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 of Bleeding Daylight. Social media links, contact details and hundreds of additional episodes are waiting now at bleedingdaylight.net. What do you do with the knowledge that God has called you to a specific task or lifestyle, but you know you're living outside of that calling?
How do you move forward when you know that God is inviting you into something bigger, but shame is holding you back from the life you should be living? Today's guest shares her own journey with vulnerability and honesty that will challenge you to examine your own understanding of God's grace. Today's guest is someone with an amazing story. Rhame Neubauer is a wife, a mum of two and the author of This Love Is For You Girl, a book she describes as an act of obedience.
The journey takes her from a 12-year-old girl hearing the gospel for the very first time through what she calls her dark years and into a radical, beautiful restoration that only God could have written. It's a testament to the fact that through Jesus, the past can be over and the future can be redeemed. Ray, welcome to Bleeding Daylight. Thank you, Rodney. I'm so glad to be here. I understand that you grew up around faith in what you describe as a culturally Christian environment.
Help me understand what that meant for you at that time. Sure. Yeah. So I live in the southeast of the United States and it is incredibly Christian culturally in the sense that there is a church on every corner. And whether you really are a believer or not, quite frankly, you are probably at church on Sundays somewhat regularly. I always was around and understood church. I knew the names of the 12 disciples. I could have told you about Noah or Abraham, the most famous Bible stories.
But even being in a church for my entire life up to the time I was 12, I don't remember anyone ever explaining the gospel to me in terms of sin and Jesus and his sacrifice and what his blood has now done for us and salvation. I did not understand that concept whatsoever. That was explained to you when you were 12. Tell me the circumstances around that. I believe you were at a Christian camp at that stage. I was, yeah.
I was gone for a week at a sleepaway camp and our counselors were college-aged girls. They asked us to do this activity where we wrote down on a note card the percentage of which we were sure we were going to heaven. And I very confidently wrote 75 percent. And I felt really good about that. One by one, they took us outside alone to talk about what our answer was. I remember the counselor saying, do you want to know how you can be 100 percent sure, not just 75 percent?
And I was like, yes, because I was always hungry. I always was so hungry for God. But if you don't have someone telling you, how do you know? So she shared the gospel with me and I immediately was like, yes, I want everything to do with Jesus. I'm all in. And I was. I did not look back from that point forward. Was there a sense with the church that you were a part of, of why didn't you tell me this? Why hasn't this been spoken of in our church? Yeah, there was.
And I remember even in youth group activities, sometimes I would try to kind of take over a little bit from the leader. And I would I'm a naturally pretty outspoken person. So I was jumping in probably more than they were expecting, you know, another high school student or middle school student to be doing. It did concern me. And I really wanted to see that church become more focused on the gospel and on the truth of Scripture. But unfortunately, that did not take place there.
So here you are as a young girl who has just discovered the gospel, just discovered what Jesus has done on your behalf. And I imagine that radically changed the way that your life was going. What were the steps from there as you continue to grow up as that young woman? It did radically change every part of my life.
So all the decisions I made for the rest of middle school and all through high school were focused on my faith, the way that I live, the way I interacted with boys, the way that I chose to not partake in a lot of things that other kids my age were doing. And then actually, when I was 17, I started praying one night asking God, what do you want me to do after high school?
Because I'd always had this one vision of myself going to one of probably two colleges and just kind of going for a social experience. But that's not really what I felt like he wanted for me. So I was like, God, what do you actually want me to do with my life? And at 17, he told me very clearly, it was probably the first time I really recall knowing I was hearing the voice of God. And he told me I was going to be a missionary. And I was like, what does that even mean?
I don't even know any missionaries. I had never spoken to a missionary at that point. But it was clear that that's what he was asking. And so I actually chose my university because they had a phenomenal program in Christian missions with an emphasis on international ministry. And that is what I got my degree in. So you go off to study. I imagine also at this time, you're in and surrounded by this cultural Christianity.
Was there pushback from those around you that would have considered themselves Christian, but thinking, hey, Raim's going a bit far with all of this? Yeah, I think my decision was startling to the people in my immediate circle. Yes, because it was unusual unless you were maybe going to go pastor a church. It was unusual to make your entire life about your relationship with Jesus.
And I know for a fact, because of what people said to me back then, that there were quite a few circumstances and people that were just uncomfortable and didn't really know what to do with it. So here you are, you've gone off, you've studied. You feel very confident that God wants you to be a missionary to reach out to other people. But things don't always go according to plan. What happened for you then? Sure. I was 19. It was the spring of my freshman year of college. I was dating a guy.
