And so he calls me the next day and he's like, hey, this is Jay.
(14:31):
And I'm like, I know who you are.
We started a ministry together was really what happened.
And then he was dating me for six months before I was even considering dating him.
Eventually we started dating and God told me my new name would be Jordan.
(14:53):
I totally freaked out.
I was like, no way.
I will take any man on the planet, but Jay Jordan.
I prayed for three signs that God was actually calling me into this marriage with Jay.
One of the signs that he gave me was a story of Naaman, where Naaman goes to see Elijah and Elijah tells him to go wash in the Jordan seven times and he will be renewed like a young boy.
(15:19):
That was the final thing of God telling me, you need to go wash in the Jordan.
And I had the exact same statement as Naaman, like, have you seen that Jordan?
No way am I going in that, but I did.
I followed God.
(15:39):
It took me two years.
I had a lot of trauma from my first marriage, so it took me about two years to feel bonded with Jay.
And then I thought we'd be together forever.
Absolutely.
Along the way, there are more children, but then I guess the unthinkable happens.
(16:01):
Tell me about that.
Yeah, so we had four more children together.
So I have five total.
So in 2012, we opened a salon company and I got pregnant with my baby four.
I opened in January, got pregnant in April.
That November, my back went out right to where I could not stand at all.
I ended up having baby four on New Year's Eve.
(16:25):
And then May of 2013, I had to have emergency back surgery.
And it absolutely and totally traumatized me.
But the neurosurgeon was like, if you leave this office, you may never walk again.
Jay and I came out of 2013 planning to get divorced.
That October, I was so traumatized from my surgery.
(16:49):
I couldn't pick my baby up.
I had a business.
It was just so much.
He was kind of going through his own thing and we were both just like, we give up.
We can't do it anymore.
Well, then right after New Year's, he's down at the salon putting security cameras up and I feel a boom, boom.
I think I just felt the baby in my stomach.
(17:12):
And so I call him up and I'm like, I think I just felt the baby move.
And he said, are you trying to freak me out?
And I said, well, I'm freaking out.
So knock yourself out.
Jay Jordan was never short of words.
The man could talk a wall to falling apart.
He just talked all the time.
He didn't speak for a week.
(17:33):
We were both totally freaked out.
And lo and behold, I was pregnant with baby number five.
And we both kind of waved our wily coyote white flags of defeat.
In September of 2014, we went to a conference led by the guy who led Jay to Christ.
(17:53):
On the second day of that conference, God said to me, if you leave him, you will always long for him.
And he gave me this sense of dread on my inside.
When we got back from that conference, really Holy Spirit walked with me through every day over the next few months and totally restored mine and Jay's relationship.
(18:21):
October 2013, we come out saying we're going to be divorced.
And October 14, God miraculously heals our marriage.
We said every, I love you.
We said every, I'm sorry.
It was just amazing.
On December 29th, it was like any other day.
(18:44):
And then that night, Jay passed away from a hypertensive crisis just suddenly out of nowhere.
And it was the most traumatic thing that's ever happened to me.
It must have absolutely rocked your world and had you starting to think, what is going on here, God?
(19:06):
We thought we'd just repaired this relationship, that this was going to be forever.
What now?
What were the words that you said to God at that stage?
You probably don't want this on your show.
I had removed the F-bomb out of my vocabulary until I had a dead husband on my floor with five children.
(19:28):
I was very angry at God for a long time, actually.
How dare you just leave me like this?
I don't know that I ever had a what did I do to deserve this, but I can tell you I wallowed in pity.
So I'm sure there was plenty of that mentality, but it was more like a how dare you, how dare you do this to me, God?
(19:54):
I thought He was restoring our marriage to do ministry.
Here we'd had these babies and life was trucking along and we had built all this amazing stuff.
Death was the unexpected, blindsiding blow, for sure.
The summer before Jay passed away, he had started praying every day that God would heal the broken little girl inside of me.
(20:20):
The story of Naaman was the final thing that God gave me.
This was 10 years later in 2014.
Jay started praying over that.
He died in December of 14, and in August of 2015, God started honoring that prayer and started healing me from everything.
(20:43):
I just realized this summer, 20 years later from 2004, God has fully answered His promise that He made to me through the story of Naaman in my own life.
