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, I'm so pleased you can join me. Bleeding Daylight is on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others. Links are at bleedingdaylight.net where you'll also find dozens of other episodes. Please leave a five-star review for Bleeding Daylight on your favourite podcast platform.
Our lives are shaped by our thoughts, so what happens when our thoughts about ourselves, others and even God are shaped by trauma? How do we get life back on track? Today's guest has travelled that road. Today I'm talking with Charles Wagner, a man whose journey from spiritual struggle to profound transformation has inspired many. Despite growing up immersed in Evangelical Christianity, Charles grappled with deep-seated beliefs about God's love, stemming from childhood trauma.
Charles eventually found healing through Biblical counselling, which revolutionised his understanding of God's love. He's now the author of five books, including two New Testament commentaries. He hosts a testimony-focused radio show in Boston. His extensive work in prison ministry, juvenile detention outreach and various church leadership roles reflect his passion for sharing the transformative power of God's love with others. Charles, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
I am absolutely delighted to be here, Rodney. Thank you for having me. I mentioned that you suffered childhood trauma, which did shape your thinking about God. Can you take me through some of that trauma and what beliefs it caused you to hold about God? Yes, this is something I used to be really ashamed of, Rodney. As a matter of fact, I went through 40-some years of my life without ever sharing it with anybody.
And I just always like to preface my revelation of this by saying, I know my parents are with the Lord. I know that they love Jesus Christ. I am looking forward to seeing both of them again. But when I was three to four years old, I witnessed my father beating my sister. That same night, I saw my dad push my mother out of the bedroom, and it was not one of his best days. The conclusion I came to that night was that I didn't want to be like my dad.
And then my mother said, well, you're going to end just like your dad. So I was informed as a toddler, or I concluded as a toddler, that I was morally broken merely because I was a boy. Girls don't do those kinds of things. They don't hurt people like that. That began a lifelong struggle with the belief that I was morally corrupt simply because of who I was. Part of that informed me that God didn't love me, that God was angry with me. This message just really deepened.
I was ashamed to share this with anybody. So you talk to yourself, right? And you keep telling yourself, you're bad, you're bad, you're bad, you're bad. And then you really deepen in your belief that God doesn't love you. I carried that through about 40 years of my life. That's such a heavy load for a young child to carry. How did it display itself in those early years of your childhood? I'm not going to say I was a loner. I had really good friends. I was blessed.
My five guys from the neighborhood are all strong men of God today. We're in touch. But I've spent a lot of time by myself. I just generally had this feeling that every other friend that I had was a better person than me, that I was going to be a failure in life. And I just had this expectation of failure, the believing that I was a failure, not having any real career ambition. That's kind of the ways it really affected me. And of course, my relationship with the Lord was weak, to say the least.
Tell me about faith in those early days. You've already mentioned what your father did, but were your family a family of faith? Were you part of a local church? Yes. As a matter of fact, we went to church twice a Sunday. We'd drive a half hour to church in the morning, and then we'd drive a half hour to church at night. I did vacation Bible school. I did Sunday school. I actually went to a Christian high school. So I was immersed in all things evangelical and immersed in the gospel.
And I heard this over and over again, that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins because he loves us so much. Well, I really concluded, Rodney, that he loved everybody but me. I was the one guy that he did not love. I was the one guy that a guy would say, oh, he's coming to heaven. Oh, I guess I have to let him in. That sounds silly, but that's kind of how I thought. And it's interesting that we carry those sorts of thoughts through life.
And I think it's not an uncommon thing for people to feel that way, that God must love everyone else more than us because we see everyone else's show reel. We see everyone else's highlight reel, but we know what goes on in our heart. And there's something in us that says, but God can't excuse that. Was that your experience? Yes, I agree with that. It was actually like I was broken and I could not be fixed. God couldn't fix my life.
He couldn't love me because I was just this morally corrupt, broken kid. You've mentioned that it affected you right through those school years, your grades were not good, and you felt that while God could love others, he could not love you. Fast forward a little bit. When was it that that started to change for you? What was the healing process for you? My first wife and I married in 1985. Looking back, I saw some red flags there, but I saw getting married as a form of treating my depression.
So, we had an 18-year marriage before it really began to fall apart. We had two wonderful kids. The marriage really began to fall apart and I became extremely depressed, Rodney. I mean, very, very depressed. One day, at a train station, I was thinking about stepping in front of a train. I was very, very suicidal and I ended up being told that I had to go to the hospital or else I'd be put in the hospital. So, I was in the hospital for four or five days and I was trying to fight the divorce.
I was unsuccessful. During that time, I met a woman who was a student in my class. I was teaching at the time and we became friends. As my first wife is tearing me down, this woman is building me up. But this woman was very, very broken, Rodney. She was on welfare. Her father abandoned her when she was in the womb. I did not know that she was on drugs. You guys might think, well, of course you must have known. No, I really didn't. So, she ended up dying suddenly of a cocaine overdose.
