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 is passionate about prayer and passionate about sharing other people's stories. Today, we'll hear his own story. Jonnie T's journey has been one of faith and transformation. Raised by a single mother after his parents' divorce, he found salvation at 19 but struggled in his faith for some time. In 2020, Jonnie launched the Refuge Freedom Stories podcast, sharing stories of God's grace.
He's an author, hosts a weekly online prayer group and spends much of his time pointing others to the freedom he has found in Jesus. Jonnie, welcome to Bleeding Daylight. It's awesome to be here. Thanks, Rodney. It sounds like life didn't follow an easy road for you in your early years. What do you most remember about those growing up years? There was a lot of tension in our home. My parents split up when I was 11. I had left my mom and my brother and I on our own.
She had a lot of bitterness in her heart towards things that had happened, and that kind of transported itself into our daily life. And so I kind of grew up in that environment. It really clouds your sense of the truth. It really clouds your sense of perception of, you know, what the other side of the story is and things like that.
Not that I ever really found out anything about the other side of the story, only bits and pieces here and there, but it still colored my views, you know, of my father. And because we were on our own, we lived on social assistance for three years. And that was difficult because, you know, as a teenager, you're very concerned about being dressed like everybody else and meeting the creed of, you know, all your friends and wanting to fit in with your peers and so on.
So it kind of struggled a little bit with that. Being a very personal kind of guy, I found that it was easy to have and make friends, but yet people didn't really know much about my situation growing up. And then when I was 19, I gave my heart to the Lord. I thought it was at a Baptist church, but it was a Brethren church. I walked up to the front and I asked the pastor if he would help me accept Jesus into my heart.
And I had this big Cheshire Cat grin on my face that you couldn't wipe off for hours. It was amazing. And I can still clearly remember it to that day many, many, many years later. Now, after I moved away from home and started working on my own, you know, the Bible talks about the seed falling on good ground, the seed falling on thorny ground among the rocks and so on.
Getting away from that initial church environment and moving into an environment of hardworking guys, you know, all living on their own, lots of partying and things like that, like it, I kind of fell away from the Christian lifestyle. I never ever doubted God existed, but I did fall away from that Christian lifestyle. And of course, anytime you go down that path, it leads you in directions and places you don't really want to go.
And oddly enough, I remember the other day when I was standing at one time looking in the mirror and I looked at my face, it just struck me that I didn't look like myself. I looked like death was haunting me in that reflection that I saw. A little bit later on in that journey, I met my now wife, but she had just become a Christian before I met her. And that joy and that effervescence on her face, my spirit immediately connected with that.
So it wasn't long after that I started going back to church and gave my heart back to the Lord. And immediately a lot of things dropped away. People that I used to hang out with said, what really happened to you? You know, you were this and now you're this and now you're preaching the Bible and doing all these things and going to church. If people aren't along that journey with you, they really get confronted in their own hearts, potentially, with the way they're living their life or whatever.
So all those old friendships pretty much left. The Christian life is never an easy life. Nobody can honestly tell you that, because as God brings up things in your heart that you don't even know are there sometimes in your old nature, and as He's purging you of those things, it's so important that we recognize that that's His handiwork, and we need to embrace those things so He can bring them to the surface. So that's what He's been doing in my life for many, many years.
I'm wondering about that early conversion experience at the age of 19, because we know that none of us come to Jesus unless we're called through the Holy Spirit. But that can differ for some people in the way that they are called. For some, it's a matter of, yes, this makes sense. I see that I need to do this, and that is still the calling of the Holy Spirit. But we say, yes, based on what I now know, and that's going to give you that Cheshire grin that you mentioned.
For other people, it's a real deep heart calling, as I'm not quite sure why, but I just need to do this. What was the experience for you at that moment when God grabbed your heart at the age of 19? I guess because I'd grown up in that very bitter and tension-filled environment, a lot of pressure on my shoulders. Even when I was working part-time, I could help my mom pay the rent and all that kind of stuff, because it was hard. Times were really hard.
I think when I look back on it, I just see that lifting, that levity coming to me, that heaviness, that burden. At the time, the message that was preached would have spoken to my heart. I can't tell you exactly what it was about, but it would have spoken to my heart about the need to ask Jesus to forgive me for my sin and commend my heart as my Lord and Savior.