What did that healing look like for you?
How did God start to take you on that healing journey?
(21:04):
First, I had to forgive God for allowing my husband to die.
I had dug deep roots with the Lord, and it took every ounce of those deep roots to survive.
I had to believe that God is good, regardless of whether I can see it.
Because either He is or He isn't, but He can't be both.
(21:29):
And the Word says that God is good, so there has to be truth there, even if I can't see that truth.
And then I also knew that God completes what He starts.
What God kind of taught me about Jay was that Jay was completed on this side of heaven.
(21:51):
And of course, I argued, because it's like my favorite thing to do.
I argued with God, and I was like, no, I have five reasons that he was not completed.
God was like, but those are the gifts that I have left of him here.
(22:13):
So instead of feeling like God had mistreated me by leaving me with five kids, He taught me what gifts He had given me in those five kids.
That was a big healing stage for me.
(22:33):
I did two semesters of grief share.
It's a grace from God.
I know that your brain shuts off, but it's like when you need it the most, it's gone.
I couldn't form a complete thought for a year and a half.
For the first year, I still felt very married.
I could hear him walking down the hallway.
(22:54):
I would pull into the driveway and expect to see him standing there.
It's like you memorize the people you're with, their sounds, their motions, everything, and you don't even know it.
It's just second nature.
We were so bonded and ingrained with each other.
All of his movements were so ingrained in me that even up to a year after he was gone, they still felt so normal.
(23:20):
My father died when I was four.
While I was in grief share, I learned that I had never been given the grief of a daughter.
I had been given the grief that my mom experienced.
Losing my dad at a young age, I think, helped me in a lot of ways walk with my children.
(23:45):
So often people think that grief is a process that happens.
You've got a couple of months, then it's done, move on.
Grief takes as long as grief takes.
And obviously for you, there was deep grief there that you had to complete.
But out of that comes a ministry, an opportunity to reach out to others, including your book.
Tell me about that book, The Death Tsunami.
(24:08):
My very first sentence in The Death Tsunami is, I was not ready to write this book.
But I knew that God had called me to write that book.
And to be honest, I feel like it was a huge step toward closure in the healing process of that.
(24:30):
I don't hardly promote it because I cry.
And I sobbed every night that I wrote it.
One of the gifts of becoming a widow is that I can cry and still function.
Because I had to learn to do that.
The reason I call it The Death Tsunami is because like a physical tsunami, death is a spiritual tsunami.
(24:56):
And when death comes, it annihilates everything in its path.
Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
But nobody sees it.
And so you're completely annihilated.
But everybody looks at you and thinks everything should be totally normal.
(25:17):
I wanted to kind of express that process of being normal and in a family.
And then all of a sudden, everything stops.
You're no longer a valid family.
Now you're a widow.
Now your kids are orphans.
Like, what does that mean?
And what does that look like?
God just kept breathing life into the dark spaces.
(25:44):
I just had to trust Him to keep walking through the dark because it's so easy to get lost there in the dark of it all.
Oftentimes, people think that at the end of grief, things go back to normal.
And yet, things don't ever go back to what we call normal, but we settle into new rhythms.
(26:04):
How long did it take you to find those new rhythms after Jay passed away?
Well, I'm 10 years in, and I think I'm still learning.
It's funny that you say that.
I hate that term, normal.
And I actually talk about this in my book.
Nothing is ever normal again.
(26:25):
His loss touches every birthday, every holiday, everything.
I think what I would say our rhythm has become kind of the culture we have as a family is we talk about him very, very normally, but I have never tried to saturate the kids into a delusional thinking as like, he's here, but he's just not here.
(26:54):
And it occurs to me that when we come to terms with the fact that they are no longer here, and we don't romanticize and pretend that they're still around, it actually honors them.
It lets us feel the loss of them in our lives, that they played a part that they can no longer play, and that honors the part that they did play.
(27:15):
Yes, I totally agree.
Because he'd be frozen in time.
If we tried to pretend that he was still active and around, he would be frozen in time.
He will never surpass 2014.
I had a vision for years, probably two or three years.
(27:35):
I was driving a car, and we had dropped him off, and I could see him in the rear view, and we were driving away from him.
