Ordinary People Extraordinary Things

81. From Trauma to Triumph: Charles Wagner's Journey of Faith and Healing

August 25, 2024 Charles Wagner Season 6 Episode 81

What if you felt unworthy of love despite a steadfast belief in faith? Charles takes us on an emotional journey through his early life experiences, revealing how witnessing domestic violence and grappling with gender identity deeply impacted his sense of self and spirituality. His story is one of resilience, finding solace in faith, and ultimately realizing God's unwavering love and protection. From feeling unworthy to embracing divine purpose, Charles's heartfelt recount of his childhood trauma and faith is profoundly moving.

Charles's narrative doesn't stop at childhood trauma; it expands into his adult years, where he faced suicidal thoughts, endured a painful divorce, and experienced immense grief. A life-changing intervention from a family member and a friendship with a troubled woman further shapes his journey. Her tragic death becomes a catalyst for Charles's plea for spiritual rescue, leading to a transformative journey with a biblical counselor. This chapter of his life is a powerful testimony to the healing and transformation that can come from unwavering support and a deepening faith.

The episode also highlights the impact of sharing personal stories within the church and the transformative power of testimonies. Charles is the founder and executive director of Gramazin, which is Amazing Grace backwards. Join us for this episode filled with hope, resilience, and the inspiring power of faith as Charles's story demonstrates the profound impact of personal and spiritual growth.

Connect with Charles, his ministry, & the book “The Two Souls of Heidi Lonsberry”:
https://www.gramazin.com

Listen to the podcast here:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1882033


https://generationstogenerations.com/podcast

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Stories shared by guests may not always be shared views of OPET.
Being a guest does not mean OPET approves of every decision or action in the guests' life.

We all have a story, all of us, share your story. You don't have to have the perfect answer or the perfect life - share what Jesus is doing in your life. This is an easy, real way to witness & share your testimony.


Speaker 1:

I'm so thankful you're here listening to Ordinary People Extraordinary Things. I am praying over this podcast that it would be impactful and insightful for you. Please let me know what part really resonated with you. We are so thankful that you are getting the word out about Ordinary People Extraordinary Things. Thank you for making this podcast what it is today. We wouldn't be here without you. Well, welcome to Ordinary People Extraordinary Things. I am here with Charles. Charles, thanks for being on.

Speaker 2:

I am so pleased to be with you, Nancy. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1:

Well, if anyone doesn't know who you are, can you give three words or phrases to describe yourself?

Speaker 2:

doesn't know who you are. Can you give three words or phrases to describe yourself? Well, one word that comes to mind is I'm unworthy of all of the goodness that I have received from God, and I'm so grateful for his great generosity. I'm a recipient of God's amazing grace and mercy. My sins have been forgiven by what Christ did on the cross. And the third thing, Nancy, is I feel very joyful and thankful for what Christ has done in my life.

Speaker 1:

Those are all good. Those are all really good. Were you raised in the church?

Speaker 2:

I grew up outside of Philadelphia in a very evangelical church. You might even consider it, perhaps, a fundamentalist church. My parents sent me to Sunday school, to VBS. We attended two services every Sunday, the morning and the evening, and so I grew up bathed in the evangelical culture. I even was sent to a pretty reputable Christian school and was there throughout my middle school and high school years. So I grew up with the gospel, I grew up with good doctrine and yet, nancy it's interesting I really didn't believe God loved me, despite all of that.

Speaker 1:

You believed in God. You just didn't believe he loved you.

Speaker 2:

I actually believed in the gospel, but I somehow thought it applied to everybody else but me, so that for some reason God had he well, actually there is a reason which we'll talk about but I thought God had rejected me, and so the gospel really didn't give me the hope that it gave everybody else around me.

Speaker 1:

You said that there was a reason for that. Can you share that?

Speaker 2:

When I was three years old it was like I'll give away my age, nancy. It was about 1964, 65. I witnessed my father beating my sister and I can still close my eyes and hear that to this day. And in that same evening my father pushed my mother out of the bedroom and I came to the conclusion, as a three to four-year-old toddler, that I didn't want to be like my dad. I saw him as a brute. I saw him. You know, nobody that I wanted to emulate. And you know, even as a toddler, I'm coming to this conclusion and I do want to say that my father is with the lord and he was a humble man. I know he regretted what happened that day and I'm so grateful that he was my dad and I have his bible upstairs and I treasure it. And, nancy, what's really wonderful is I have his written test. So I have no doubt that I'm going to see my father again and he's perfect now that he's with the Lord.

Speaker 2:

But that did happen and again I was saying as a three to four year old, I really don't want to be a guy like that. And then my mother chose to say at the time again, I'm a three to four year old. I'm very impressionable. She said Well, you're going to grow up to be just like your dad, and it was almost like a curse. You know, because I was born a boy, I'm going to be a bad person and that's. That's kind of the deduction I came to as a toddler, and that's kind of the deduction I came to as a toddler.

Speaker 2:

Now I want to say again for my mom oh my goodness, she was a great woman of faith the last 20, 30 years of her life. I know that my ministry is now doing well because of my mother's prayers and her support and sending me Bible verses and stuff. So again, I'm not here to deride my parents, but I'm just saying factually this happened. So I walked away from that whole experience thinking you know what my male gender was a moral failure. So, nancy, what began then was a really a lifetime of, you know, envy of 50% of the population, of disappointment that I had not been born in a different way. And, nancy, I struggled with that through elementary school. I've thought about it that those thoughts were there in kindergarten when I started interacting with other girls in the class.

Speaker 2:

But you know what, nancy, god protected me and I think he knew I know he knew all along that I would now be in ministry many decades later and he protected me and he gave me, even as a young child, this understanding that you can never become a girl, right, you never can become a female. That's impossible. And so I never went down. I guess you would now say it in today's current events. I never went down the transgender path.

