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 to this episode, I'm glad you're here. You can connect with Bleeding Daylight through social media. Links and other episodes are at bleedingdaylight.net Please share Bleeding Daylight with others. Sometimes we find what we need just at the right time. But that doesn't always guarantee instant healing.
Today we'll hear from a guest who has walked the long road to wholeness. Today I have the privilege of chatting with Bambi Lynn, a woman whose life journey is a testament to the transformative power of faith and resilience. From a tumultuous upbringing marked by abuse and despair, to a pivotal moment where she encountered the divine. Her story is one of redemption and hope. She's authored two books, The Journey of Josephine and The Treasures of My Heart.
I'm so pleased that she is joining me on Bleeding Daylight today. Bambi, thank you so much for your time. Well, thank you for having me. What a privilege it is. We all hold stories that are difficult to tell. And I know that your childhood was quite fractured. Can you take me back to those days? Sure. My dad actually was a brutal alcoholic. He wasn't a very nice drunk when he was around. My parents went back and forth with each other.
Within nine years, I think my parents got back and forth together. I mean, maybe 20 times. Finally, after when I was 10 years old, my parents finally did split. So my mother was a single mom having to raise four children by herself. We weren't very rich. We were a very poor family. So there were definitely some things that we had to deal with in the poverty. I have a very different name, as you can see and can hear.
So that definitely played a part in being bullied in school and being bullied around because people really made fun of my name. And then we had poverty and my name. So it definitely wasn't a great combination. It would have made it a very unstable home life, wouldn't it? Absolutely. We moved a lot. We always did seem to end up back across the street from my grandparents. I loved my grandma, but my grandfather sexually abused me as a little girl.
I did not reveal that until after my grandmother died because I loved my grandmother so much. We knew that my grandfather had sexually abused a lot of us granddaughters in our family. Believe it or not, though, my grandma's house seemed safer to me than at home. It just was calmer and things like that. And so people sometimes wonder, you know, why did I go back to my grandma's house when my grandfather had sexually abused me as a little girl? I just loved my grandmother so much.
And that's the only way that I can explain why I kept going back, because I just loved my grandmother. You, as a little girl, were having to decide what safety meant and going between a home that seemed unsafe to another home that seemed slightly safer. And yet there was danger there. It must have very much shaped your childhood and into your life from there, thinking, is there actually a safe place in life? Absolutely. Sometimes people don't understand trauma.
I went to a counseling years ago and it was titled Ancient Past. And it was the whole concept of going back to your past and being able to heal and know where Jesus was in your past and being able to let it go. But so many people don't understand trauma. Everything affects your mind, your physical body, you know, the way that you react to things. It depends on the trauma that you have been through as a child and when that trauma started.
And it goes into your adult life and it really builds the insecurities even into adulthood. We hear so often when there are claims made of abuse many years after the abuse happened, people will say, well, why didn't you mention it? Why didn't you say something about it? And they'll almost dismiss the abuse because there's been a lapse in time. So that must be difficult to deal with as well.
When you finally have the courage to actually share what has happened, to know that there are some people that just because of the passage of time will dismiss that. Oh, absolutely. And that's why it did take me 30 years to finally have the strength and the ability to write my first book, The Journey of Josephine. I had to go through a whole lot of healing and a whole lot of forgiveness in order to write my raw account of my life and to be vulnerable.
I think that sometimes the issue is that there's nobody willing to tell their story. And so as women, I'm only going to talk for women, I know that boys are abused too, but I'm looking at my ministry is to help set the captive free in women's life. And I told my story to give the permission, so to speak, for other women to tell theirs, because we're stuck in hiding our own secrets because nobody wants to discuss it. They think it's throwing their family under the table.
They think that it's not having respect for the family, that you're not walking in forgiveness. If you really forgive, you wouldn't have to bring up this issue anymore. When that's not true, God wants us to be whole and set free. And God had a plan and a purpose for our lives, and that was to prosper us and not to harm us. So we have to go back to those moments and continue to hand them back over to God. And the more that we do that, the more set free that we become.