And the thing was, I've never felt the need to try and stop or turn around.
It was like it was natural.
I think God gave me that as an encouragement to keep going.
(28:00):
Because we all can't stop in 2014 and just stay in that space forever.
We have to move forward.
And God is still good, and He still has life for us to live.
And that's what I tell my kids all the time, because each of them have gone through this stage of like, well, I want to die so I can go see my dad.
(28:21):
And I'm like, no, no, no, you have life to live.
So you have a full story to tell your dad when you get to see him.
You're not done yet.
Like, you got to pop out some grandbabies, because he's going to be mad if he doesn't have grandbabies.
Just encouraging them to also keep pursuing life.
(28:46):
Because one day when we do get to be together again, then they have stories to tell them, like, hey, this is what we did.
And he'll love that.
Stephanie, it's been a great conversation.
We haven't even had the opportunity to touch on your other books, Believing in Boundaries or A Dose of Reality.
And I know that you're involved in various ministries, and God continues to bring wonderful surprises into your life.
(29:13):
So what I'm going to do is put a link in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can catch up to where life is for you now, find out more of your writings, more of your ministry.
But I just want to say thank you for being part of Bleeding Daylight today.
I absolutely love your name, Bleeding Daylight.
(29:34):
I think that is amazing and fantastic.
And thank you for having me.
I'm so glad to be here.
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.
Thanks for listening today.
I really hope you'll enjoy this episode and that you'll be thinking of ways to share it with others.
If you want to hear more stories of lives transformed and people kicking against the darkness, head to bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:36):
One of the big questions many people ask around faith is, how can a good God allow suffering?
How do you keep saying that God is good when you're facing overwhelming trauma?
Today's guest has had to answer those questions in her own life and may help you find those answers for yourself.
(01:03):
Have you ever felt like life has thrown you so many curveballs that you can barely keep standing?
Are you wondering how someone can not just survive devastating loss and change, but emerge stronger and more purposeful?
Today we'll meet Stephanie Jordan, a remarkable author, speaker, and entrepreneur who has transformed her journey through marriage, divorce, widowhood, and single motherhood into a powerful ministry of hope and healing.
(01:30):
As an accomplished business owner, published author, and mother of five, Stephanie combines raw authenticity with deep spiritual wisdom to help others navigate life's most challenging transitions while growing closer to God.
Her story of resilience and unwavering faith captured in books like The Death Tsunami continue to inspire thousands to embrace both the struggles and victories of their own journeys.
(01:56):
Stephanie, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you for having me.
I'm so glad to be here.
Take me back to the 90s.
How did life look for you at that time?
I was in high school in the 90s, young, early 20s, and it was a lot of fun in the 90s.
But I didn't realize that I was a raging codependent.
(02:19):
That was something we didn't talk about a whole lot back then.
I made a lot of mess out of stuff by doing that.
I was the only Christian in the punk rock scene here in Birmingham, Alabama.
That was always an adventure because people would kind of make fun of me for being a Christian, and I'm like, make fun of me for something I don't choose.
(02:42):
You can't make fun of me for something I choose to be.
And so the 90s were great.
The world was still my oyster, and a lot could happen.
It's interesting that you're in this punk scene where you're not completely accepted because you're a Christian.
And I imagine that in the Christian world, there were people that wouldn't have accepted you because you're into punk and you can't go there.
(03:06):
So what was that like having to be across those two lifestyles, so to speak, where they didn't really understand each other?
That's so true.
I've always said I've lived on the outskirts of every culture.
That is so true.
There were punks that hated me because I was Christian.
There were Christians that hated me because I was a punk rocker.
(03:28):
But I always found a beauty in that awkward space.
For example, one of the places that we would hang out here in town was actually in front of a huge Methodist church, and there was a fountain.
And we would stay in that area a lot, and there would be Christians that would come out and minister.
(03:53):
And they would always be like, Stephanie, get over here and get them off of us, you know?
And I would tell them, I'm like, your tactics aren't working.
They legitimately do not care that they're going to hell, and they are embracing it, and they're just making fun of you in the process.
So your tactics are not relevant.
(04:13):
They're not going to get across to them what they need.
Really at the time, I guess I was too young myself, though I was a believer, and I always loved the Lord.
