Yvonne Rempel faced trauma from the day she was born. Her childhood left her with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Following a difficult upbringing, she experienced a life transformation in her early 20s. She’s come a long way since then and now helps others break free from their past to become the person they were meant to be. She co-founded Damascus Experience and co-hosts the podcast On the Road to D...
Yvonne Rempel faced trauma from the day she was born. Her childhood left her with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Following a difficult upbringing, she experienced a life transformation in her early 20s. She’s come a long way since then and now helps others break free from their past to become the person they were meant to be. She co-founded Damascus Experience and co-hosts the podcast On the Road to Damascus.
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(This transcript is intended as a guide only. It may not be 100% correct.)
Emily Olsen
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick out the darkness until it bleeds daylight. This is Bleeding Daylight with your host Rodney Olsen.
Rodney Olsen
Welcome to Bleeding Daylight. Please remember to share this episode with others and connect with Bleeding Daylight on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You can follow Bleeding Daylight wherever you listen to podcasts. It's free and it'll ensure you never miss an episode.
My guest today faced trauma from the day she was born. Her childhood left her with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. How do you come back from such a harsh upbringing? We’ll find out soon.
Today's guest had a difficult upbringing before beginning a life transformation in her early 20s. That was quite a number of years ago and she’s come a long way since then. She now helps others break free from their past to become the person they were meant to be. She co founded Damascus Experience, which we'll explore a little later and co hosts the podcast On the Road to Damascus. It's my great honor to introduce you to Yvonne Rempel. Yvonne, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Yvonne Rempel
Hi, thanks for having me.
Rodney Olsen
I mentioned that your upbringing was difficult. But that probably doesn't even come close to describing your early years helped me understand what life was like for you as a child.
Yvonne Rempel
Well, my early years were difficult. I have ... My psychologist has said PTSD because I had numerous traumatic experiences as a young child. So my upbringing was very unusual. My mother, when the day that I was born, my mother didn't want me, my stepfather named me, my grandmother gave me my middle name. And then they sent me home with my mom. So that was a pretty rough start to to a beginning, that should have been such a joyous occasion. And then I found that, you know, by the time I was aged five, that there was a way to behave so that you didn't get repercussions. So you weren't beaten, so that you weren't called names. So that those moments that happened, you know, you just learnt to protect yourself as a child really early on, so that you didn't have to encounter that type of abuse. So yeah, my childhood was was pretty rough and very different than most people.
Rodney Olsen
You're talking about postnatal depression, perhaps, at the start, but obviously, it's more than that if this has gone on, and you've had to learn to behave in a certain way. So was that the start of it? Or was it just that your mother didn't want children at all?
Yvonne Rempel
No, actually, my mum went on to have four more children. My mom had me under certain circumstances that were not great and those circumstances have actually been a secret even to this day. So I don't really know the reason and having to live with the unknown, and not understanding why these things were happening over and over and over again, really played a part in my childhood. You know, when when I tell my own kids when they were younger? Hey, there's a reason why you're doing this. So this is how we adjust this is how we correct there was never any direction on how to correct something, because they never knew what I did.
Rodney Olsen
That makes life very difficult. Was that kind of abuse coming both from your mum and your stepdad or is this just something that your mum played out in your life in those early years?
Yvonne Rempel
My mom was the biggest factor, my stepdad was actually only in my life for another three years after I was born. And then there was another step that that came into my life at 12 years old. So the majority of the time was just in my mum, me and I had two siblings at the time. So the abuse was predominantly me and her. And when she would get frustrated with the other kids, I already knew enough to step in, and directed at me so that they didn't have to suffer those consequences. Because they didn't know what they did wrong. You know, you're a child and you accidentally drop something or you accidentally break something, or it's an accident, you clean it up and you move on. But the consequences is being slapped in the face or thrown across the room or locked in a bedroom with no food, those types of consequences. You know, you never understand them. Because when you have friends, and they tell you the things that happen in their home, we don't understand it. So my mind just never wrapped around why those things were happening.