I was in love, as in love as you could be at that time, kind of a first love type situation. Up until that point, although I was very much in love with God, I had a very performative view of my faith. It was very, we have to check these boxes. We've got to do X, Y, and Z. There was still this earning, I'm going to earn it type mentality happening to a certain degree. One of those boxes was you are not intimate until you're married. That's just not something that you do.
If you're a good Christian girl, that's just not what happens. I did not prepare. Neither one of us prepared for the circumstances we put ourselves in. And so we ended up being intimate while we were dating. That may not sound like a big deal to a lot of people. But for me, that completely shifted my identity. I didn't know what that meant about me. I didn't know what that said about me. Soon after that, this gentleman became verbally and emotionally abusive towards me.
And it became this downward spiral. And so that really set off 12 years, I call them my dark years, 12 years of sexual abuse on many accounts, alcohol abuse, living just in a completely different way than I'd ever imagined myself living, surrounding myself by people that were not in any way pointing me to Jesus, but the total opposite. It also greatly impacted my physical health. I was diagnosed with four chronic illnesses within an 18-month period, was told I'd never be able to have children.
If I did, it would be with extensive fertility treatment. That went on for 12 years. Today, and I can talk about some how I got here, but today I'm a completely healed person, physically, mentally, mental health, physical health, completely healed. I've had two children, beautiful, healthy, and they were both conceived naturally. No fertility treatments whatsoever. I'm married to a man of God. Could not be more opposite than what I was living and what the enemy told me was going to be my life.
It has turned out completely differently by the grace of God and just the ways that he has completely and radically transformed me. It's been quite a journey, to say the least.
You touch there on the fact that the enemy is telling you what your life is going to be like and telling you who you are, and yet we know that the grace of God covers all of that, but I imagine during those 12 years, you were still hearing what you grew up in and that cultural Christianity of you have to perform, you have to behave, and yes, we want to live a God-honoring life, but at the same time, what you learned as a 12-year-old
was that God's grace covers it all, that Jesus' sacrifice covers it all. At any time in that 12 years, was there that sense of, but I can come back to Jesus, or were you so convinced that you had messed it up and you had to keep running? I continued to talk to God. I never denounced my faith or turned away from it fully. I just felt trapped. I felt like I did not know how to go back into obedience.
That felt like an impossible task for me because the amount of trauma I'd experienced, the amount of pain I had experienced, I was running as fast as I could from having to face being convicted, having to face my own sin, my own shortcomings. I was so ashamed of myself that I didn't want to talk to God about those particular things. I was never unaware of what His Word was saying. Some people, I think, get to a point where they convince themselves what they're doing is not sin.
I never got there. I always knew that what I was doing was wrong, but having to face that, it was like, He's my Father. I knew He saw the most despicable parts of me and just these horrible, horrible things that I was involved in and the pain that that caused. I feel like Satan just took that and bred shame into me in such a way that I just could not even face God with it.
So even though I remained a believer in the sense that I was professing Jesus as Savior always, I was not allowing God to touch those parts of my heart because it was just too painful. We do hear stories of people who completely abandon the faith and then come back to Jesus at a later stage. But what you're describing, I think, is probably more common of those people who are living a Christian life of sorts.
They're still considering themselves to be Christian, but there are things below the surface that they just can't deal with. When did you come to the point where you realized, I've got to take this to Jesus? I've got to deal with this? That's a good question. I was so sick, and I was so tired of being so sick. I was just sick in every way. I'd hit rock bottom more times than I could count.
And what I would say happened is that I began to make one small, obedient decision at a time, and it was like a crawl. It really was. It wasn't like I overnight became a different person. It was a crawl back towards Him, and it was like, okay, God, you can have this part of my heart. Okay, God, now you can have this part of my heart, and on and on and on. And then it started to snowball very, very quickly.
Once I understood how much healing and freedom was coming with surrendering all of those parts of my heart, I was like, why did I not do this so much sooner? This is so much better. Once I started, God worked and moved very, very quickly. Your life is suddenly turned around, but I imagine that as life goes on, we all hit those roadblocks, and sometimes we feel we're slipping back. What was Jesus saying to you in those times? Was He trying to hold on and say, no, we've been here before.
Let's keep going. Absolutely. One thing I did, and I would encourage other people to do, is to learn what God says about Because the world is going to say a lot of things about you. The enemy is going to say a lot of things about you. But God's word is chock full of all the things that He says to be true about you, how He views you. That is what I began to define my identity with, what God says to be true about me. And God does not call me ashamed at all. He calls me accepted.
That's just one example. The enemy would tell me that I was in bondage to these things, and I could not break away from them. However, God tells me that I'm freed, completely freed. The enemy would say, well, you're alone. You have to fight your own battles. Nobody's coming to save you. God would say, you're actually completely defended because I'm fighting for you all the time. Learning what God actually says to be true about me completely changed everything. Those are the things that I recite.