I was really too young, I guess, to know how to counter what they were saying, because it wasn't that I fully disagreed.
But the way that they came across was never fruitful.
(04:36):
It took me years to kind of realize why it wasn't fruitful.
There were a lot of Christians that obviously thought that if I really believed in Jesus, nobody sober wakes up and looks like this, right?
It was kind of this thing that Christians always thought I would want to be different, that I would stop wanting to look the way that I look.
(05:01):
I have a lip ring and vibrantly colored hair, or be as bold and kind of out there as my personality is.
Good gosh, my poor mom, she was like, how did you get to be so crass?
To be honest, I don't really know the answer of that, except that God kind of custom made me in this niche, because He knew what my life was going to look like, and secondly, to love on people and be able to speak a language to people that other people can't.
(05:35):
So my punk rock background and my rock and roll style really has given me a unique perspective on Jesus and my salvation and reaching people that don't agree.
In those early years, you were still trying to find your own way amidst these two different lifestyles, so to speak, and I guess that led you down some interesting pathways, and I know that you married early.
(06:02):
Tell me about that first marriage.
I came from teetotaling parents, right?
They didn't smoke, they didn't drink.
I was not around a party lifestyle at all growing up.
So when I came into the punk rock scene, all of a sudden, I'm around all these people partying all the time, just massive amounts of drugs and alcohol and debauchery and sex and all that sort of stuff.
(06:28):
I stayed on the clean side of it.
I was never drawn to that, but not because of me.
I was never drawn to that because God protected me from it.
He allowed me to be in the world but not of the world, and it really had nothing to do with me because I was such a mess.
I should have wanted to destroy myself with all those things, and He just kept His protective covering hand over me and allowed me to experience the pain and the hurt that all of that causes without succumbing to it.
(07:02):
Having
teetotaling parents and then going to that contrast of a lot of debauchery, I knew what I didn't want
to look like, which is either of them, and I felt like I found a really good kind of middle ground
that fit who I am as a person, but also aligns with who Christ exemplifies in the Bible, which is
(07:26):
somebody that could sit around and have a good drink and a good conversation with some ragtag crew,
but also uphold these standards of living a life and shining the Father down.
That's kind of what ended up happening, but it was really a God thing.
It wasn't a Stephanie thing.
(07:47):
It was supernatural above my own comprehension at the time.
So that's where you met your first husband.
Tell me about that.
He was a total raging alcoholic, talking about the debauchery, and I just thought he would grow out of it.
We got married a month before my 22nd birthday, and he had just turned 22.
(08:08):
We were just a few months apart.
I had no idea anything about alcoholism.
I just thought it was something that he did and that he would grow out of it and grow up, and it didn't work that way at all.
He had the total polar opposite childhood where he had an alcoholic father, a lot of abuse, and a lot of struggle.
(08:31):
My codependency was like, oh, I can love him better.
I can love him into wanting to be okay, and I learned that wasn't true very quickly.
So where did that lead with this alcoholic husband, and you're just trying to make your way in life and a little bit, I guess, naive probably to some of the things that you had landed yourself in.
(08:55):
So where did that lead you?
Yeah, I was totally naive to all of it.
Marriage, relationships, alcoholism, growing up, all of it.
He was in jail on average every three months of our marriage for public intoxication, lots of public intoxication charges.
(09:16):
He got wrapped into this really bad group of people.
And now I just told you I came from the punk rock scene and a lot of debauchery, right?
So when I say that it's a bad group of people, you can imagine there's a level that I am referring to in the fact that I did not even feel comfortable hanging out with these people.
(09:41):
And I asked him to not hang out with these people, and he refused.
That was kind of a shift, a beginning of the end, if you will.
He beat me up.
I was so dumbfounded it happened.
(10:01):
I didn't come from that lifestyle.
So when he got violent, that changed the ballgame.
And I was really so dumbfounded it happened, it was almost like I disassociated it.
He ended up leaving the state for a little while, and then he came back July 19th of 2001.
(10:22):
I had just found out I was pregnant with my oldest son on July 3rd.
And on July 19th, he beat me up, and I thought he was going to kill me.
The next day, he pulled me down onto his lap.