Rodney Olsen
I know that you're someone who feels very deeply and it seems that this is something that started at a young age because you had the courage to step in and take punishment that wasn't yours, even at that early age to protect the rest of the family. Do you recognize that as something that is outstanding for a child of that age?
Yvonne Rempel
Yes, I do. I didn't realize that at the time. To me that was a normal behavior. This is what you do. When you have siblings, you protect them that that all costs. And then you don't realize it until later on when you start having your own family and you realize children shouldn't have to protect each other from their parents this this should be the safe place for them. So you know when people tell me stories of my childhood and how I would do certain things, the most of the key word is that I was adaptable to every situation that I was in because I was protecting those around me, and I was trying to protect myself.
Rodney Olsen
When did you start to realize you mentioned talking to your friends, you realize that that wasn't the same situation for them at home. So when did you start to realize that what you were experiencing was not normal?
Yvonne Rempel
I started experiencing that when our Child Family Services started showing up at my school, probably about grade one or grade two, they started arriving at the school and they started talking to me. The only thing with that is that every time they came in, they talked to me, we moved in, we switch schools, every time there was an incident and my mom got caught, we moved. So it became very difficult for an organization that's supposed to protect you can they can protect you if they can't find you. And so that became a recurring theme, right, where we went into running and hiding, so that nobody else knew what was happening. So there was shame that was coming out of what was happening. But then also a lack of understanding that was happening.
Rodney Olsen
And at the same time, this is the age where most of us start to form friendships that are going to last, if not forever, for at least a number of years, where we can feel that security outside the family at least. And you were even being robbed of this.
Yvonne Rempel
Yeah, I didn't have friends and having friends was very difficult for me. I wasn't allowed to do things that most kids were, you know, on top of making sure that my brother and sisters were taking care of, you know, I took care of them. You know, when they came home from school, I made their home, I did their homework with them. I made sure they were bathed, I cleaned the house, I did the laundry. So in essence, by the time I was seven years old, I was raising two other children, the mothering instinct, that should have been something that I gotten when I had my first child actually kicked in for me, at seven years old.
Rodney Olsen
And you're in those very early years, as life progresses, you come to that stage of adolescence of trying to find your own way. How did it play out for you, in those sorts of years,
Yvonne Rempel
We talk about the destruction of a childhood, you know, when there's abuse, and there's trauma, and there's things like that, but but there's structure, right? So I knew my part I played, I knew those moments that I needed to be there, I knew all of that. And so at 17, I was kicked out of the house, and I went on a very destructive path. Because I didn't have no options. I had no structure. I didn't know who I was, other than, you know, raising my brothers and sisters, you know, other than trying to please my mother. When I left home, and I was out in the world, I got into some things that, you know, those are the kinds of things that you don't really want people to get into, you know, drugs and drinking. And I tried to find my worth. And I tried to find my place, you know, with other people, with friends with men, you know, it was a very destructive time in my life.
Rodney Olsen
And how was that separation from you, and your siblings, you spent all these years where you're trying to protect them, and you're effectively being a mum, in absence of your own mother doing that task? How did it feel when you were wrenched away from them,
Yvonne Rempel
it was actually very difficult. So when I left my home, I never went back. And I spent many, many years not talking to my mother. And to this day, I still don't talk to her. But my siblings, it took them at least a good seven to eight years to understand that I was allowed to leave, and that the emotions they felt when I left, it was not my fault. And so we had to come to an understanding that I was not their mom. But they were extremely devastated. And they blamed me for everything that happened after I left because I was supposed to be there to protect them.
Rodney Olsen
So again, they feeling not quite sure where to turn and and blaming you for and I've heard this before of people who have got out of a situation or being kicked out of home. And yet the story that's being told back at home is is quite different. And again, it is part of that manipulation. So from what you've understood from what your siblings have told you, that manipulation continued, even against you at that stage.