So that message would have resonated with my heart, and yet when I walked up to the front, and all I remember is a very simple prayer with a man who was at the front, and yet that lifting of that heaviness off of me, I think, is what brought that joy and that smile. You then get caught in the weeds and the thorns, and then meet your now-wife, and you see an attractiveness in her that comes through her connection to the Spirit and that shining. I guess there's a couple of things going on there.
Firstly, there's that attraction, both to her and both to what you see in her through Christ. But I'm also wondering about beginning a relationship with someone, having not had great relationship model to you. Was there, I guess, any trepidation for you in entering into a relationship with someone, knowing that you hadn't seen that model, knowing that your parents' relationship hadn't gone well?
Throughout my family's history, there's always been divorce and separation and all that kind of stuff, and from a very young age, I always believed that that wasn't right. So stepping into a relationship that would ultimately lead to a marriage, it was always in my heart that I was meant to be the one to break that family curse, to stand in the gap for all the future generations and say, no, I am not going to let that spirit of division, that spirit of divorce, go any further in this life.
The devil is very quick to try and push all the buttons that he can to ruin any stand that you want to make for Christ, but God is always victorious and God is always faithful to support when we stand on His word and the principles of His word. And one of the big breakthroughs that came for me, I was standing in the shower one day and I was just thinking about that and I thought, Lord, you know, what am I going to tell people about you? What am I going to tell people about Christianity?
Because they look at me and they really can't understand what's happened. And I said, I can't tell them that they're going to be wealthy. At that point, I was married. I said, I have a mortgage now. I can't tell them that I'm going to be healthy because I had just been recently, at that point, diagnosed with type 1 insulin dependent diabetes.
I can't tell them that they're going to be happy or stress-free because, you know, we work into a relationship, there's obviously differences in personality and other situations and you have to work through all that. And plus there's just the stress of life in general. I said, so what am I going to tell them? Without a word of a lie, as clear as your voice is today to me, I heard God speak into my heart and He said, I put love in your heart and you can forgive your father. And it was immediate.
The revelation was, yeah, I don't hate my dad. I don't have bitterness in my heart towards my dad, even though he was my dad biologically, but I never really hung out with him ever or anything like that. And then later on in life, oddly enough, he called me one day and wanted to come back into our life because he had been into some situations and now his life was falling apart and going down. He said, how much further can it go? And he needed help.
And he called me out of the blue and I thought it was the right thing to do to try and help him. When he came back into our lives, there was a guy standing there that I didn't know because I didn't have that relationship growing up with him. And honestly, I didn't particularly like him.
I would never have hung out with him if I wasn't related to him biologically, but yet we tried our best to minister to him and show him the love of God and how far we actually got with that before he passed away, I don't know. I know that you and your wife have engaged in youth ministry for some time. Tell me about that journey. I mean, working with young people, being able to instill in them some of the things that perhaps you even missed in your own childhood.
It must have been both challenging, but also rewarding. It was awesome. It was so much fun. I was thinking the other day, you've probably heard of Carmen, the musician. Yeah. So Carmen sings a song called Lazarus, Lazarus come forth. And it's all about how Lazarus dies and Jesus resurrects him. And with two different youth groups that we worked with, we put on like a drama presentation using that as the script and the music and everybody acting out their parts. And it was fantastic.
I just absolutely loved it. Working with young people is exciting because they're wide-eyed, especially when they first come to Christ. Now, at that time, we were only about 10 years older than they were, but yet they're still young in their faith. Just the ability to sow good teaching and get them excited about God, give them the ability to find their purpose.
It's so exciting when you start to see young people step out into that sense of what God has called them to do, whether it's missions or whether it's evangelism or whether it's music or writing or singing, whatever it might be. It's a really rewarding place to be. You do need to ground them solidly in the Word and in prayer, because without those two things, anyone can fall back into the rocks or the weeds or those things.
And I suppose with your own experience, you would be very keen to ensure to the best of your ability, empowered by God, to see that they don't fall into the same sorts of traps. It's empowering for you to see the weight lifted off their shoulders, as it had been for you, but you'd also be doubly keen to ensure that they don't get caught among the weeds, among the thorns, after that conversion. Absolutely, yeah.
We can all learn from our mistakes and wayward paths through life, and I believe the onus is on us as Christians to encourage those younger than us to give them insights to help them understand that they're not the only one that's ever gone through this thing. Many people have gone through very similar things, and God will always make a way where there is no way if you're willing to look for it. When you're discipling young people, I guess there's a couple of ways that that can happen.