I was getting ready for work, and I was putting some jewelry on, and he pulled me down on his lap, and he said, don't think I won't do it again.
(10:44):
I knew then that I wasn't going to live through that marriage.
And I left.
I had an angel.
She owned the salon I was working at at the time.
When I got there, you could tell I had gotten my butt kicked.
And she was like, oh my gosh, what has happened to you?
(11:05):
I can't let you go home.
And she let me come and stay at her house for a month.
She didn't charge me rent.
She never asked anything from me.
She never tried to make me figure it out, what steps I was going to take.
I tried to work the marriage out for two years, but he never got any help.
And probably one regret that I have is I never had him arrested for it.
(11:28):
But I don't even know if that would have made much of a difference.
But I never lived with him again after that.
And especially at this stage, it's not only your own welfare that you're concerned about, but you have another life now as well, don't you?
Yeah.
So that night that he was violent, I told God in that moment, I said, if you get me and my baby out of here alive, I will never come back.
(11:53):
And I actually called my oldest son.
He's 22 now.
I call him my lighthouse because he was a beacon in a very dark place.
It was really because of him that I had the strength to not go back.
I hear women say all the time, if somebody laid a hand on me, I would this.
(12:15):
And I'm like, no, you wouldn't.
Not if it's your husband.
We're nurturers by nature.
It is not in your nature to harm your spouse and who you love.
My son gave me the strength because I could never let that happen to him.
Never.
And so he gave me the strength to walk away and stay away.
(12:36):
God then led you into another marriage.
And I guess you must have thought at that stage that this is it for life.
Tell me about that time.
It was really kind of crazy.
So I tried to work my marriage out with my first husband, like I said, for two years.
And I told God, I said, look, I will stay married to him for the next 40 years of my life if that's what you want me to do.
(13:00):
I made a covenant, but if you can find it in your grace and mercy, please deliver me.
And after two years, God delivered me from that marriage.
And so I divorced him.
A couple of weeks after my divorce was final, I ran into Jay, who was a punk rocker and hated me because I was a Christian.
(13:22):
We knew each other as teens.
He hated God.
He was totally anti-God.
Jay's whole goal was to OD on his 21st birthday in New Orleans.
That was his life's ambition.
God rewrote his story and he was baptized in New Orleans on his 21st birthday.
(13:44):
So indeed he did die, but it was to himself.
That was a couple of years before we ran into each other.
So we ran into each other at a punk show.
We started talking and he told me he was a Christian and I didn't believe him.
I was like, he's so full of crap.
He's just hitting on me.
He's just flirting with me.
He's not even remotely telling the truth.
(14:08):
We were both like, gosh, we would love to have a ministry toward punk rockers here and all this sort of stuff.
He asked for my phone number and I wanted to throw it off a number so badly because I knew this dude.
I knew all about this guy and he was trouble.
It was like God wouldn't let me.
And so he calls me the next day and he's like, hey, this is Jay.
(14:31):
And I'm like, I know who you are.
We started a ministry together was really what happened.
And then he was dating me for six months before I was even considering dating him.
Eventually we started dating and God told me my new name would be Jordan.
(14:53):
I totally freaked out.
I was like, no way.
I will take any man on the planet, but Jay Jordan.
I prayed for three signs that God was actually calling me into this marriage with Jay.
One of the signs that he gave me was a story of Naaman, where Naaman goes to see Elijah and Elijah tells him to go wash in the Jordan seven times and he will be renewed like a young boy.
(15:19):
That was the final thing of God telling me, you need to go wash in the Jordan.
And I had the exact same statement as Naaman, like, have you seen that Jordan?
No way am I going in that, but I did.
I followed God.
(15:39):
It took me two years.
I had a lot of trauma from my first marriage, so it took me about two years to feel bonded with Jay.
And then I thought we'd be together forever.
Absolutely.
Along the way, there are more children, but then I guess the unthinkable happens.
(16:01):
Tell me about that.
Yeah, so we had four more children together.
So I have five total.
So in 2012, we opened a salon company and I got pregnant with my baby four.
I opened in January, got pregnant in April.
That November, my back went out right to where I could not stand at all.
I ended up having baby four on New Year's Eve.