And that's why I told my story, The Journey of Josephine, was to give other women permission to be able to tell theirs. You've touched on something very important there, and that is giving permission, because many times people who have gone through abuse feel that they don't have permission. They don't have permission to actually feel the way they feel. They don't have permission to tell that story. They don't have permission to actually accuse someone who has done something terrible to them.
How important is that permission in a woman's life? I think it's very important. I tell women every day, the greatest hero in your life is the reflection of you looking at yourself. And that hero needs to be taken care of. That hero needs to be set free. That hero needs to go from trauma to triumph. And you have to be willing to do the hard work. And I just was willing to do the hard work. There are some parenting styles that I adapted because of the abuse that I had gone through.
And there's ways that I deal with situations because of the trauma. But the more that I kept understanding, and when I accepted Christ as my Savior at 16 years old, it didn't make things easier. It made it that God said, Now, Bambi, let's take each step. Let's peel the onion. Let's continue on this process. And give yourself permission to cry. Give yourself permission to scream.
I have friends in my life that when everything was happening, and they've learned my lifestyle and learned different things in my life, or if I've gone through some heartache, my friends have said to me, You know what, Bambi? And I've said the same thing to now to my friends. You have 10 minutes. You have 10 minutes to scream, to yell, to swear, to do whatever you need to do, to ask the questions why.
But then after those 10 minutes, we're going to take you back to the Word of God, and we're going to show you how Christ looks at you, and who you are in Him, and how you are the daughter of the King, and somebody trying to rob that identity from you. And we're here to help you understand and get that identity back. I know that it wasn't only your grandfather who abused you as a child, and that can be difficult as well, knowing that you can't feel safe in any place.
And I'm wondering again on the idea of permission, many abusers, and you would need to tell me if this was the case for you, but many abusers will then tell the person that they have abused, This is our secret. You can't tell anyone, and sometimes with threats. So there's this ingrained thing in many people that I can't tell, even though I know that that person doesn't hold sway over me anymore, but I can't tell because of that threat, or because that's what I've been told all along.
Was that the case for you? No, it wasn't the case for me. And I understand that many people have said that, and abusers do say that. The case for me, and I think the case for a lot of women and young girls, is that we wouldn't tell anyways. When I was a young girl, you just didn't talk about things like that. Everybody knew that there was a dirty uncle in your family.
There were things that were happening within your family that you didn't want to tell, because you carry the weight of knowing that if you told the story, that you would be messing up somebody's life. I never told my grandmother, because where was my grandmother going to go? Where was my grandmother going to live? I took on the heavy weight of my grandmother.
And when I got sexually assaulted by my uncle, when I was 15, I felt like I couldn't tell anybody, and I finally did, but in the beginning I couldn't tell anybody, because I decided to leave and run away the day after my 16th birthday. When I moved into his house, I felt kind of like I deserved it, because I left and moved out of my house, and how could I go back and tell everybody what just happened?
Victims have a huge burden on their shoulders, because there's so many impacts and so many things that are happening that we are trying to control. This might be a difficult question for you, and it might be one that you really don't know the answer to, but you mentioned that your grandfather had abused others apart from yourself, and that you were trying to protect your grandmother. Do you think that your grandmother had any inkling of what was going on? Did she know any of this?
And was she trying to hold back and protect the family as well by not divulging what was going on? My grandmother now has passed away, and so has my grandfather, and all of us that were victims of my grandfather, we're all in our 40s and 50s now. It was a different time. It was a different place than it is. It was such a secret when we were kids. Could my grandmother have known?
I think the intuition may have been there, but I don't know if my grandmother truly knew what was happening to her granddaughters. You mentioned that you then left home at the age of 16, and things didn't necessarily go well from there either. What did that look like? When you left home at 16, what sort of a life did you jump into? Well, I moved in with my uncle. He was my uncle by marriage, and his son, my aunt and my uncle, had split up. He offered his house to me.