There's this walking alongside, encouraging, praying, but there's also so many times in the today, discipleship has become a course. You go along, you do a discipleship course, and it's almost like you go through a series of lessons, you're done, you're out. Yet what the Scripture talks about is that walking alongside, that encouraging, that follow my example, follow where God is leading us.
Can you see that there's a gap there in a lot of our churches today where we have turned discipleship into a course? Absolutely. It's not a meat processing plant. We need to actually walk with people, just like Jesus walked with people, living out our lives daily, honestly before God and before men and women to show them that this life that we talk about is real. We may only be the only Bible people ever see or cross paths with.
You can give people a course, but what's the difference between that and being in school and the material? But they have to find God for themselves, and we have to be vessels that we allow God to use.
And I think that with that comes great responsibility because we need to pursue God wholeheartedly ourselves because if he's put us in that place, whether it's for young people or in the workplace, warm or out on the street or whatever it might be, we really need to know God, and we really need to be able to hear his voice and to sort of operate in the gifts that he has in the Spirit because there may be times where you're ministering to
somebody and there's no breakthrough or they can't seem to give victory in that certain thing, and it may be a spiritual battle that they're going through. Maybe it's a generational curse or something like that, and we need to understand those things in the Spirit so we can pray against effectively. So it's not just a matter of living out our lives before them and walking with them every single day, which we do need to do.
The basic teaching that they're going to get from a course, that's fine, but Christianity is so much more than just what's written in a textbook. I know that you have a real heart for prayer and that you do lead a prayer group, and you've seen amazing answers to prayer. Tell me about some of that journey. Back in 2020, the churches were closed here in Canada, and you weren't allowed to fellowship together. So we started an online Zoom group.
We had people coming from different places in the church and others who were participants in the online church services had joined us, and the numbers have grown and shrank, you know, over the years that we've had. But we meet every Wednesday night, exact same time, exact same Zoom meeting room, and we have for the last four years without missing a single one. And so what I wanted to do was I wanted to create a mechanism for people to document their prayers.
And we ask that everybody that's going to participate in one of the Wednesday meetings, they have access to the prayer log. So they would go and they would pray over all the unanswered prayers before the meeting. And then when we open our meeting, even though we're a small group, I really honestly believe that God has placed a burden of prayer upon us. We have about 195 prayers listed totally on that log. And of those 195, about 167 have been answered within about 56 days.
One guy who used to be part of our group was not feeling well one week. He went to see his doctor and his doctor sent us from blood work, called him up the next day and said, I need you at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, which is a cancer hospital. He had like stage four blood cell cancer of some kind. And so they immediately started him on chemotherapy. And after his first chemo session, they had to take 300 cells from his bone marrow and look at each individual one.
And if they found even one cell that had an anomaly in it, he had to go for a second round of chemo. He would log in on Wednesday nights from his hospital room with the chemo bags hanging there and that kind of stuff. So we prayed with him. When he was in there, he had a vision of Christ that gripped his heart, prayed him through that. And after his last round of chemo, five rounds of chemo, he went and got his blood cells tested again. He was 100% cancer free and still is to this day.
That is just amazing. One guy went into hospital and he had a heart issue and he was close to dying. And within 48 hours, he was completely healed. We've had many other situations of people needing a new job. Then God gave them the perfect job and they're so happy there. There's so many examples, big issues and small issues. And it's just so encouraging. The Bible says when two or three are gathered in his name, that he's in our midst.
And if we ask and believe for anything together, that he will answer us and give us the answer to that prayer in alignment with his will, obviously. And I am a huge believer in prayer. When I'm talking to people at a shop or on the phone to like a service rep or something like that, I always ask them two questions. The first question is, do you listen to podcasts? Well, that's kind of a weird question. I say, well, I just happen to host one.
You know, I wondered if you'd be interested in listening to it and start the conversation and tell them, you know, it's all about people's journeys of faith and how their lives have been changed by the power of God. And they go, oh, that's interesting. And then my second question is, is there anything I can pray for you about? You would be amazed. Largely, the majority of people that I ask those two questions usually have something that they would like prayer for.
Even in the hospital, going in for lab work or test or something or whatever, the technicians, I will ask them the same questions. I think one of the greatest ploys of the enemy is to convince us that the vast majority of people are not interested in spiritual things. And yet, as you say, when we encounter people and we ask them, can I pray for something?