That was kind of the moment where I just threw my hands up to God and said, help me, help me. My life is a mess. Please come and rescue me. Through a chain of events, he led me into biblical counseling. The woman who was my counselor was just wonderful, fantastic. She met with me for four years and Rodney, what she did was she honed in on this identity issue that I had. I was so ashamed of my identity struggle and yet she kept loving me. She kept loving me.
I would spew the darkness and corruption in my heart, metaphorically all over her rug in her office. She just kept loving me and loving me and loving me. By the time this woman was done counseling me, I knew that God loved me. She proved to me that God loved me. The way she treated me showed me how deeply God loved me and Rodney, that changed everything. Now, when I read the Bible, this was a love letter from the God who deeply loves me. I started falling in love with God.
I started getting involved in prison ministry. My son and I traveled and did various volunteer work. The Lord led me to my second wife, who is a godly woman. It was really that dark period of my life. When I went through the divorce, I was depressed and this woman died suddenly of a cocaine overdose. God used that to draw me into biblical counseling, which changed my life. You've mentioned biblical counseling a couple of times.
I guess most people are familiar with the idea of counseling, but may not be quite so familiar with this idea of biblical counseling. Maybe you can give us a thumbnail sketch of where that differs from most other counseling. I'm not an expert on this, but my explanation is this. I had a lot of counselors. They would say, just change your thinking. Just change the way you think. Think good about yourself. Love yourself. Treat yourself well. Well, none of that worked, Rodney.
None of that could change my heart. This woman was saying to me, look, you're a sinner. You have rebelled from God. You have desired to go your own way. You have desired to do things the way you want, say things you want to want, be who you want to be, make your own plans, define good and evil yourself. This rebellion is what separates you from God. Surrender your life to Christ and surrender your heart to Jesus. He is the Lord of your life.
That was what I needed to realize that I was really a rebel from God. As much as, yes, I was victimized by things that happened to me when I was a toddler, I was also keeping that going because I was choosing to believe that God's a bad guy and I'll do things my way. That was the eye-opening thing. I think only a biblical counselor will have that approach to help you to see it's really a spiritual issue.
It's very interesting that you talked about that issue of trauma right when you were a very young child. It seems that there was this one incident that happened and that caused you trauma. How often do you think we miss the fact that it could be one instant in our childhood or along the way that could cause us ongoing trauma? Because most people would think, well, no, no, that can't be it.
How often do you think people miss the point that there could be something like that that has changed the whole trajectory of their life? I think it happens all the time. I think most people don't like to really examine their lives. They don't like to go back and reflect on the various things that happened to them. I think there's also denial. Many people that are really victimized, perhaps by an adult, it's a trauma.
They don't want to go back and revisit, so they don't take the time to think about what the implications are of it. Also, you can think from my standpoint, it's not like there was this horrific thing. I can think of people that I've had on my radio show that their parents were in jail for drug addiction and they've been trafficked. I can easily say, brush it off, oh, that couldn't have been that important because it's not like I experienced what these other people experienced.
But what might seem like a minor thing to others, it was huge. It blew up. I would encourage people to reflect back on how God has worked in your life. That's part of creating your testimony. When you look back and see how God's working, prayerfully, he's going to open up that understanding about what took place in your life that led you to think the way you thought. Tell me a little about that radio show where you invite people to share their encounters with God.
What was it that sparked the idea for you to begin that? My ministry is called Gramazin. Our whole ministry is to encourage believers in Jesus Christ to share their testimonies with their friends, their family, their coworkers, their neighbors. But we're also trying to encourage churches to publish those testimonies.
We'd like to see the day when Bible-believing churches publish testimonies on their website or their social media so that churches become the place to go when you're despairing and you're looking for hope. That's our mission. I also wrote five books. I hired somebody to promote my books. As part of the process of promoting the books, she reached out to the radio station. And just at that time, they had an opening. The manager of the radio station saw the ministry they were trying to do.
They believed in it, and they invited me to have a show. My goal is to have one testimony from every Bible-believing church in New England. So we've got a lot of work ahead of us, but that's how we got into it. How often do you think churches don't realize the wealth of experience that lies in the testimonies of the people that sit in their church every week? Oh, my goodness. It happens all the time. I have talked to pastors, oh, I love what you're doing. I think it's so fantastic.
Oh, yeah, go collect those testimonies from other churches, not from their church. Because I think people are so scared of sharing their testimony that that's kind of a, oh, I don't want to go there. I did a research about 10 years ago of 2,000 church websites, and less than 3% had any even reference of a testimony. And to me, it's like you've got this drug that cures cancer, and you don't want to tell anybody about it, right? So you've got this relationship with Jesus Christ.