Yvonne Rempel
Yeah, and it still continues to this day from my understanding. But definitely in the first couple years, when I left, there was rules, like you're not allowed to say my name. All the pictures in the house of me were removed. So there was a manipulation that was happening, and I was made up to be the bad guy for everything that was happening because I was the one who left
Rodney Olsen
And all this time you're trying to find your sense of self, your sense of identity, and trying to at least Please someone and this is, as you've said, leading you down destructive paths. When did you know that you had hit rock bottom,
Yvonne Rempel
I knew I hit rock bottom when I actually woke up in a place that I didn't know, after a couple of days that I didn't remember, this epiphany kind of struck me going, this is not the life that I fought my entire life. You know, going through my life, I had this intuition, this guiding, you know, where I would go to school, but I would get good grades, because one day I was going to go to university and I was going to protect other kids in the world, or one day, I was going to do something good with my life, because out of this bad, there had to be something good coming out of it. And so when I, when I was growing up, I was very, I was guided by this deep intuition, you know, of right or wrong and how I should move and, and where I should go and the person I wanted to be. And when I fell out of that structure, I really, really lost that. And I lost that intuition, because they started doing drinking, and I started doing drugs to numb all the pain that came crashing down out of that structure. So when I hit that rock bottom, I sat there and I said, this was not how this was supposed to go. I didn't live my whole life fighting for something to end up going down the the wrong path that I wanted to go,
Rodney Olsen
we can put up with an awful lot in life if there is just a little bit of hope. And it sounds like that intuition that you had, there was a sense of hope in there. Do you believe at that stage, you had lost that hope? Or was there a moment within that sense of rock bottom, that there was still hope that you had turned things around?
Yvonne Rempel
No, I definitely lost that hope. I lost a vision of a future. And that's really what it what it was, you know, when I was living at home, even going through those moments of abuse, or things that shouldn't have been happening, there was still a hope that one day I was gonna leave, one day I was gonna do better. One day, I do better by my own self. But when you hit that rock bottom, you just you lose all of that sense of hope you lose yourself, you lose your vision for your future. And when you don't have that to really you cling on to what's the point of just trying to do anything with your life?
Rodney Olsen
So you've woken up in a place that you don't know, there's days missing in your memory, that you just don't know, what has happened? Where do you move from there?
Yvonne Rempel
Well, it actually it took me a little while to move from that point, you know, my deep sense of being needed and worth, you know, was still wrapped up in people. So I would do anything to do to please people, because it really I really needed that in my life. That was my that was my sole identity was being worthy. And so you know, it didn't really turn around until I actually got pregnant with my first child at the age of 18.
Rodney Olsen
Was it then that you realized, I'm now responsible for another life? I need to clean up? What caused you to start to turn things around? Because you'd been responsible for children before they weren't yours? They were your siblings. But you still spiraled out of control? What was it that was different this time?
Yvonne Rempel
You know, honestly, there wasn't much of a difference. I guess it was really in shock. Number one, because he I shouldn't have gotten pregnant. And number two, it was never in my plan to have kids, because I never ever want any children in the world to ever experience what I experienced. So in my plan that I had in my life, I was never going to have children. Never. So when I got pregnant, and I was like, Oh, well, I knew instantly I knew I needed to be responsible. I knew I wanted to do different for this child. And so I needed to start going the right direction and start cleaning up my life. enough that I could help this child have a better upbringing than I did.
Rodney Olsen
So you're still in your late teens, how do you start to form a new life when you've really come from this destructive past? And you're trying to find a better way forward? How do you start to make that happen?
Yvonne Rempel
At first, I tried to do it on my own. I tried to put in rules I tried to put in structure. So I tried to really build a structure in my life again, right because it was the time that I was, even though he wasn't thriving. It was a time where there was structure and I kind of knew who it was. So I started putting the structure in place. But when I put this structure in place, I had a lot of baggage I realized that came with it. And there was a lot of things have never been dealt with in my life. And so here I am at 18 you know i shortly turned him 19 right after I have my boyfriend who's sitting beside me, though the father of our child, you know, we're sitting in this apartment and we're like, now what do we do? You know, how do we move forward? Because this was never in the plan for either one of us, how do we move forward. And so at the time, we were living a couple provinces away from our family. And so we moved back closer to his side of the family, learning that there is families that live very differently than you. I remember, I walked in when I met his family, and I went, see you guys sit up the table to eat suffered together, you guys talk to each other. That's a real thing. How composites and plant pants are not flying at each other. When you're arguing like, there's another way to live, I started realizing that the way that I grew up was not normal. And that there was other people who experience life vastly different than I did, which I kind of had a little bit understanding. But now I'm looking through different eyes. And so I started looking at other people around me and other families around me going, how do you do that. And what I did is I started imitating them, and how they lived a life, because I liked the way they were doing it.
