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. Welcome to Bleeding Daylight. Please find and follow Bleeding Daylight on social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Links and contact details as well as hundreds more episodes are available now at bleedingdaylight.net.
How do we move forward when we can no longer live up to the expectations that others have loaded upon us? What do we do with betrayal? Where do we turn when our body refuses to allow us to do the things we believe we need to do? My guest today has faced these challenges and more. Her story will encourage you and give you the keys to find healing and to keep going.
I'm so excited to introduce you to today's guest, someone whose story of faith, resilience and transformation through unimaginable loss will absolutely move you. Amber Swift has walked through what I can only describe as a refining fire, serving faithfully as a pastor's wife for 25 years, raising five kids, leading worship and women's ministry, all while watching her world seemingly crumble around her.
Family betrayal, church division, prodigal children and even her own health crisis could have left her bitter, but instead God met her in that darkness and she emerged with a mission to help other exhausted, overwhelmed women of faith by finding healing body, mind and spirit. Amber, welcome to Bleeding Daylight. Thank you so much for having me here, Rodney. Just hearing that made my eyes water up. I'm wondering if you can take me back 25 years or so.
At the beginning of your journey as a pastor's wife, what did you imagine ministry life would be like back in those early days? Oh yeah. I fell in love with the Lord at a young age and I was just like, I just want to serve the Lord. And I really had kind of like a dreamy perspective of it. And I just thought everything was just going to be wonderful. And it's kind of like getting married.
You don't know exactly what you're saying yes to and being in the ministry is kind of the same way along with motherhood. So it all kind of goes together. So I just honestly thought it would be, I'm going to say yes, I'm going to serve the Lord, love His people. And that was really the extent of what I thought. And what were those early years like? My husband was a full-time youth pastor. We got married and we quickly had two children. So we were just in the midst of this.
Honestly, it was like a revival. We were living in a small beach town where youth were coming to the Lord right and left. And it was very, very exciting and thrilling just to be a part of that. And then God called us elsewhere to go plant a church. So that began a whole new journey. Tell me about that journey because it is one thing to step into a church that's already existing and to see that success at the Lord's hand of seeing young people come to know Jesus.
But then stepping in and starting a brand new church, it's exciting, but obstacles along the way. Yeah, there were definite obstacles. It was exciting in the fact that we were able to be a part of this new work. We were living in an area where the style of ministry we were bringing wasn't as popular because there's a lot of more denominational, kind of more religion where we were living. We were just bringing this kind of come as you are. Jesus receives you just as you are.
And so it was very exciting. There were definite highs and lows. When you're starting something brand new, nobody knows what you're doing. Nobody knows who you are. It's all just brand new. But it's so exciting in the fact that people entrusted us with a part of their life that they didn't always entrust to other people. We got to walk alongside of people's walk with Jesus, and we got to show them what it looks like to walk with the Lord.
It wasn't a long list of do's and don'ts, and it really is a relationship with Jesus Christ. So exciting, very exciting. So into this mix, you already have a young family starting and a growing family. How was it balancing those calls upon your time? Yeah, we moved and started a church with two children, and then we barely quickly had three more. So yes, it was a lot, a lot of balance because we didn't have any family around, raising five little children and then homeschooling them.
One of the things that my husband and I always agreed upon was that it was always a relationship with the Lord first, our marriage second, our family third, and then ministry. And so I'm really, really thankful that we agreed on that because so often young people in ministry, they allow the church to just take over their marriage and their family. Then they have nothing left. And it was hard because my husband also had to have a second job to support us.
When you start a church, it's not like there's any financial income. So he ended up having like 10 different jobs during those first years just to make sure we could eat. But God always provided, but yeah, a lot. Now I know that you'd be working as a team and there'd be certain ministry opportunities that you'd take up as well, but you've clearly got your priorities right, that the family is coming before the ministry.
And yet I know that there are certain expectations that come from congregations as to what a pastor's wife should be doing. Did you really feel those expectations upon you? Yeah. When I was going through it, I honestly didn't think I had that on me. But when I hit my health crisis, that's when I saw I did. So I have always loved teaching. I'm a teacher. It's a gift God's given me. And I love teaching women. I also have always been a part of worship and leading worship.