We might get someone saying no, but we're more likely to have someone say, yes, please pray for this, even if they don't fully believe, even if they don't believe the things that we might. They are open to prayer. How important is it that firstly, we know that God is a God who answers prayer and secondly, that he wants to engage with the people that are around about us? Yeah, absolutely. It's incredibly important. Another tactic of the enemy is to sow doubt in us about praying for people.
Well, what if I pray for them and nothing happens? There's times where we can pray for someone and we may not immediately see an answer to prayer, but that can still plant a seed of faith in that person's heart. And you continually ask that God will open their eyes and show them somewhere down the road if we don't see an immediate answer to prayer to bring somebody else across their path or to open that door. We don't always see the answers to prayer.
And I think we have to come to that realization. It's such a fundamental part of being a Christian, I believe. When you look at the apostles and they were baptized in the Holy Spirit, what did they do? They went out, they preached the gospel, they lay hands on the sick and they recovered, they prayed for them, they prayed for deliverance, people being raised from the dead, all these different things. To me, that is the true gospel.
It's not a matter of us just standing around, going to church on a Sunday, you know, not drinking, not partying, not messing up in the world's ways. The true gospel is Jesus Christ today, alive, and he can do all of the things that he said he has done and will do in his word because he's the same yesterday, today, and forever. Who are we to say to God, I got this huge problem in front of me? And God looks around at the universe and says, um, did you see that I created this?
And you're asking me to solve this little tiny problem here? I think we need to get to that place. And I'm talking to myself as much as anybody else. I need to get to that place where the magnitude of God and his power is something that becomes my everyday understanding. So when the enemy parades sick people in front of me or different things like that, those are minuscule compared to who God is and what God can do. You touched on your podcast, Refuge Freedom Stories.
What was it that sparked the idea for that? I have a friend, I've known him for 30 years, and his name is Reverend Alan Campbell. Alan had a troubled youth. He spent some time in federal prison. When he was in there, some Salvation Army guys came in, preached the gospel to him. He realized after they had left what they were talking to him about Jesus. And he said that the Lord spoke to his heart and said, are you tired of this life? Are you tired of all of this?
And so he gave his life to the Lord and he got out. And he started a ministry of being a first point of contact for young offenders when they get out of prison or they get out of youth detention center. Then he called me up in 2020. And he said, hey, Jonnie, I just heard an interview and a survey that said that 77% of Canadians believe in miracles. And he said, we've seen a lot of miracles through this ministry and I think we should start a radio show. And I said, oh, it's a chair.
I can help you with that. I'm a technical geeky kind of guy. I'm pretty good with my computer. Sure, I can probably put some kind of show together, but I don't have a radio show host voiced. I said, you're going to find somebody else, but I'm willing to help you. Within the next couple of days, another guy came up to him, Dave Shearer. And he had been watching what Alan was doing with the ministry. And he does have a God-given radio voice.
If you listen to the first 50 episodes of Refuge Freedom, you'll hear that voice. So he said, hey, I like what you're doing. Is there anything you need? And Alan said, yeah, I need a radio show host. And so we started and we're on radio stations across Canada, half hour show. A few months after that, on a Sunday, my pastor had been listening to some of the shows and she said to me, do you guys have a podcast? I had this huge light bulb moment above my head, this big epiphany.
And I said, no, but we're going to. And I knew absolutely zero about podcasting. So I just Googled it and figured it all out and started somewhere. And the Lord was gracious enough to help me get things set up. So we've been podcasting since about the fall of 2020. The first 50 or so guests were individuals that had been ministered to by Refuge Ministries Canada, which is Reverend Alan's ministry.
Actually, in 2021, I was the only guy left hosting because Dave had moved into a full-time ministry. And I do all the interviews, all the editing, all the distribution, everything. There's a great opportunity to share the stories of what God is doing. Are there perhaps one or two stories that have really impacted you as you've sat with that guest and heard their story? Absolutely. There was one guy, he was quite addicted to drugs. He said, God woke him up in the middle of the night.
He lived in a city. He woke him up in the middle of the night, told him to go out on the front yard and get down on his knees and pray in a busy intersection in this city. And he's in his pajamas. He knew it was God talking to him, so that's exactly what he did. Got on his knees, asked God to forgive him, and God instantaneously delivered him from his drug addiction. I think he was in a heroin or crack or something like that.