You'll come to church to worship that Jesus Christ has changed your life. He's saved you. He's delivering you. He's transforming you. But yet, you don't want to tell anybody outside the church. This is prevalent throughout our society. And we're going to try and put a dent into that and try and encourage as many churches as we can to encourage their people to share their testimonies and publish them.
Have there been some surprising testimonies that you've uncovered, either in a church or on the radio show? When I was less spiritually mature than I am now, I used to think that, oh, look at that Christian, right? He's perfect. His life is great. He's done everything right. And look at that woman over there. She's done everything right.
But when you get people on the radio, you realize that these people that are really strong leaders and they're influencers in faith, they really have their own brokenness. They have their own brokenness, and they're coming from brokenness. They have a lot of broken backgrounds. And I can see that these people still wrestle with themselves and their own spiritual weaknesses. And so there is nobody, including me, who's arrived, and they're like this perfect example of a Christian.
We're all broken. Yeah, I can think of specific testimonies. There was the Muslim woman who went through a whole ton of abuse. She was trafficked. She's now got a dynamic ministry. It reaches 700 some million Muslims across the world. And there's some people that really have great courage, phenomenal courage, Rodney, and they're inspiring when they share their story on the radio. You're talking about believing someone else has arrived. Someone else has got there.
They're the super spiritual Christians, and yet we feel that we're not arriving. And yet, even when we look Scripture, we see Paul saying, hey, look, the things I want to do, I can't do. The things that I don't want to do, I end up doing. And that seems to be a problem that's common to every man and every woman. And yet, we so often believe that someone else has it all together. Yes, absolutely. The previous church I attended, there was this couple that, I think they had five daughters.
They were like this perfect family. One day, I went up to this father and go, why are your kids so perfect? And at that very moment, two of the girls started fighting. He goes, this is what our life is really like. We tend to build people up that they're these perfect people, but they're just as broken as the rest of us. And Rodney, one of the things that to me is a barometer we should all ask ourselves is what is our prayer life like?
If we get up in the morning and tend to ignore God throughout the day, we can handle things on our own. If trouble comes to us, we're not inclined to pray, then this is a sign that we are not as spiritually mature as we might think we are. It's a test for myself all the time, and I fall short. My prayer life needs a lot of growth, and I'm sure that's true for most Christians.
You've mentioned that you've been involved in prison ministry, and I know that for many people, they like to put on a mask to say, I'm doing okay. And in that way, they can reject God. I suppose people who are in prison have reached rock bottom, and they may even be more open to a way forward than most people that have never seen the doors of a prison. Amen. I am telling you the truth. I got goosebumps when you just asked me that question.
I have never experienced a worship service like I experienced in this prison in Philadelphia. It was the largest prison in Philadelphia, and we went in there. These guys were so thankful that people from outside the prison were bringing the gospel in, and I witnessed men just thanking God. You could just tell it was from the depths of their heart, thanking God that He has given them the hope of forgiveness of sins.
Men in the room that committed murder, they had done all kinds of things, and yet they're crying out to God, please forgive me of my sin, or thank you so much for forgiving my sin through Jesus Christ. Yes, they have no pretension. It's not like, hey, look at the car we got parked in the parking lot, or here we went to Germany for vacation, or South America for vacation. I just got a high-paying job. No, these are men that all had completely broken lives.
They're standing naked before God, and they're just so thankful for the forgiveness of sins. I am so thankful the Lord enabled me to experience that. Yeah, so powerful. So do you think there are things that we can learn from those who are in prison who have, by their very nature of being in that place, have to let that guard down? Do you think those of us on the outside should learn a lesson from them? Absolutely. Absolutely.
I wish it could be mandatory that every Christian had to experience that. I think we don't understand how we were enemies of God. I think we believers really need to understand that. I do believe in the total depravity of man and total depravity of my heart, and I need to really understand that's how broken I was, and yet Jesus Christ loved me so much that he says, you're my enemy, Charles, but I'm going to come and rescue you through the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I'm in ministry now, Rodney, and I know that everything I'm doing in ministry is being done by Jesus Christ. It's not being done by me. He's just using me. I'm the hammer that he's using to build the building. I think we need to be humble before the Lord, and that's when the Bible tells us he will truly bless us, is when we have that humility to understand we are nothing and he is everything, yet he loves us so much that he calls us his children.
So often we tend to minister from the place of our own hurts, of the places where Jesus has brought healing. Has that been your experience, that you've been able to minister to people to share with them the fact that God truly does love them, to help them to understand that thing that you had struggled with so much for so many years? Absolutely. The Lord has taken me to a point where I'm not very public about it. I've written a book about it, a whole book about it, a Christian novel.
