Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen. Welcome and thanks for listening. As you listen, please consider sharing this episode with others through social media and word of mouth. If you'd like to stay up to date with Bleeding Daylight, connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media.
Links are at bleedingdaylight.net, where you'll also find dozens of other episodes. Today's guest takes us on a rollercoaster ride from a difficult upbringing through dark supernatural experiences to a place of peace and belonging. Today, I'm joined by Clayton Hatley, whose story is one of deep struggle, redemption, and transformation. From a childhood marked by trauma, witchcraft, addiction, and anger at God, Clayton's path has been anything but easy.
However, his life took a dramatic turn when he rededicated his life to Christ as a teenager, eventually entering ministry. Now married and serving in children's ministry, he continues to grow in faith and encourages others through his own podcast, Faith Unleashed, where he promotes unity in the body of Christ and shares practical ways to impact local communities. Clayton, welcome to Bleeding Daylight. Thank you. Glad to be here. Your life has certainly been full of ups and downs.
Tell me about the family that you were born into. A generational Christian family. They would go to church, but they would often struggle to have that relationship with Christ. My mother and my father met while they were in high school. I am the product of a high school party. Neither family really had a strong relationship with God and that strong understanding. My mother's side of the family had a bit more of a grip and understanding as to a relationship with Christ and what that entails.
My father ironically ended up going to college to be a minister himself, and even while he was going to school doing that, still very much out there living a worldly and unpleasing life to God. And were you the only child of that partnership or were there other siblings? The last memory I have of seeing both of my parents together was like I was like three, and I don't even think they were together at that point. They were never married.
Through my mother's side, I have two siblings from two different partners that my mom had. And then through my father, I have five siblings spread amongst three different partners from my father. I know that there was struggle right from early on, and even something that happened when you were age three. Can you tell us a little about that?
At the age of three, I was molested by my biological father, and that did a lot in regards to how I grew up processing a lot of emotion and how I just grew up in general. There was a sense of my father not wanting me, my father not wanting to have to do anything with me, and it filled me with a lot of anger and confusion. I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child pretty early on as well.
Between ADHD and then this event happening to me where I was molested by my own biological father, I had become this child that needed a lot of structure because of my ADHD. And then when that structure wasn't there, I felt as if I wasn't wanted and I wasn't needed because people weren't putting in the effort to make me feel safe. When that happened at the age of three, a lot of my safeties were stripped away because somebody so close to my own father did that to me.
I loved my stepdad because he came in at a challenging time. I was a teenager when he came into my life, but I don't think there's anything that can replace the feeling of having a biological father in your life. I went off to Bible college. I was going through this process of forgiving people in my past that have wronged me. We were going through John Eldridge's book, Wild at Heart. There's a chapter that talks about the wound that every father leaves behind.
As I was going through that, I made the decision that, hey, I'm going to reach out to my father and I'm going to try to have a relationship with him. I reached out to him. First thing I noticed was he does love me and I'm a little caught off guard by it because I've grown up my entire life not thinking so. The one thing that irritated me, I guess, the most out of reaching back out to him is he kept on going back and saying, hey, I know you know that I didn't do it.
To hear those words from my father again grabbed inside of my chest and it felt like it just wrenched my heart because that's not what I was trying to live. I wasn't trying to live in the past. I was trying to be present with my father and have that relationship. Then about 10 years ago, which is a couple of months after having these conversations with him, I don't know if it was my mom or my aunt, but they get a call out of the blue saying my father had passed away.
That was a sombering experience because to grieve someone you want to know but didn't really know that was supposed to hold such a strong part in your life and in your upbringing, that really hurt and shook me to the core. I found out that I had two siblings that I didn't know about. I learned how their relationship with my father was and how it's different from the relationship I had with my father, how he treated them, what seemed to me to be better than me.
Even then, the siblings that I knew from his past marriage before that one, that they were treated better than me. In a way, there was this resentment and anger. In that moment, I had to check myself and be like, hey, Clayton, it's not your sibling's fault that your father was this way. But in the grieving process, I had to really come to a place of forgiveness for my father. Forgiveness for my father isn't something that started and stopped and it was completed.
For me, it's something that I have to continue to do today. Recently, God's been doing this thing in my life where my family is being restored. I have an opportunity to get to know my brother and sister, Damian and Destiny. They're 13 and 16. I'm 30 years old. There's quite the age difference. I have to check myself and realize that he was their dad and he was there for them and do my best to be present in their life in hopes to be a light in the darkness for them.
Take me back to the early days when you first accepted faith as your own. I believe that happened quite young. I was eight years old. I can remember the day like it was yesterday. We were in Children's Church. The overwhelming and unconditional love of God just overcame me and flooded me in that moment. My mom was in a relationship with one of my sister's fathers. They were married, but I didn't know at the time he was abusive towards my mother. He ended up going to prison for raping a realtor.
He was the first father figure I was willing to accept in my life. Then to have it ripped away so soon impacted me in a way. I want that father figure. God really just came in and showed me his love as a father and showed me that he would care for me no matter the circumstance and show me he's there. He's ever present and will always be. For me, that was the biggest thing is just the presence, knowing that God is there and always there and will always be there.