(16:25):
And then May of 2013, I had to have emergency back surgery.
And it absolutely and totally traumatized me.
But the neurosurgeon was like, if you leave this office, you may never walk again.
Jay and I came out of 2013 planning to get divorced.
That October, I was so traumatized from my surgery.
(16:49):
I couldn't pick my baby up.
I had a business.
It was just so much.
He was kind of going through his own thing and we were both just like, we give up.
We can't do it anymore.
Well, then right after New Year's, he's down at the salon putting security cameras up and I feel a boom, boom.
I think I just felt the baby in my stomach.
(17:12):
And so I call him up and I'm like, I think I just felt the baby move.
And he said, are you trying to freak me out?
And I said, well, I'm freaking out.
So knock yourself out.
Jay Jordan was never short of words.
The man could talk a wall to falling apart.
He just talked all the time.
He didn't speak for a week.
(17:33):
We were both totally freaked out.
And lo and behold, I was pregnant with baby number five.
And we both kind of waved our wily coyote white flags of defeat.
In September of 2014, we went to a conference led by the guy who led Jay to Christ.
(17:53):
On the second day of that conference, God said to me, if you leave him, you will always long for him.
And he gave me this sense of dread on my inside.
When we got back from that conference, really Holy Spirit walked with me through every day over the next few months and totally restored mine and Jay's relationship.
(18:21):
October 2013, we come out saying we're going to be divorced.
And October 14, God miraculously heals our marriage.
We said every, I love you.
We said every, I'm sorry.
It was just amazing.
On December 29th, it was like any other day.
(18:44):
And then that night, Jay passed away from a hypertensive crisis just suddenly out of nowhere.
And it was the most traumatic thing that's ever happened to me.
It must have absolutely rocked your world and had you starting to think, what is going on here, God?
(19:06):
We thought we'd just repaired this relationship, that this was going to be forever.
What now?
What were the words that you said to God at that stage?
You probably don't want this on your show.
I had removed the F-bomb out of my vocabulary until I had a dead husband on my floor with five children.
(19:28):
I was very angry at God for a long time, actually.
How dare you just leave me like this?
I don't know that I ever had a what did I do to deserve this, but I can tell you I wallowed in pity.
So I'm sure there was plenty of that mentality, but it was more like a how dare you, how dare you do this to me, God?
(19:54):
I thought He was restoring our marriage to do ministry.
Here we'd had these babies and life was trucking along and we had built all this amazing stuff.
Death was the unexpected, blindsiding blow, for sure.
The summer before Jay passed away, he had started praying every day that God would heal the broken little girl inside of me.
(20:20):
The story of Naaman was the final thing that God gave me.
This was 10 years later in 2014.
Jay started praying over that.
He died in December of 14, and in August of 2015, God started honoring that prayer and started healing me from everything.
(20:43):
I just realized this summer, 20 years later from 2004, God has fully answered His promise that He made to me through the story of Naaman in my own life.
What did that healing look like for you?
How did God start to take you on that healing journey?
(21:04):
First, I had to forgive God for allowing my husband to die.
I had dug deep roots with the Lord, and it took every ounce of those deep roots to survive.
I had to believe that God is good, regardless of whether I can see it.
Because either He is or He isn't, but He can't be both.
(21:29):
And the Word says that God is good, so there has to be truth there, even if I can't see that truth.
And then I also knew that God completes what He starts.
What God kind of taught me about Jay was that Jay was completed on this side of heaven.
(21:51):
And of course, I argued, because it's like my favorite thing to do.
I argued with God, and I was like, no, I have five reasons that he was not completed.
God was like, but those are the gifts that I have left of him here.
(22:13):
So instead of feeling like God had mistreated me by leaving me with five kids, He taught me what gifts He had given me in those five kids.
That was a big healing stage for me.
(22:33):
I did two semesters of grief share.
It's a grace from God.
I know that your brain shuts off, but it's like when you need it the most, it's gone.
I couldn't form a complete thought for a year and a half.
For the first year, I still felt very married.
I could hear him walking down the hallway.
(22:54):
I would pull into the driveway and expect to see him standing there.
It's like you memorize the people you're with, their sounds, their motions, everything, and you don't even know it.
It's just second nature.