The first couple of months that I was there, they call it now grooming. There was no word for it when I was 16. He had me in beauty pageants, and I was modeling. He just made sure that life was really great, that I left my mom's home. And I went to school, and the school was so much better than it was at my other school, because my other school, they bullied me a whole lot. And then so here they didn't. So there were so many other things, facets that were happening.
The abuse was slowly starting. I stayed there for about three months until I finally had the courage to go to the nurses at the school, and I told her what was happening. And the first thing that she said to me is that, we're really glad that you finally came because we knew something was wrong. And come to find out, my uncle, by marriage, he had sexually assaulted and raped other girls. He did spend 10 years in prison for that, but not at the time that he did with me.
I ended up in a foster home because I couldn't go back to my mom's house. I do tell about the story in my book, The Journey of Josephine. I loved the family that took me in, but then I had done something stupid, and I left there because I felt like I couldn't go back to their house because I had done something really stupid, and I didn't think that they would love me. I didn't think that they would accept me, because I had never been truly loved sacrificially.
So I ended up leaving and going back to my hometown. When I went back to my hometown, that's where I met somebody that took me into his apartment, took me into his house, and one thing led to another. In December of 1986, I went to the police station, and I told them that something was wrong and that I didn't know what was wrong, but I didn't feel right. I went down to the bridge at our hometown, and I went to end my life because I said I can't just live this way anymore.
The police officer actually followed me, which I didn't know, threw me down to the ground and threw me into the police car, and at 16, I ended up at the psychiatric center for kids. When I got there, they did all this blood work, all these tests and everything like that, and they asked me if I knew that I was pregnant, and I said, no, I didn't know I was pregnant.
I told them to give me a few minutes if I can go back to my room, and at that very moment, I knew that my life was a mess, and at that moment, I looked up to heaven, and I said, if there truly is a God, if you truly are a God that loves, I ask you to help me to save my baby and to save me, and I will honor you all the days of my life, and I will serve you until the day that I die, and that was when I accepted Christ as my savior and continue to have a relationship with him now almost 37 years.
I'm wondering if we can go back a little from there. Tell me what did you know of God to that point because you obviously knew enough to reach out and say, if you're there, then I want you in my life, and I will follow you. What was happening before that as far as your understanding of who this God was? When I was a little girl, there was a church bus ministry that picked up kids from homes that their parents didn't go to church.
Every time that we moved back to the area where my grandmother lived, this church bus would pick us up. I would be a church bus kid.
I loved, loved being with Jesus, and I loved going to church and going to Sunday school, but I didn't think since we were church bus kids, and I write this in my other book, The Treasures of My Heart, I loved Jesus so much, but I didn't think that I could ever have a personal relationship with him because I was a church bus kid, and that Jesus only comes into the hearts of the children that were raised in a Christian home.
So I knew of God, but I knew he wasn't for me because I just was a church bus kid. We're seeing those elements that you mentioned of trauma continuing to go through life. There's this understanding that I'm not good enough for Jesus because I'm a church bus kid.
There's the family that loved you, that you were fostered with, but again, your pastor told you that if you don't do the right thing, then you're not going to be loved, and so you left that situation when they probably would have accepted you back in and been able to love you. So the trauma is already telling you that you have to be of use in some way to people before love is going to be given.
So when you started this journey of faith in Jesus Christ, how hard was it for you to start to understand that his love is absolutely unconditional? I've been a Christian for 36 years, and I really think that it's a journey. We all have a tendency sometimes when we fall that, oh, my goodness, is Jesus really going to love us?
I just always remembered thinking that God had a baseball bat, and whenever I made a mistake, it was always in the corner, and I would always look at the corner, wondering if that baseball bat, whether God was really going to love me, or it was all based on pain. So I loved Jesus, but I lived a life wanting to prove to him over and over again that it was good that he saved me. I wanted to prove over and over again that I was a good girl and that I was worth saving.