So I was doing a lot, but I just kept going. And I didn't realize when you're in it, you just keep going and you don't realize how much of a toll it's taking on you until you hit that brick wall. We love the Lord and we just want to serve Him and we want to serve His people, but we also have to make sure that our families are first. And so in all of that, I was being put way down, you know, and it wasn't anybody else's fault. It was mine.
That was something that I was taking on and not acknowledging that I am not Superwoman. I am not God. There's one God. There were a lot of expectations that I didn't realize that I had taken on. It just became just part of my life. And you mentioned there that health crisis that suddenly hit you. What were the early signs of that? Where did it go from there? I was 39 and I actually had raised all of my children from a holistic perspective. So not one of them were ever on antibiotics.
I raised them, you know, using natural food as medicine and essential oils and supplements. And so we had this really healthy foundation, but I was saying yes to everybody and everything. Then I added on top of that a very healthy detox. My body could not handle that. It threw me into the early onset of menopause at 39. I wasn't sleeping. My entire body hurt. I was putting on weight. I was absolutely miserable. And I went to my mentor at the time, who's a naturopathic doctor.
He diagnosed me with chronic stress and I was like, what? What is that? He was just like, Amber, your body is just shutting down with everything you're doing, with the busy family. And we do have some very strong-willed children. So we don't have kids that are just like super meek and mild kids. A bunch of strong-willed children, homeschooling, leading worship, leading women's ministry, and then adding that quote-unquote healthy detox. It just threw my body into this whirlwind.
That's when the Lord started showing me, Amber, you are not called to say yes to everything and everybody. And I started really beginning to pull back. It was hard because I had this pattern of just doing, doing, doing, and I loved it. It was fun. It wasn't like it was miserable. I just had to start pulling back and praying and reevaluating and seeing that I can do some of these things, but I can't do all of them. It was very eyeopening.
As you started to pull back from some of those things that you had been doing, was there a sense of guilt associated with that for you, even though you knew that health-wise you weren't able to continue to take on everything? Was there still a sense of guilt that, oh, I should be doing this or I should be doing that? There was a sense of guilt, but for me, there was also a sense of loss. I felt like all of a sudden I saw how much my worth was tied to what I was doing.
I'm definitely your typical Type A. I love doing things and I feel so good and successful when I'm doing all of the things. The Lord just, at that point, began to teach me what it looked like to please Him and please Him alone, which would prepare me for later on when the rug got pulled out from underneath us. In my practice, I have a practice called Journey to Renewed Health.
Every woman that comes to me just about, they are the woman that most churches want because they're the women that say yes and they serve everybody and they do all of the things while their health is completely falling apart. I see what you did, God. You let me go through that so that I can then in turn help your daughters. The church is filled with these women who they look like the poster women. Oh, wow, she leads this and serves this and she's so amazing, but inwardly, she's falling apart.
It's so amazing how we get to encourage with the hope that God has given us. We get to give that hope to other people. As well as the internal struggles that you're having with your health and then how do I handle not saying yes to everything? Of course, there were the external factors as well. Tell me a little of that journey.
I see now looking back how God is so good to have allowed me to get my health in order and allowed me to really get my priorities straight, to know who it was that I needed to say yes to, whom I needed to please because a few short years after that, we began to deal with gossip and slander that began with a family member, which then led to a lot of people leaving the church and a lot of devastation. The amount of betrayal we went through, it was very hard, very hard.
Betrayal is difficult at all times, but it especially hurts when it's those close to you that are betraying you. How did you start to walk through that in trying to keep those priorities right for yourself, but also not getting bitter and turning against others? Yeah. Oh my goodness, yes. By the grace of God. So many tears. I remember feeling so incredibly lonely, so incredibly heartbroken. When you are serving people and you love them, that's exactly what it is. You love them.
A pastor and his wife who has a heart that God has given them for his people genuinely cares about their well-being, cares about where they are with the Lord, with their personal family life, and you invest so much of your life and yourself into these people that when they begin to believe somebody who is lying about you, even when they are told the truth and there's accountability—we even brought in mentors of ours, other pastors.