That was a life transforming thing for me. I don't have to look anywhere else. I don't have to seek anything else, but God will always be there. There's nothing I can do to make him run away. This was at the age of eight that you accepted faith for yourself, but I suppose out of the woundedness that you were still experiencing, those feelings of abandonment, there were still things that happened after that that were very damaging as well. Where did life lead you?
I had attended church from that point on to, I think it was about 11. My mom had gotten in a relationship with my sister, Emily, her father. I was probably a week away from asking this man that if I could call him dad. He ended up dying in a car accident while he was out working. At that moment, I was just so full of anger and rage towards God that I quit going to church, turned to alcohol. I was smoking tobacco.
I think the thing that made it probably the most darkest time in my life is what I did in rebellion against God, because I was so upset that I figured I'm going to turn the complete opposite direction, and I'm going to start seeking out things in which at that time I didn't understand, witchcraft in more particular, a form of paganism called Wicca. I was just so hurt and so distraught, and I thought that God was really trying to just get under my skin.
I was like, I finally have that one thing that I want, and I thought it was taken away from me. Now, I didn't get extremely deep into it, but I feel like I got deep enough into it to where, say, what really had his grips on me through it, I would do this form of meditation where you would sit down and you would just concentrate, and what you would do is you would try to communicate with the person in a completely different area than what you're in.
It took my mind to a very dark place, my family was very big into the paranormal, watching ghost hunting shows and things like that, so naturally I had a curiosity about it. I grew up having seen and experienced some paranormal experiences myself within one of my childhood homes, things that I couldn't explain. In my family, it was often painted that they're your loved ones trying to communicate with you.
Later on, I found out that, and I believe that it is actually demonic entities trying to reach you and open up a door that nobody wants to go down. As you're getting involved in these very dark practices, where else did that lead you? I would end up going out and doing these ghost hunts. I would find myself finding recordings that I would do in interviews with the supernatural to try to communicate with them.
They would call them EVPs, electronic voice phenomena, which a lot of people take recorders, some people just take their phones. They talk and they're like, whatever is present, make itself known, you can speak to us using this device, because the thought is that spirits, demons, and other entities can use our electronic devices to communicate with us. At this time, you're searching for some kind of supernatural experience, and we know that this is a very real thing.
So, were there times that you actually encountered things that maybe even frightened you? Close to the time where I rededicated my life to Christ, there was a couple moments that really just shook me, like being paranormal experiences. One of the darkest moments I experienced, I was living with my aunt at the time. I was in bed, I had been in bed sleeping for a while, well, I woke up and I had sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis is often followed by paranormal experiences.
I felt like I was being choked. In the back of my mind, I had always remembered the teaching from church that they teach you is like, if you say it in Jesus' name, it has to be done, and if you tell it to flee in Jesus' name, it has to flee. Well, I could not physically speak in that moment, so I just remember shouting in my head the loudest I could, and Jesus' name be gone, and in that moment, whatever it was was in the room, left the room. There was peace.
I was still frightened, but there was peace, and I was able to move almost instantly. Myself, in that moment, I was like, nobody's going to believe me that this happens. I got to go upstairs and make sure this really happened, like that I'm not playing tricks on myself. So I go upstairs and I go to the bathroom and check in the mirror, and I got marks on my neck from where I was being choked. That was pretty insane to me.
I also recall in that same season of my life, in the broad daylight, I was just sitting in the living room watching TV and just seeing a lampshade just go crazy, and it scared me to the point where I ended up running out of the house. I was like, I'm not going back inside for a while. That was another big one, and then being at my uncle's, spending the night there, spending time with my cousins, they got into ghost hunting with me.
I got to a point where I was taunting these demons, and I had been shoved out of rooms by nothing physical in front of me that I could see, doors slammed in my face. It was scary, but to transition into going back into my relationship with Christ. My mom, around all of this, had started going back to church and had started really having a relationship with Christ around that time. She started begging and begging and begging and begging me to come back to church with her.
Well, I didn't want to go to church on a Sunday, and I knew about church. I knew what it was about. It wasn't something I didn't understand. Through my mom begging me, I had just gotten irritated one day because she had rang my phone three times within an hour asking me if I would come to church. The last time she rang me, she's like, okay, you don't have to come to church with me. Just come to church on Wednesday. I'll take you to youth group. Just go try youth group. I was like, okay, I'll go.
But mom, after this, if I don't like it and I decide not to go back, you got to shut up about this whole God thing. In my rebellion, God still reached me, got me to church. While I was in church, I had the miraculous experience of feeling God's love even stronger than I did when I was eight years old because He reached me where I was at in my sin, in my rebellion. I hadn't even talked to anybody.
I was just walking through the door, and I just started tearing up because I felt the love of Christ so strong. The youth pastor coming up to me and speaking to me also made a huge difference. When I was going through all of this stuff with Wicca and ghost hunting, I found myself in some pretty depressive states, a lot of depression.