I say them out loud because Proverbs tells us that there's power of life and death in the tongue. And so when you come verbally, when you can say something about yourself, you're coming into agreement with that thing. That's a practice that I have carried on now for years, and I will probably always continue to because I want to never forget again what it is that God says to be true about me.
We certainly see a lot of scriptures that talk about our identity and who we are, how God sees us through the lens of Jesus. But there are also stories of people who have lived that out as you are going deeper and deeper into the scripture. Were there any of the people that are mentioned in scripture, any of the identities that you see there that particularly shone to you, that you thought, yes, I understand what this person was going through, and that mirrors my life?
Yeah, two that pop out would be Paul. I adore Paul because he also, he was the first missionary. We have a lot of commonality in our interests, going from someone who was literally killing Christians, persecuting them unto death. And then within three days of him meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus, his name had changed. His identity had completely changed. He had become a new person and went on to be one of the greatest fathers of our faith, one of the greatest leaders in the faith.
And that has always reminded me that there's nothing that I could ever do or could have ever done that would separate me too far or make me too far gone or unlovable to God. And then secondly, I would say the story of the prodigal son I love. I especially love that the father, when he hears that his son is returning, his son has gone off and squandered all of his blessing, all of his wealth, everything his dad gave him, and he's coming back home because he's spent it all and he has nothing left.
The father hears that the son is on his way home, and he doesn't just sit in the house. He gets up and starts running up the road to greet his son. And I would imagine this guy is probably pretty old. He has an adult son, probably not super young. And here he is running up the road to embrace his son, who just basically spit in his face. He took everything he gave him and ruined it. But yet the father welcomed him back with open arms, running to him to greet him.
And that is imagery that the Heavenly Father and I have worked through so many times of him just truly running to greet me, wrapping his arms around me over and over and over again, and always welcoming me back home. As you started to emerge from those dark years, what did God have in store for you as your future?
Yeah. So in 2019, I fully surrendered the part of my heart that wanted a husband, wanted a because that was something I had been very intentionally keeping control of throughout all of my dark years. I never let God have that place. I wanted to do that myself because I'd had so much pain in that area that I thought it was safer for me to keep control of it rather than relinquish control of it. Well, that clearly didn't work out. I surrendered that to him.
And in under a month, I'd met my husband, my now husband. I mean, it was like immediate. I look back on it now, and I'm like, God, what you had for me was better than anything I was even asking for or anything I was even imagining. And that would extend to every facet of my life. We were married in two years, I guess, after meeting. And then we got pregnant with our first child in under a year of being married.
We got pregnant twice back to back, naturally carried both kids fully to full-term healthy births. And I was told by more doctors than I can count that that would be impossible for me because of the conditions I had been diagnosed with. And so I have witnessed personally miracle after miracle after miracle in my own life. And it just keeps going because the depths of God's heart, the depths of his love for us are never ending.
And I think that's the part of life I'm most excited about is I don't ever have to stop discovering that because there's always more to him. And every time I think, oh, I have figured God out, there's just more and more and more of goodness there. Do you still find times where the Holy Spirit taps you on the shoulder and says, hey, here's another thing that you haven't fully abandoned over and you get the opportunity to do that again with different parts of your life? All the time. All the time.
And I ask for it now. I crave it. I'm like, refine me over and over again. Put me in the fire. Purify me. I want to lay it all down. Now it's the less obvious things. It's not these really in-your-face sins that maybe the public would be aware of. It's more nuanced parts of my heart. Maybe I was holding on to pride in a particular area that I had no idea I was doing. The Holy Spirit will reveal that to me in a particular way. And I get to take that to him, you know, and it just it never ends.
It really doesn't ever end. I don't know if you've ever heard this analogy. It's my favorite analogy I've ever heard in my life, but it's about a silversmith. And the silversmith is putting silver in the fire and he's taking it back out and putting it back in and taking it back out. Somebody asks him, what are you doing? He's like, I'm refining it. And they're like, well, how do you know when it's done? And he says, when I can see my reflection in it.
That's what I think about the Father doing with us is he just puts us back in the fire over and over and over again until he can see his reflection in us. It's not always easy, but I don't run from it now. I embrace it. And I say, I know that there's so much goodness on the other side of this. I know that there are churches and there are Christians who would try and give us a list of this is what you should do. This is what you shouldn't.
And that can sometimes feel harsh and difficult, even if it's right. The things that they're outlining. How much more gentle is the nudging of the Holy Spirit when he actually speaks to our heart and says, this is another thing you have to give up? Can you compare those two of those external pressures and the internal speaking of the Holy Spirit? It is different. I completely agree with you.