We did everything the exact biblical way that you're supposed to, and yet people still want to believe what they want to believe. The things that we ended up having to do was just honestly really pull close together as a family, really pull close into the Lord. I mean, when you look at the book of Job, oh my gosh, Job was the most righteous man in the world, and he went through those things. Because your first question is, Lord, I just served you. I just said yes. I wasn't even sinning.
I mean, sure I've sinned, but I wasn't doing any of this huge, horrible thing. You feel so lost and betrayed and forsaken, and the enemy just loves to come in like a flood. I had worship music playing almost around the clock in our house because I was just, no, we are not going to give in to this despair because it affected me, my husband, and all of our children. The heartbreak is horrible. Staying in the Word every day, I had to read God's Word just to make it through the day.
And another practical thing I did every single day, and I teach all of my clients this, every day, I had to write down five things I was thankful for, and I literally saw the shift. I would wake up in the morning feeling almost despairing, and I would sit down with my journal and my Bible, and I would immediately write down five things I was thankful for, and I would literally see God shift my brain, shift my heart, shift my perspective, everything. I exercised every single day.
I mean, these are just practical things, but they were things that kept me sane. All of the people who I poured my life into, a lot of them left and didn't believe us. Then people who I would have thought would have reached out didn't, and so it was extremely isolating and extremely alone, this lonely feeling. Those are some of the practical things we did.
Honestly, every day when people's faces would come up in my mind and what they did, I would just out loud say, Lord, I choose to forgive them, but I need you to be a just God and be my defender, just like King David said. You need to show up, Lord, because this hurts so bad.
Something you touched on there is the fact that we certainly are never promised that it's going to be an easy road in Scripture, and yet so often, even with the best of intent, we have this idea in the back of our mind that I've done the right thing. Why is this happening to me? Yet, as you say, you looked into the book of Job, and here's a guy who didn't do the wrong thing, and yet he was going through it.
That must have been a comfort for you, but also a shift in your way of thinking from that natural way that we often think of, I'm doing the right thing, I deserve to be treated well, to actually, I'm going to go through this, and I'm doing it with the Lord. No, it did. Job was such a comfort to me because I would vacillate between, Lord, I didn't do anything wrong, to, oh my gosh, I must have done something wrong. What's wrong with me? Starting to just try to find where I sinned.
I was raised in a very biblically-based church, so very good, solid Bible teaching, but I really, somewhere along the line, thought one or two things. Either God just blesses you when you do the right thing, or if things are going wrong, you must have messed up somewhere. You must have done something wrong. The Lord had to really correct my thinking in that, because that's totally me taking on everything upon me. It's all based on me, and it's based on my works, where it really isn't.
It's based on me submitting to the Lord, surrendering to Him, walking with Him, and the rest is up to Him. But God really had to begin to shift and show me all the wrong thinking I had built up over the years. So yes, it's so sneaky how we can begin to build all of this wrong thinking in our head over the years, even us good Christians. So how did you come to a resolution with the issues that you were walking through? There's still people that have abandoned the church and walked away from you.
How did that start to resolve? So after prayer and seeking the Lord, the Lord opened the door for us to merge with another church. It ended up being the exact thing that we needed at the exact time. After everything that we had gone through, we needed a rest. We needed help. We needed to be able to heal, and God has been so gracious. It has not been an easy road. It has been a very difficult road, but through all of that, we have had each other. Our family has grown.
We've learned what it looks like to walk through deep, deep pain and to be able to come out on the other side. We've been able to share our story with so many people. We've been able to encourage so many people, and along the way, what I have seen is that our story is not unique to us. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in ministry who are being treated horrifically.
What I've been able to do is I've been able to come alongside other women and build them up, encourage them, because it's so interesting. Even in my practice, I end up having women come to me who are in full-time ministry, and they come to me wanting help with balancing out their hormones holistically. But what ends up happening as we keep going through it all is that they're in full-time ministry, and they're being hurt so much right and left.
And so I'm able to come alongside of with the hope that God has given me and tell them, it's wrong. You shouldn't be treated like that. Because so often in ministry, we're almost taught this doormat mentality where we're just called to just lay down and let anybody treat us the way they want. But really, when you look at the life of Jesus, you see that He drew healthy boundaries. I love the part where He goes in the temple. He goes out and He goes and makes a whip.