Rodney Olsen
And some of his hope is now starting to return. Because you can see that it is possible to live in a different way. You said you started with structure. But obviously that's not going to take you all the way what else happened in your life, that was going to start making things turn around for you,
Yvonne Rempel
I started learning that there is people who want to be in your life, not to take things from you. And what I mean by that is that there's people who want to be in your life in a relationship without needing to have a transaction have some kind of relationship with you. And that was really started when my so my boyfriend, he's not my husband, but at the time, he had an encounter with God. And he started going back to church, and he would take our son with him at six months old. And he said, Do you want to come to church with me? And I said, Nope, I've never been a church in my life. I'm pretty sure it's the weirdest thing in the world. They're going to know I'm weird. So I'm not going to go. He said, Can I go with our son? Would that be okay? And I said, Okay, that's good. I'll have Sunday mornings to myself, you go to church. So he started doing that. And then he started going to church and then going to his mom and dad's house for one chapter. And then I was like, Well, why am I being all alone, sitting here, I want to have lunch over there. So then what we did is that I would go with him to his mom and dads before he went to church. And then I would stay in their house until they were back from church so that I can have lunch with them. So I started doing this, this weird kind of dipping my toe in, something's different. I don't really understand it, it's going to blow my structure that I carefully put in place. And then one day, my father in law said to me, You know, I know that you don't like to go with us to church, because you don't know anybody. But I'm a long distance trucker. If I come off the road, I don't really know anybody. Would you go to church with me on the days that I'm off the road? And I'm thinking in my head church once every four weeks, okay, well, that's the price I'll pay so that I can hang out with everyone, because I really didn't want to be alone. And then I started going to church. You know, people say that they have these encounters the moment they walk through the door and I tell you from the moment I walked through the door, I had an encounter where God spoke to me and I don't think from that moment I was ever the same.
Rodney Olsen
What do you feel God was saying to you in that moment, when you walk through the doors of that church, that you resisted so much? What was this message that God was giving to you?
Yvonne Rempel
The message the pastor was speaking that day was on forgiveness. The reason I never wanted to walk into the church is because I didn't feel like I belonged. I felt like there was a lot of things I did that I didn't deserve to be one of those Christian people who sat in a pew on Sunday, right? I lived a hard life. I did things that, you know, people would be appalled by and I was like, they can't they're there's no way that they would accept me. You know, I'm a lost cause. I'm one of those people that they talk to outside the church, but to actually be in a church that was I was like, No, and I sat down for my very first Sunday, and the pastor was preaching on forgiveness, and how Jesus atone for everyone sin, and how Jesus forgave everyone for what they did. And I was like, Who is this person who would forgive me who I have never known in my life and He would just forgive me, that doesn't make sense because that doesn't line up with anything I knew in my entire life.
Rodney Olsen
Forgiveness is an interesting thing. And you're starting to get this message. And you're starting to realize I need to respond to this in some way. And I want to explore that too. But I am interested, what was more difficult for you? Was it accepting the fact that there was a God who was prepared to forgive everything? forgive everything that you had done? Or was it actually starting to forgive some of the other people that had brought trauma into your life? Where do you think that tussle was for you?