There was one sentence that he said when he was talking in his story, God loved him at his worst. And when he said that, God dropped a whole song into my heart, lyrics, music, everything. I wrote it in 10 minutes. It's called, You Loved Me At My Worst. Later on, as I was interviewing some people and I was telling this one guest about this song, and she goes, oh, and I said, would you like to hear it? She goes, well, sure.
So I grabbed the guitar off the wall and I started playing this song for her. Of course, I'm looking at the music and the words, so I didn't see her. But when I turned away from the music and looked, she was just weeping, just weeping, because God had touched her through this song. And it's not me. It's God's song. He dropped it in my heart. We had another lady on who had come out of human trafficking, and she talked about her story.
And she said she was at the point where there was no way out for her in this situation she was in. And so she had made up her mind that that day that she was going to commit suicide. She went to the train station. She was going to have a cigarette. All she was doing was sitting there waiting for the train to come so she could jump in front of it. As she was sitting there smoking, this young child came up to her, and she said she looked in that child's eyes.
She saw the eyes of God just touching her heart with love. And immediately, it just broke that spirit of suicide off of her. She left the train station and ultimately found her way out of that situation and now ministers for others who were in that lifestyle and that trafficking and so on. So those are just a couple of examples. But I mean, the stories are just so inspiring. One guy, he's a Catholic fellow. We got along incredibly well on this interview.
The spirit of God. I came up from finishing this interview, and my wife looked at me. She goes, boy, it looks like you had a great interview. And I just felt the spirit of God all over me in this conversation. And he had been in a situation where he was in a corporate executive role, had to fly all over the world for these businesses and things like that. They were on a trip in Brazil, and they were looking at the Amazon River. Everybody else was on the top of the boat, and he was below deck.
And he said, well, what's everybody doing up there? And so he went to the top of the boat, and he said he could understand because they were looking at the magnificence of the scenery. And while he was on the deck of the boat, he believed God was calling him to step out into the water, to leave that whole job behind and kind of step out into the unknown and follow him. And I'll tell you, that has resonated with me because I'm no longer working full time.
I'm a big believer in flowing in the river of God, where I've learned over the years not to try and make plans because I'm terrible at trying to plan my life the way God wants to plan it out. If you look at Ezekiel 47, it talks about the river of God. And the river of God flows from the throne of God. It goes down into the dry land. And what happens when it gets there? All the trees grow, all the fish come back, and so on.
And I see that as God using us to bring life back to the world, to bring people into the kingdom. You know, God talks about us being fishers and men. And that might mean that tomorrow I'll have a plan to go do this, but God will say, no, your path is going to go this way today. And when I follow that path, that's where his presence is. That's where his confirmation is. That's where his life is. We've touched on so many different things.
We've touched on the podcast and the stories that have come from it, of your early conversion and calling back to God, of that building relationship both with your wife, but also with kids that you've served, about family life, about flowing in God's river, the prayer group. There's so much going on. We haven't even scratched the surface of the books that you're currently writing. There's so much happening.
And I'm thinking that there's going to be people listening at the moment who want to get in touch, who want to follow more of your journey to listen to the podcast, even to engage with that prayer group. Where is the easiest place for people to find you? Refuge Freedom Stories is a subset of Refuge Ministries Canada. So if you go on the web, refugeministriescanada.com, you can get in touch with Reverend Alan Gamble, the director there, and he can direct any requests towards me.
You can listen to Refuge Freedom Stories on any podcast platform. I also write a sub-stack column called From Glory to Glory. In that column, I not only publish the podcast, but I also write articles about things that I believe that God is speaking to my heart about, and I believe that if he's speaking to my heart about it, then it's worth sharing because he could use it to speak to somebody else's heart.
And I will put links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you easily on those links. But Jonnie, I just want to say thank you so much. It's been a great conversation. We've been all over the place. We've just seen God's goodness in so many different ways in your life. So thank you for your time today on Bleeding Daylight. Well, thank you for having me, and God's continued blessing on the ministry that you have here and what you're doing.
And I would encourage anybody who's listening, if you're not a believer, if you don't know that God exists, we're here today to tell you that Jesus died for you, and he's willing to take you even at your worst, and to bring you out of the pit of this world and give you the life that he had planned for you before you were even conceived in your mother's womb. Give him a chance. He's waiting for you to make that call. Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
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