He doesn't just sit there and say, okay, you do whatever you want. He goes out and He intentionally makes a whip, and He clears out the sinners, the people who are taking advantage of God's people. We've learned the power of forgiveness. We've learned the power of drawing healthy boundaries. We've learned how we can then in turn give hope to others who are walking through this same exact thing. It still hurts. We still have things that come up, and it still hurts because we are human.
But we know the One who comforts us in our pain. He literally gives us comfort when it hurts so bad. He gives us comfort. He gives us strength. My heart and what I've taught all of my kids is I say, you guys, listen, this is wrong, and this is what has happened.
But we have a choice to make, and we can allow other people's sin to dictate the rest of our life, or we can choose to forgive, and then we can choose to allow God to use that in our lives so that we can go and we can be a powerful mouthpiece for the Lord. That's my heart for me, my husband, all of our children. What I love is my husband is not walking around bitter. I'm not walking around bitter. I see my children are not walking around bitter, and that is the most important thing to me.
I see these young men and women, because we have young adults and older teens, who are walking around, and they are some of the kindest, most empathetic, thoughtful people. I know that that's because God has enabled my husband and I to walk through this with His grace and helping us to be kind, even when we're treated ugly, to choose to forgive, to choose to allow God to be our vindicator, to choose to allow God to be our defense, to choose to allow Him to bring about justice.
The most important thing is that at night, we can lay our head on our pillow in peace, and that's more important than anything else. Darrell Bock I love that you use the example of Jesus going into the temple with the whip, because often that's portrayed as, here comes Jesus, He's lost His temper, and He's just going through the temple with that whip.
And yet, as you point out, the Scripture clearly states that He went away, He put that whip together, He took that time, so it wasn't out of a flaring up of anger. It was actually a calculating, how do I deal with this issue? And while none of us are Jesus, obviously, it still helps us to understand how we should react in those situations, when we tend to have that anger flare up in us, to say, let's go away and work out how we're going to deal with this. Amen. Yes, so true.
It shows how important it is for us to not be driven by our emotions, but driven by the power of the Holy Spirit living in us. In the end, we don't want to have to face the consequence of just lashing out irrationally. I don't want to have to face that. So, I would much rather be led by the Lord and deal with things boldly and kindly, but in truth, just like Jesus did.
I think too, so often it's like we're almost painted this picture of a Christian is supposed to just never stand up, always be so kind that they never stand up for truth or stand up for righteousness. But I am a firm believer that we are called to stand up for righteousness, to stand up for truth, to be strong, to be the mouthpiece of the Lord when He wants us to speak up. That's why I love that example so much.
We do hear of people who have been working in ministry who have been hurt, who have been betrayed, and they not only walk away from the church, they'll walk away from faith. What do you think it was for you and your husband that made you stay the course? Was it those priorities that you had already set all those years ago? Yes, yes. So, when I was 15 years old, I came across this passage, and it's in the Gospels, and it says that many of the disciples turned away from Jesus at that time.
And Jesus turned and looked towards His intimate 12, and He said, Are you going to leave too? And Peter says, Where else would we go? And that became the cry of my heart as a young teenager. And I firmly believe, looking back, because that's 32 years ago that that commitment was made, is that that commitment is what helped me stay the course. The reality is people are just people, and they're just going to do what people do. We need a Savior. We need Jesus. If we don't have Him, we have nothing.
On the loneliest and the lowliest of times, that is what's kept me, because I can run to my bedroom, throw myself down on my floor, and know that my Savior will meet me there, and He will comfort my heart, and He will heal my soul, and He is the one that can heal the wounds that any of us go through. That is what I firmly believe is what kept me staying the course. And I know that from my husband, but I can't speak for him, but I've watched him walk that out. Where else would we go? Where else?
Sometimes when these sorts of things happen, where there is betrayal, where there has been an issue between people, it may take some time, but sometimes people come back and say, you know what? The Lord has showed me that I was wrong, that actually the things that you were accused of, you were not guilty of. Have there been anyone from that past that have come to you and said, I'm really sorry for what happened?