Yvonne Rempel
You know, the tussle actually was more that there was a God who loved me unconditionally and there was nothing I needed to do to earn it and that was the hardest thing I had to reconcile in my life. Because love for me, came at a cost in everything in my life, up to that moment, being loved, meant being abused by my mom, being loved, meant having to be the mom, to my brothers and sisters, being loved meant having to go a different direction in my life with my boyfriend, you know, so there was so many different things, love cost, something to me, it is was it was a something that has been in my life for many years. So when somebody told me that God loves me, and there was zero cost to that, I spent a good chunk of time reading the Bible, not to find out who God was. But to prove that there is no way that somebody loves you without a cost.
Rodney Olsen
There are still many people today who would say that, there still is a cost that we still have to live for God's approval, and we have to work so hard at it. And yet the the message that I'm sure you found in those scriptures in the Bible, as you are reading it is that No, there's nothing we can do. That is going to earn us any more forgiveness.
Yvonne Rempel
Yeah, somebody who has ever read the Bible, it was a little bit shocking. When you open it up, and you read it, and you're like, Okay, so I'm gonna find all of this, it's a big book, you're gonna find something right? people disagree about the Bible all the time, they argue theology. And every time I read it every time I opened it up, and every time I looked at it, it was like, God was telling me, there's nothing you can do Yvonne, there's nothing you can do in your life, that would change my mind. And you don't have to earn it. You don't have to be somebody to on what I'm freely giving you. And so reconciling that in my life, and just accepting it was the biggest step I had to do in the process of healing, and forgiving other people.
Rodney Olsen
How long did it take for you to make a decision to accept all of this from that first time? When you walk through the doors? And you're confronted with this message about forgiveness? Was that the moment for you? Or did you continue to wrestle with this for a while, until you said, Yes, I'm ready to accept this.
Yvonne Rempel
For me, I accepted Jesus, probably two weeks after I went to church. But I accepted it because I wanted to be part of the community. And then I was baptized three months later, because you know, reading the Bible, I went, people get baptized. So I'm going to do that also. And then it actually took quite a few years to fully comprehend what it meant to just live in his presence, and just to live with his unconditional love. And all through that time, like all those years that I wrestled with this and all those years, he was showing me in so many different ways, how he loved me, and that he wasn't requiring me to do anything in return for it.
Rodney Olsen
And that must have been an enormous wrestle. Because you've been conditioned from the day you were born. That this is not how life is. And yet, there comes this powerful message of transformation that you finally start to accept and start to understand more and more what it's about, what did that do for your life, for your family, for your husband, for your child?
Yvonne Rempel
Well, I had a couple couple of really radical moments that really changed my life. And so one of them with my husband, you know, when you bring a lot of baggage into your marriage for both parties, and we really needed some counseling, uh, you know, so after being married for quite a few years, and I remember sitting in the counseling room with him. And there was two things my counselor said to me, number one, he said evil and I would never be married to you because I could never make you happy. And I realized that I viewed my husband as a knight in shining armor to save me from my terrible life that I lived because that was the fantasy that I escaped from when I was a child. And that's how I viewed him as the person who had saved For me, and I put all my hopes and dreams on him, which was, you know, very unhealthy and very damaging to our relationship. And when he said that, I realized that my happiness didn't come from him, it came from me, and that I had to be responsible for making my own self happy. And then the second thing for my own children, and I remember this, so clearly, it was three o'clock in the morning, we just we had a campfire the night before. And a three o'clock in the morning, I was woken up. And I could hear God was telling me I want to talk to you. And so I go outside, it's a beautiful summer day in Canada, right? It's Summer Night in Canada, it's so dark, the stars are out, I go by the fire, the embers are still glowing. And he said to me, Yvonne, I want you to train up your children. And I didn't know what that meant. And I had to spend the time looking at what that meant, and finding people who understood what that meant. But when I dedicated training up my children is God asked me, What I found was I he redeemed my childhood, by allowing me to be the mom that my mum never could be. He redeems my childhood and allowing me to relive it with my own children. And so when I submitted to allowing God to love me, I learned that I could love people in a way that I didn't know was possible.
Rodney Olsen
I want to take a slight detour here, because you've mentioned a number of times that God has spoken to you mentioned, when you first walked into the church, there was that experience of hearing him through the words of the pastor who was preaching on forgiveness. And now you're you've been sitting around a fire and you believe God is telling you to train up your children. There will be people listening at the moment who say, well, I've never heard God talk. Explain a little of that to us. How do you hear God talk to you?