We were so bonded and ingrained with each other.
All of his movements were so ingrained in me that even up to a year after he was gone, they still felt so normal.
(23:20):
My father died when I was four.
While I was in grief share, I learned that I had never been given the grief of a daughter.
I had been given the grief that my mom experienced.
Losing my dad at a young age, I think, helped me in a lot of ways walk with my children.
(23:45):
So often people think that grief is a process that happens.
You've got a couple of months, then it's done, move on.
Grief takes as long as grief takes.
And obviously for you, there was deep grief there that you had to complete.
But out of that comes a ministry, an opportunity to reach out to others, including your book.
Tell me about that book, The Death Tsunami.
(24:08):
My very first sentence in The Death Tsunami is, I was not ready to write this book.
But I knew that God had called me to write that book.
And to be honest, I feel like it was a huge step toward closure in the healing process of that.
(24:30):
I don't hardly promote it because I cry.
And I sobbed every night that I wrote it.
One of the gifts of becoming a widow is that I can cry and still function.
Because I had to learn to do that.
The reason I call it The Death Tsunami is because like a physical tsunami, death is a spiritual tsunami.
(24:56):
And when death comes, it annihilates everything in its path.
Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
But nobody sees it.
And so you're completely annihilated.
But everybody looks at you and thinks everything should be totally normal.
(25:17):
I wanted to kind of express that process of being normal and in a family.
And then all of a sudden, everything stops.
You're no longer a valid family.
Now you're a widow.
Now your kids are orphans.
Like, what does that mean?
And what does that look like?
God just kept breathing life into the dark spaces.
(25:44):
I just had to trust Him to keep walking through the dark because it's so easy to get lost there in the dark of it all.
Oftentimes, people think that at the end of grief, things go back to normal.
And yet, things don't ever go back to what we call normal, but we settle into new rhythms.
(26:04):
How long did it take you to find those new rhythms after Jay passed away?
Well, I'm 10 years in, and I think I'm still learning.
It's funny that you say that.
I hate that term, normal.
And I actually talk about this in my book.
Nothing is ever normal again.
(26:25):
His loss touches every birthday, every holiday, everything.
I think what I would say our rhythm has become kind of the culture we have as a family is we talk about him very, very normally, but I have never tried to saturate the kids into a delusional thinking as like, he's here, but he's just not here.
(26:54):
And it occurs to me that when we come to terms with the fact that they are no longer here, and we don't romanticize and pretend that they're still around, it actually honors them.
It lets us feel the loss of them in our lives, that they played a part that they can no longer play, and that honors the part that they did play.
(27:15):
Yes, I totally agree.
Because he'd be frozen in time.
If we tried to pretend that he was still active and around, he would be frozen in time.
He will never surpass 2014.
I had a vision for years, probably two or three years.
(27:35):
I was driving a car, and we had dropped him off, and I could see him in the rear view, and we were driving away from him.
And the thing was, I've never felt the need to try and stop or turn around.
It was like it was natural.
I think God gave me that as an encouragement to keep going.
(28:00):
Because we all can't stop in 2014 and just stay in that space forever.
We have to move forward.
And God is still good, and He still has life for us to live.
And that's what I tell my kids all the time, because each of them have gone through this stage of like, well, I want to die so I can go see my dad.
(28:21):
And I'm like, no, no, no, you have life to live.
So you have a full story to tell your dad when you get to see him.
You're not done yet.
Like, you got to pop out some grandbabies, because he's going to be mad if he doesn't have grandbabies.
Just encouraging them to also keep pursuing life.
(28:46):
Because one day when we do get to be together again, then they have stories to tell them, like, hey, this is what we did.
And he'll love that.
Stephanie, it's been a great conversation.
We haven't even had the opportunity to touch on your other books, Believing in Boundaries or A Dose of Reality.
And I know that you're involved in various ministries, and God continues to bring wonderful surprises into your life.
(29:13):
So what I'm going to do is put a link in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can catch up to where life is for you now, find out more of your writings, more of your ministry.
But I just want to say thank you for being part of Bleeding Daylight today.
I absolutely love your name, Bleeding Daylight.
(29:34):
I think that is amazing and fantastic.
And thank you for having me.
I'm so glad to be here.
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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