There was probably about 35 people involved in that, and there has only been one person. We are so thankful for that. That felt like a healing balm to our hearts. It's amazing. There really hasn't been, except for that one person. That's where I've learned the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation.
I choose to forgive those who hurt me because my Savior has forgiven me, but there's a huge difference between forgiving somebody and then reconciling and being able to have a relationship. Reconciliation takes both parties. That has been a really hard pill for me to swallow because I am a relational girl. I love relationships. I think that in the body of Christ, we're brothers and sisters. So I've had to just, okay, Lord, I choose to forgive.
But when there's no repentance or working it out from the other side, you can't reconcile and have a relationship any longer. So out of all of those people, there has been one. And so we're thankful for that. That's an interesting thing to think about too. I have even heard Christians say, I can't forgive that person because they haven't repented. They haven't shown any remorse for what they've done. And yet the scripture doesn't call us to that.
It calls us to forgive people as we've been forgiven, and we've been forgiven even before we repented. So how hard has that lesson been for you? Once again, I look back at my teenage years. I was abandoned as a young girl. My real father would just show up back into my life to abandon me all over again. And that's where I learned that lesson. There was never any type of change in his behavior. He never apologized. But the taught me that if I want to be forgiven, I need to forgive him.
It doesn't mean what he did was right or that he's going to get off the hook, which is what a lot of people think. It just means that my soul is okay and that I'm going to be okay because I need to be forgiven in the same manner that I forgive is the same manner I'm going to be forgiven. I desperately need forgiveness. It has not been hard, but every time a situation comes up in my head with this situation with the church, I've had to choose to forgive over again.
That's where I see I'm like, wow, it has nothing to do with how we feel. It has everything to do with our will and our choice. The kids and I were just talking about that again this morning, that every time it comes up, you just choose to forgive and you just say, okay, God, they're in your hands. I really see that it is an act of my will. It is a choice. Am I going to be obedient or am I not? It is crazy how much of our Christian walk is that. It's not all the emotions like we want.
Sometimes there is. You've touched several times on the women that you are now helping with the help that you received. Tell me about that. How empowering is it for you to be able to reach out to other women, to see them walking through some of the same struggles that you've walked through and yet to be able to say, I've been there, there is a way through? Yes. No, I love it.
I love it because I see how God took my health struggles and as a result, that's when I started Journey to Renewed Health. Then I see how He has allowed me to use even what we've walked through in the more recent years. It breathes life into me. When we walk with the Lord, none of our pain is pointless. None of it is. He promises that He will use every single thing for our good, for those who are called according to His purpose.
It is so encouraging and it gives me hope because none of that junk is wasted. I'm so thankful. Whenever we walk through just really hard seasons and pain, if we can just have that eternal perspective and just realize that none of this is going to be wasted, not one bit of it, and if we're open to just, okay, Lord, I'm going to walk through this, I'm going to feel the pain, I'm going to deal with this, and then we allow God to use it, then we get to see, ah, it's just this light bulb.
I get to see Him allow me to encourage these other women and I love it. I love it. You're dealing with people on that physical level of that physical healing of getting their body right, as well as spiritually and emotionally. Yet in the church, we often forget we are whole beings, that we are made up of all these things and we might focus on one or the other.
It must be such an encouragement for the women that you serve for them to understand that holistic approach to who we are as people under God. Yes. Yes, it's so true. Really helping these women get healthy holistically. I remember one of my first clients in 2020, we had worked together for three months and we worked on balancing out her gut, healing her at the cellular level, dealing with her emotions, the spiritual health.
After three months of working together, she said with awe in her voice, she said, Amber, I can now serve the Lord the way I've always wanted to. The Lord said, that's it. I want you to help my women get healthy completely so that they can then in turn walk in all that I have for them. It is a joy. Amber, I want to thank you for what you're doing in sharing some of your very difficult story with others so that they can find healing too and continue to walk in the way.
I want to thank you for sharing that with so many people through your website. The link is in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you easily, but thank you so much for your time today on Bleeding Daylight. Thank you so much for having me. It has been a pleasure. 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.