And I think that unfortunately, a lot of little C churches have gotten it wrong and have made our faith religious and very ritualistic. And that's not what it was ever intended to be. I think the correcting of the Holy Spirit is so patient. It is so gentle. It is meant to cut like a knife, right? The word of God is like a two edged sword. It is meant to separate. It is meant to distinguish. And it is meant to call us to be set apart. And we need to be living that way.
However, God is so unbelievably merciful and so unbelievably patient. And what I have found is that obedience that comes from following a list or performance is not the goal. That's not what he wants for us. He wants us to be obedient because we love him. He wants us to be obedient because we delight in doing the things that are of God the way that he delights in being with us. I've spoken to many people who have been through difficult times.
And one of the things that helps them continue on a healing journey is to reach out to others with the same healing that they've received. Is that what was behind This Love Is For You Girl, the book that you've written? Yeah, it was. God told me about eight years before I started writing a book that I was going to write a book. But when he first told me I was going to do it, I had no idea what it was going to be about. When he put that particular work on my heart, it was my love story.
It is my love story with God. I knew that the world needed to be able to fully dive into it and see just the far reaching extent of what he has done, the level of redemption that he is capable of. It is quite an exposing and vulnerable story, but it's because you have to understand how dark something can get to be able to see the contrast of how much light he can pour into something. It is my heart song.
It is my love story between God and I. And it does also have very practical takeaways for anybody who wants to just grow closer, who wants to understand the heart of God more, who wants to go deeper in their faith. If you have ever experienced shame of any kind, I would highly recommend that you read it because it definitely speaks a lot to that as well. As you say, it's more than just your personal story.
It does share what you've been through, but it points to the opportunity for many others to embrace God in that way, to find the healing that you've found, to find a new life as you've found. What has been the response to it so far? The people that have had the opportunity to read it, what are they saying about the book? Everybody has really appreciated the honesty in which I talk about my relationship with the Lord.
And I really wanted it to feel conversational, like I'm sitting down with you for a cup of coffee or for a dinner or lunch, and we're just pouring our hearts out to each other. That's what I wanted it to feel like. And I have been given feedback that that is how it is received, which was my goal. And it must have been difficult right at the start to put that book out there because it is so much your story. It's not as if you're writing on a different topic.
You're writing about what you've experienced. How difficult was it to push yes on that first day and to finally release it into the open? Yeah, I think a lot of people probably would think I'm crazy for being as vulnerable as I've chosen to be. But at the end of my life, I want to know that there is nothing I withheld to glorify God and to point others to Him. And if I have to be vulnerable about my own struggles to do that, I'm happy to do it. And that in and of itself is God's grace.
Because without Him bringing me to the place that I am, that He truly is my everything and He is my top priority, there's no way that I could talk about these things as openly as I do. I would have given anything for somebody to talk to me. When I was in the struggle, if I had had someone speak to me the way that my book speaks to others, it could have potentially changed a lot for me. I never had anybody talk to me like that and really meet me where I was.
That's really what I want to be able to do for other people. When you look back at that young woman who felt very clearly that God was calling her to be a missionary, do you think she could have ever imagined that this is what it would look like in sharing a story about God's grace, God's goodness to people in this way? No, I would have told you I'm probably going to live in a hut in Africa for the rest of my life is what I thought.
That was like the extent of what I thought missionary was and my how much my understanding has grown since I was 17. But yeah, God can redeem time. And yes, there was a 12-year gap in me fulfilling that promise and that word over my life. But He certainly is fulfilling it now. It's been incredible and very unexpected. Where to from here? Obviously, you're very busy with your two little ones and your husband. But do you see other things that God has in store for you further down the line? I do.
I'm actually in conversation right now with some other people about potentially starting a church or just a new way to worship and minister here locally. I'm sure I will write again. I've been a writer my whole life and I don't see that stopping. So God's already put some other topics that eventually I'll probably put into book form. I'm just excited to see what unfolds.
For someone listening at the moment who is caught up in that kind of shame, who is just as you were still following God, but in a more distant kind of way and longing for that intimacy with God that you were missing at that time, what would your words to them be? To just let go of all of it, to let go of all of the control, to stop trying to hold it yourself because you will never be strong enough to hold it yourself. But God is.
He is not intimidated by anything that you have ever thought or said or done. He's unintimidated by it. He is powerful enough and big enough to not only hold it for you, but to completely redeem it and what he has for you on the other side of that is better than anything you can imagine. Rhame, there is a link in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find your website and connect with you. They can also find your book there.
But I just want to say thank you so much for being so open and honest with your story, but also thank you so much for spending time with us today on Bleeding Daylight. Thank you, Rodney. 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