Yvonne Rempel
What I learned was, and this is many, many years later, that hearing God comes in many different forms. And when I say I hear God, I have never, I've heard his audible voice one time in my life. But when I say that, I heard him I'm talking about this really deep intuition that guides you in life, you know, that, that those intuitions moments when you're standing at a crossroads in life, and everything in your gut is telling you to go one direction. For me, I have crazy feelings, and my feelings, and we call it being a feeler. And for anybody else who doesn't know what that means. It's called being an empath. And so what it is, is that my feelings guide me, in my life, I'll feel empathy towards somebody, or I'll feel sad, sitting beside somebody because they're sad. So really, I had this deep intuition from very, very early on in my life. And I realized that it was some something that really guided me. So when I realized that there was language to it, and it was actually very biblical, that, you know, being guided by God, I started putting language to something that I never knew existed and I realized that God actually talks to me all the time. I just didn't know it and so I started really discovering what that look like.
Rodney Olsen
How much of a comfort was it for you to start to realize that even way back in those early days, when you were talking then about having that sense of intuition, that sense of feeling, and that understanding, that was God knocking on the door, all the way back then,
Yvonne Rempel
For me when I took a soul care class, so I spent a good 10 years of my life, you know, when I, you know, just really quieted myself, close my mouth a lot allowed God to love me, heal me and just be a really good wife and mom as best as possible and learn how to do that. I did counseling, and I did you know, lots of psychologist and I did a class called soul care. And in the soul care class, I remember it was a class on forgiveness, and we had to forgive things in my life. And one of the moments was, where was Jesus in your life? And up until then, I was like, he was not really in my life. I never, I always pictured him as this, you know, spirit that always sat beside me when I was sad, you know, somebody who was there, but not there. And for me, though, up until then, you know, like, I could accept love, I could trust him. I can move forward. But a lot of the healing needed to come from is why weren't you there? God? Why weren't you there to protect me? Why were you there when things were going wrong? And as I sat in my class, somebody said to me, but Yvonne, he was there with you. And all of a sudden it was like God took me back to the parts of my life that I could remember. And he goes, I was there. I was the neighbor that got you and your sister out of a storm, and called the police so that you can go home, I was a police officer that picked you up instead of going home with somebody you should never have gone home with. I was a neighbor who made sure that you had food in your fridge and who took care of you. And I started realizing that God was not just this spiritual guide. In the back part of my life. He was the hands and feet on earth and people who were there to minister to me, I just didn't know it.
Rodney Olsen
One more thing I'm interested in, as you say that there's this intuition, this sense of feeling. We know that our feelings can be deceptive. How do you draw the line between what you know? is God speaking to you through those feelings? And what are just the normal everyday feelings that we all have? Which are so often self centered?