I'm on podcasts. I'm talking about it. So the Lord has given me the courage to share my story, to encourage other people. At one time, I did not accept who God made me to be. Now I love the fact that God has made me to be who I am, that I'm the Charles Wagner that he has called into ministry. So many people struggle with their identity, who they are in Christ, who they are with God. And so now I have a testimony, a story that I was very broken, the Lord rescued me, and I'm not perfect, Rodney.
The Lord knows I have a lot of struggles. I also had the experience with an unwanted divorce, so I can minister to people that are going through a broken marriage. I was also suicidal. So you have the opportunity to share with people, look, I almost killed myself, and look how the Lord has now used my life, has now called me into ministry. See what I would have lost out on had I actually done it.
Yes, I think when we experience things in life and the Lord delivers us, this is why it's so important for us to share our testimonies, to tell other people he can rescue you just like he rescued me. I imagine there's people listening at the moment who say, well, I really don't have a testimony because they expect that a testimony must be someone who's been through the deepest, darkest moments of life and have come out.
And yet, simply the fact that Jesus loved us enough to die for us and to reconcile us back to the Father, that's a testimony. What would you say to those people who say, my testimony isn't dynamic enough, my testimony doesn't say enough? What would you say to them about starting to share what's going on in their life? I'd ask them first to look in the mirror and realize just where they came from. At one point, they were enemies of God.
I don't care how good people they were, how nice, how many good works they did. They were an enemy of God before they received Christ as their Savior. That meant that they had a destiny to a place nobody wants to go to. So there is a dramatic rescue that God did in their life. He plucked them out of an eternal destiny separate from him and delivered them into a new relationship with him. That's traumatic. Right there, the very fact that you received Christ as your Savior is traumatic. It's huge.
For those that maybe grew up in a Christian home and have always had a strong walk with God, well, that's good. That's a testament we need to hear, because look, doing things God's way gives you a life of spiritual blessings. If you've always walked with the Lord, then tell us about how your family did that so that other families can learn how to do it. There's not anybody that doesn't have a testimony. We all have a testimony. Tell me just a little about the books that you've written.
Tell me about those books. I married my second wife, and I moved into her home. We live in a former shipbuilding village up here in Massachusetts. It's right by the ocean. You walk through the village on a cool fall night, and you think, this is a place where an author writes books. So when I moved up here, I got writing books. My first book was actually split into two by the publisher. I wanted to have a book, when people experience something, they can turn to it, a prayer about it.
So if somebody loses their job, there's a prayer about it. If somebody has a car accident, there's a prayer about it. If somebody experiences a hurricane, there's a prayer about it. If somebody's wife or somebody's husband cheats on her, there's a prayer about it. I wanted to have prayers about various topics. So there's 757 prayers broken into two different books. After those books were done, I was thinking, Rodney, of going to seminary.
It wasn't because I wanted to become a pastor or something, but I really wanted to know the Word of God. I did not really have the funds for that, nor the time because of things in my life. So I just delved into the Bible study myself. I just couldn't get enough of the Word of God, and I started with the New Testament. My devotions, my study of the Word of God, which was intense, I put into a book. The three-part series, Take Every Passage to Prayer.
Believe it or not, volume one has not been written yet, although I really am feeling itching to start it. That's the Old Testament. Volume two is the Gospels, and volume three is the Acts of Revelation. They are already published. It's not just another commentary. This is a book written as if I'm writing to God. Like, Father, in this passage, Jesus said, and then there's also prayer beginning every single passage that I discuss.
Then I also write, for example, the Gospels in chronological order of Jesus' life. So it's not, here's Matthew, here's Mark, here's Luke, here's John. No, it's Jesus did this, and Matthew wrote about it, Mark wrote about it, and Jesus did this, and John and Luke wrote about it, et cetera. After I wrote these two books, I had the itching to do a fiction, to do Christian fiction.
So I wrote a book about my gender identity struggle, fictionalized, and then also that woman that I said died of a cocaine overdose. I fictionalized her story. I just had a different take on how the Lord redeemed people's identity. Yeah, so I've got five books, but hopefully by the next two years, I will have written the sixth book, which would be the Old Testament, volume one of Take Every Passage to Prayer.
Charles, I'm sure there are going to be people who will want to find you online and connect with you, especially to read some more of those testimonies and find out a little bit more about your ministry and your books. Where's the easiest place for people to find you online? We are very dedicated to keeping our website up to date. You can listen to every single radio show I've ever done by going to our website, gramazin.com. Now, Gramazin, by the way, is a play on amazing grace.
You take the phrase amazing grace, you reorder the letters, and you get Gramazin. So that's G-R-A-M-A-Z-I-N.com. We have everything on there. That's the place to go, and I will put a link in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find that easily as well. But Charles, I want to thank you for opening up about a whole range of things with us today.
I'm sure that people have enjoyed that conversation, and I truly thank you for the time that we've spent together on Bleeding Daylight. I thank you so much, Rodney. I appreciate it. Thank you for inviting me. It was fun. 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.