So I spent years trying to make sure that I was a good deal for Jesus. He paid a good price for me, and it wasn't until probably 10 years ago maybe that I finally understood grace, and I understood that I fall short of the glory of God and that it has nothing to do with me but everything to do with what Jesus did for me at the cross and that when God looks at me, he's looking at me through the eyes of his son.
He's not looking at me through the eyes of my wretchedness because he brought his son to set me free from that, and that was a huge revelation for me. I have six children, and my four daughters suffered greatly at the hand of my legalism and my trying to perform to make sure that Jesus loves me. I had identical twin boys.
They were born during the time that God set me free from legalism, and he set me on the path of grace and that I didn't have to be perfect because I was already perfect in him because of what Christ did for me at the cross. So it's been a huge journey. You mentioned a few times there that there's been this ongoing journey, so I want to jump back to this 16-year-old girl who finally realizes that life seems to be very difficult, almost collapsing, something is not right.
You find out that you're pregnant, and at that point, you reach out to Jesus and say, I'm going to follow you, but again, we know it's a journey, so that didn't solve everything. Where did life go from there? I was actually at the psychiatric center for 28 days.
They would not release me until somebody called to take me in because where I was living was not feasible for me to stay, and actually a pastor, which is so kind of cool how God works and how he ordains the steps of the righteous, is that I had played softball one year, and I hated softball, and he was the umpire. He would do things within the community, and somehow the police officer that picked me up from wanting to commit suicide and grabbing me, he contacted this pastor.
That pastor and his family actually took me into their home. I rented a room from them. I worked at McDonald's, and I rented a room for them for $50, and they were one of the first people that showed me Jesus with skin on. They truly loved me unconditionally, and there were times that I pulled away because I didn't know that kind of love, but they persevered with me, and I stayed at their house until my beautiful daughter was born.
And I guess you're starting to see the love of Christ, but as you say, it continues to be a journey. So now you're this young girl. You have a baby. Where does life turn from there? One of the boys at the church that I went to as a little girl, I had a crush on him when I was younger. He actually drove through the McDonald's drive-thru. He was a family in the church. His mother was an organ player.
His father ran some of the church ministry, and all of his home life, all of his aunts and uncles were pastors and missionaries in the Baptist community. He came through my McDonald's drive-thru. He asked me what I was doing with my life. I told him that I had a little girl and that I wasn't interested in anything, but he actually called me the next day, and believe it or not, we got married, but heartache started again.
I was sold out for Jesus, and I thought since he was raised in a Christian home and went to a Christian college and went to a Christian school, that he was also sold out for Jesus, and he was not. For nine years, he went back and forth into infidelity, and I just kept taking him back because I was told that marriage is covenant and no matter what, and because I was raised in such a dysfunctional home, most of the problems had to have been me.
At those times, Bible studies, women's groups were, what kind of pie does he like? Make sure you just have a pie for him. Make sure you're just submitting more to him, maybe because you're such a strong-willed person that you're not able to submit, so it was all pretty much handed on to me, and then finally after eight years, he walked away with one of the women that he had had an affair with, but it brought so much brokenness to me because once again, nobody loved me. I was unloved.
I wanted to do everything right, and I felt like I didn't. So again, it repeats this pattern. You're learning from life. You have to perform, which again tells us why it took you so long to understand the undeserved grace that God offers us, and it must, as you say, have been difficult because this is just following the pattern that you've always seen. When did life start to turn around? When did you start to get a fuller understanding of what life perhaps should look like?
After he left, my daughters and I were in church three, four times a week. We were at the altar. God was doing such a work in my life. This was in the early 90s, late 90s when revival was happening, and I just felt like God was doing something in my life, and then I met another person. His family was part of the church. He had walked away from God for like 10 years and had come back to the church, and we ended up being together, and I thought, I'm 29 years old. I have four children.
Who's ever going to love me? We ended up getting married. Soon after we had gotten married, he started hitting me, and the domestic violence began, and I stayed married to him for eight years, waiting long enough for my children, my sons to be old enough to be able to tell somebody, and I married him. I fell into lust. I ended up getting pregnant for my identical twins. I wanted to save my children. I didn't want him to have my kids every other weekend, one day a week.