I was lucky enough that I was raised going to the church, that I had people praying for me, that I had somewhat of a knowledge as to what's going on, and that I wasn't somebody that was just blindly meddling in the occult because I never came to a point, even with suicidal thoughts, I never came to a point where I was like, okay, I'm going to do it. But it seemed the deeper I got into those things, the darker my mindset became, the more hopeless my mind became.
Years after getting involved with Wicca, I started studying a little bit of Revelation. One thing that I found interesting about Wicca is their gods, their deities come in the form of dragons. One thing I didn't know when I was involved with Wicca is that I was worshiping Satan directly through drawing on these powers from these things that I thought were separate deities.
Then looking in the Bible and seeing how Satan is referred to as a dragon and a serpent and all these different things that point to Wicca being a direct worship of Satan without people even realizing it, that shook me to the core. That's still something that shakes me today because to think that I was a devil worshiper where I'm at today is a complete 180. You've had a complete turnaround in your life, as you say, a complete 180 from where you were to where you then were.
Tell me what happened then. How did life continue to progress for you? Started going back to church and ended up becoming pretty heavily involved with my youth group. I had a renewed calling for ministry. I felt the need to get re-baptized because I was baptized when I was young as well. Well, I ended up dropping out of high school, getting my general education diploma or high school equivalency. That summer, I went to the teen camp for my church.
There was a couple Bible colleges there, but there was one that really stood out to me. I remember going to bed one night after talking to one of the camp leaders and I was like, Hey, Nathan, can you pray for me? I want to try to make a decision and start figuring out what God wants me to do. Where does God want me to go to college? Where does God have me go? I need to start trying to figure this out because I came from a family that wasn't very wealthy.
So I kind of had to have an upper hand on trying to get the finances figured out myself. So I ended up going to bed that night after praying with Nathan. I just had this knowing in the morning, I don't know how to explain it, but I knew that God was calling me to a school called Florida School of Discipleship. It was in a town called Fort Myers, Florida. It was an intensive discipleship program.
I created friendships that last today I've started learning the importance of memorizing scripture to arm myself. When the enemy does attack, I'm ready for it. It only deepened within me the desire to be in ministry. It was an Assemblies of God program. So I actually went and I worked on getting my Assemblies of God credentialing. I moved out to a town called Ankeny, Iowa, which is just northwest of Des Moines, Iowa, the state capital. So you've completed these studies. You've had this big move.
In your mind, what were you preparing yourself for at this stage? I was renting a room up there with the assumption that I was going to go there and I was going to be an intern for the church. That didn't pan out, but I'll tell you the one experience God had for me in that short season. I don't know if you've heard of Leif Hekland, but he's a minister that came out of the Brownsville Revival. Leif wasn't even speaking that morning.
The church I was attending, they were getting ready to separate from the Assemblies of God. With me wanting to hold my credentials, I was in this place where I was just torn. I'm explaining this to Leif, and I was like, I don't know what direction to go. Well, Leif says to me, you think you need prayer for that, but what I'm going to pray for you is completely, entirely different from what you're asking.
Leif reached out his hand nowhere near my face, and I just felt this wind whoosh over me and knock me back, and I caught myself because I wasn't ready for it. I was ready for Leif to just come over, put his hand on my shoulder, pray for me. I composed myself, got my grounding a little bit more, and he's like, no, this time, just fall. He reached out, same thing happened.
But what I do remember is somehow I went down, and I hit my head on the edge of that chair on my way down and onto the hard floor, and somehow still didn't end up hurting no knots or anything from that. But in that moment, I had experienced something that was just remarkable, and it was just God telling me how much he loves me, how much I mean to him. It became something different after that, and it was more along the lines of how much he loves those around me, how he views people around you.
It gave me a better and broader understanding of God's love for humanity, regardless on whether I'm Afro-Christian, Catholic, Atheist, or whatever. God's love is still God's love, and he loves every single person. To me, it wasn't like a new revelation, but the understanding in that moment became so much broader and so much deeper. That's when my denominational walls that I had almost my entire life being raised in the assembly of God, it started crumbling.
I didn't stay at the church, but I didn't know that that was the first thing that was going to happen in regards to tearing down those walls. And then as time has gone on, I've been at different denominations serving in different churches. It has always just broken my heart seeing the division amongst churches over minute gray areas that we as Christians love to argue about. We forget the core tenets of faith, which is the most important.
It's just another one of Satan's tactics for division, and it's just something that really saddens me deep to the core. Satan has done a really good job at causing that division. And what I like to explain on my podcast all the time is if I go and try to open a door, but I have my other arm and hand fighting against that hand to try to open the door, I'm never going to open the door.
You need all of your limbs, your entire body to cooperate together to really have a true, meaningful, and long-lasting impact, which is why I'm such a big person for pushing unity within the church. Clayton, we talked earlier about the trauma that you've been through. You've been through so many different stages, and you've come to this point now where you're trying to seek unity amongst Christians through your podcast, Faith Unleashed.
I will put links in the show notes at Bleeding Daylight for Faith Unleashed so that people can connect with you. I just want to say thank you so much for what you're doing in promoting unity, and I want to say thank you so much for sharing some of your story today on Bleeding Daylight. Yeah, thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight. Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
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