Yvonne Rempel
That's a that's a great question. I actually do a lot of teaching on being a feeler because we tend to be guided by our feelings. What I do know. And everything that I've learned is that when people who are feelers are guided highly by their feelings, we are a disservice to the world when we are not healthy. Because we act out of our own filters and our own unhealthiness and our own emotions. So for me, when I realized that I was a feeler, one of the things I needed to know was how to be healthy. Because I could not feel anything from God, I was no good if I couldn't figure out my own emotions inside of me. So when I, when I went through all of my healing, right, I mean, a good chunk of it, we still heal to this day, but what I went through the biggest chunk of my healing, I realize that that really stopped a flow of feeling what God felt for people on earth. And so to stay in that over my emotions, it's daily meditation, it's daily sitting with him, it's daily reading of the Bible, it's keeping him in the forefront of everything that I do, so that my emotions don't creep in. And when he's trying to speak to me,
Rodney Olsen
I mentioned in the introduction, that these days, you're actually helping others. And part of that is Damascus Experience, told me about that
Yvonne Rempel
Damascus Experience was a promise that God gave me 12 years ago, I went to a conference called Catalyst. And I had this moment in the evening where somebody was speaking, and they were talking about that God gave him a promise. And then he said, I just feel like there's other people who, you know, God's giving a promise to. And that was one of those moments where I had this deep sense of feeling this intuition. And God said to me, one day, you're going to do what he is doing. And in my mind, I was like, Oh, I'm going to stand on a stage, and I'm going to talk to people and gods, like, you're going to help people out of your story, you're going to help people. 12 years later, I finally you know, after many times of healing, learning about my identity, you know, really fine tuning what God was trying to say, and do it from a place of health, I realized Damascus Experience was what he was trying to get me to build. And that was allowing people to really encounter the presence of God in their life, especially in those moments, where they feel hopeless, where they don't know him, you don't where they are standing at a crossroads. We all have Damascus moments in our lives. And those are the moments that build our faith in our history with God, for us to continue on our journey of life. And so we facilitate experiences through coaching and consulting, at EA Park coaching and consulting. And we're actually developed another course, where we're going to help with the royal priesthood, walking in the authority of Christ. And what that is, is it's equipping people to continue on their journey, and not being held up by the world.
Rodney Olsen
And on top of Damascus Experience, you have a podcast, which I imagine is along the same lines as Damascus Experience, especially seeing it's called On the Road to Damascus. Tell me what sorts of things you are talking about in that podcast.
Yvonne Rempel
You know, we actually have a lot of guests on our podcasts. And what we want to do is we want to bring hope to people to let them know that God is not done with their story. And as you can see, hope is is a reoccurring theme in my life, you know, hoping for a better tomorrow hoping for a future hoping which are all promises that God gave us in the Bible. But you know, a lot of it, I think When I didn't have hope, I had to look at other people who were a little bit ahead of me in their lives. And they gave me hope that things were going to be better. So we like to have guests on our podcast where we share our stories of their Damascus moment, encouraging other people to keep going on their journey, because God's not done with it yet.
Rodney Olsen
As you've mentioned, the healing continues. But you've gone through a large chunk of the healing that was required to bring you to where you are. Now, if you had the opportunity to reach back to that five year old seven year old girl that you were all those years ago, what would you say to her,
Yvonne Rempel
I would tell her to keep dreaming, to keep dreaming, because there's going to be a point in your life where your dreams are going to come true. And they're not going to be anything that you imagine they're going to be, because they're going to be so much better than you could ever imagine. Yeah, five years old, you dream of things you're going to be. And I never knew I wanted to be a mom. And I never knew I wanted to be a wife. And I never knew I wanted to help people. But keep dreaming. And keep hoping because it does get better. Because God has not even started your story yet.
Rodney Olsen
And to the person who's listening at the moment thinking, this sounds wonderful that evens been able to make this big change, but I'm too far gone. I can't see any way back from where I am. What would you say to that person?
Yvonne Rempel
I would tell that person that that's not true. God will go anywhere to find you. Sometimes we need to sit still, so he can find you. And sometimes he doesn't mind running you down to get you. And so anybody who's listening to this, and they're like, yeah, I can't forgive, I can't. It's not about them. It's about you and who you are and who you were created to be. So there is no way that God wants you to stay where you are so have hope that he wants so much more for you.
Rodney Olsen
I love the fact that your story is not yet over that it's going to continue to unfold, and that we get to be part of it to through things like Damascus experience and definitely through the podcast and we will put links to both those websites on the show notes at bleeding daylight dotnet so that people can contact you. What is the easiest way for people to find you,
Yvonne Rempel
you can just jump on our Instagram @damascusexperience, or our on our podcast, Instagram @ontheroadtodamascus and you can find us there. If you drop a comment. I will definitely respond to you.
Rodney Olsen
Yvonne it's been wonderful hearing your story to hear how far you've come from where you've been. And as I say, I know that the story is not over yet. And we look forward to hearing a lot more from you in the future. But thank you so much for spending some time on Bleeding Daylight.
Yvonne Rempel
Thank you so much for having me.
Emily Olsen
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