God had to continue to work on my heart and continue to build a relationship with him because my ex-husband surely wasn't going to give it to me. And you mentioned earlier the whole thing of giving permission to women, and I guess you were still seeking the permission to actually say, no, this is not good enough, the permission to say, I don't deserve you acting this way. That must have been a very difficult time for you, not even believing that you had permission to stand up for yourself.
Oh, absolutely. The church has changed when it comes to abuse to women within the church. You know, I would go to our pastor, and they would just tell me, you just need to pray more. Bake him his favorite pie. Whenever he is going to get angry, just go into the bathroom and put a pillow over your face and just pray and seek God. Continue to fast. It was always put on me as the wife and not understanding that there was no accountability for him. But yet, I didn't want to end a marriage.
I was always so angry sometimes at God of saying, you know, all I wanted to do was serve you, and my whole life is a mess. That's all I've ever wanted to do was to serve you, and there's nothing that shows. And there's times, there's some residue to it, you know, because I am a single person.
I do not date, and I haven't been in a relationship in 10 years or something because I think that that residue is that I don't want to do anything that would hurt Jesus, which is so hard to comprehend sometimes. Where has life taken you now? There's been so much trauma. There's been so much difficulty throughout your life, but you have these children. You have a very different life now. As you say, you've started to fully understand the grace that God gives. Where is life for you now?
Life for me now is that I moved closer to a couple of my children. I am a mother of six. I am very blessed with 13 grandchildren. I write. I seek adventure. I've learned not to tell myself no, and sometimes learn to live life afraid and do some goofy things in life. I have a great, an amazing set of friends that keep me accountable, and we keep each other accountable. Life is good. I have a great job. I've done so much healing.
I use the picture of the onion and how it's being peeled and being peeled over and over again, and sometimes the beginning of that, the onion peel, there's so much more healing that has to be done, and there's so much more crying and being cleansed of the pain and the rejection of life, and I tell people now that God has me dealing with the core of that onion.
Those are the things that some people don't see, but I see that God is working on, trying not to believe the stories that I could tell in my head, realizing that if my girlfriend tells me she's going to call me in five minutes and she doesn't call me in ten minutes, it doesn't mean she doesn't like me. It doesn't mean this far-out story that I told in my head. It just means that something else came up.
That's my goal this year, is to continue to stop telling myself stories in my head of what people are really thinking and what they're really doing. To be able to write books has been amazing. It's been healing, so that has just been an incredible journey that I never thought that I was going to have the opportunity to be able to share my story and to be able to touch the lives of women by telling my story. It is such an amazing feeling.
What I love as well is it's not just your own story that you tell, as you have done in your books and as you do on your website, but on your website, you make space for others to tell their stories. That must be incredibly empowering for them as well. Absolutely. My website is called HealingThroughStories.com, and it was designed for us to be able to be at the virtual table and to be able to tell our stories and to be able to exist in knowing that we're not the only ones.
When I've opened up the opportunity for women to tell their stories, wow, some of the stories and testimonies that people have written on my website are powerful. The forgiveness and the healing, the hurt that these women have gone through and that they were willing to use my platform to be able to tell other women that they're not alone. And it has been such an incredible journey to have this platform and to be able to tell my story and for others to tell theirs.
Bambi, I want to say thank you so much for being open and sharing your story. And I know there's a whole lot more in your books for people to read, for people to contemplate and to start their own journey away from the struggle that they're currently facing. I will put a link in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so people can get to your website easily to read the stories that are there to be able to purchase your books.
But I do want to say thank you so much for sharing your story today and for being on Bleeding Daylight. Well, thank you so much for having me and I love the title of your podcast. That's what made me even reach out to you. I didn't know if I would be a guest, but when I reached out to you, I reached out to you because of the title of your podcast. I just love that title. Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
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