Speaker 2:

You know I never tried to put on makeup and dresses, but it was something in my mind that I would just imagine different life scenarios, different fantasies, where I had been born female and therefore I would be more acceptable, right.

Speaker 1:

You wouldn't have these kind of terrible traits that you felt your dad had and that you were cursed to also have.

Speaker 2:

Well, that is well said, that's exactly right, okay, so anyways, I had these fantasies with me throughout most of my life.

Speaker 2:

Well, that is well said, that's exactly right. So, anyways, I had these fantasies with me throughout most of my life. I also struggled when I became an adult and started having a career. I struggled with feelings of failure as a man because I was underachieving. I look at my other guy friends and they're making, you know, top dollar and they got all these great positions and I I felt I was not in really good jobs that I was really proud of, and so that just reinforced you're a failure as a man. You're a failure as a man. Your boy wouldn't have been great if you had been born differently. Boy, wouldn't it have been great if you had been born differently? And so this was with me up until about 2004.

Speaker 2:

And my first marriage we were married 18 years. We have two wonderful children, but my first marriage began to break down and I really don't believe it was because of this struggle. Some people might argue that, but I've thought a lot about this. But our marriage did break down and I became, you know now had I failed in my career, but I had failed in my most important relationship of my life. So I became very suicidal and I remember, specifically on Goshen Road and in outside of Philadelphia there were two trees.

Speaker 2:

I would, I would look at them all the time, like you know how fast can I drive my car into them? And then, thank goodness, the Lord told me. You know, if you do that you might not die, you might end up in a worse state, and and then also I wouldn't would go to the train station. There's a St David's train station for the main line out of Philadelphia and I went there one day and I was, you know, measuring distance between the tracks and the train. And there was that evening, nancy, that I spent in the psychiatric ward of Paley Hospital because they I was forced to go there because people were concerned I was suicidal.

Speaker 1:

So uh so. I say someone saw something in you and said hey, you need some help yeah, I was with a counselor at the time.

Speaker 2:

As a matter of fact, I guess the whole story here is the day I went to the train station, this counselor had been my counselor and then she decided that she wanted to have a different career direction, but she kept me on because she was concerned about me. Well, that morning she called me up and said I'm afraid you're really going to commit suicide. I don't want to have that on my plate. So goodbye.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah.

Speaker 2:

So that's when I ended up going to the train station. But she actually got back and intervened later in the day and told me I had no choice. I could either voluntarily go into the hospital or I'd be forced to go in. So I volunteered to go in. So, and about two nights later, two nights after I got out of the hospital, I spent a long weekend in the hospital.

Speaker 2:

I came out of work at night and I can't speak for those who have committed suicide, nancy, but I know what I felt that night. You know, when you're battling suicidal feelings, you're like I want to live, no, I don't want to live, I want to live, I don't want to live, I want to live, I don't want to live. Well, that night the battle stopped. There was no I want to live, it was just I want to die. There is a dark peace that comes over you. It really does and it's a scary peace. Well, fortunately, the Lord used my brother-in-law to talk sense into me that night, and I'm still here 20 years later. It's actually been just over 20 years since that happened.

Speaker 2:

Well, a few months later, I was teaching a class and a student came up and came and sat right in front of me. It was the first day of class. I taught at a technical school and so I'm watching her doodle while I'm teaching, and I went up to her at break and struck up a conversation with her and we ended up becoming friends. And so here I was, going through this really destructive divorce, really painful divorce, and this woman is building me up. You know, we became friends and she's telling me how. You know, I'm a great guy, I'm a wonderful guy and the best guy she's ever known, and so of course, you're going to draw closer to her because she's building you up like this.

Speaker 2:

But she was a very broken woman. Her father abandoned her when she was in the womb, her mother's womb. They had grown up in poverty. She gave birth to a young boy when she was a teenager, and so she had a very broken life, and the more I got to know her, the more I stepped into her brokenness and it became a part of my struggles as well. So her mother kicked her out of the house because her mother found a cocaine pipe, and I was like, no way, you know her mother talking to her mother? No way, no, that can't be true. And so I ended up.

Speaker 2:

I wanted to put her up in a hotel but refused. She had to go into this motel. It was a seedy dive of a motel, it really was. And so why do you want to be here? And so I put her up in there, and one day she calls me and says ha ha ha, they're kicking us out of the motel because they found a meth lab and they think the place is going to blow up. And and I'm like, I'm like, I'm coming down to rescue you. I'm coming down to rescue you. No, I'm not leaving this place. I'm like ah, you know what's with this woman.

Speaker 2:

And so a couple of months later, a month later, she calls me down and I guess she was in need again. I gave her money, I thought for food and all that. So I walked into her motel room and here I'm in this motel room in the middle of the day, and all the curtains are closed and nothing happened. I mean, the Lord knows I'm telling the truth. There's nothing happened other than conversation. And I left. But years later I was thinking boy, how foolish I was. I had just closed on my marital home and so I had some cash and she could have extorted me easily. She could have said well, you came in and did X, y, z in this motel room. I will tell people that unless you give me X amount of money, that is not what happened, but that motel room became a symbol for me. So I'm sad to report that she got on a train.

Speaker 2:

She went down to Southern United States to reconnect with her dad, who she really never had gotten to know, and I heard about a year later she died of a drug overdose. So what's important about that is I grieved like I've never grieved before, nancy. I was crying for months, months, months, literally every in the morning, in the evening, and it was during that time where you take all this stuff that I'm struggling with, I said Jesus, rescue me, come in and rescue me, help me out. And I do remember I actually said Holy Spirit, move in, unpack your bags, put up your pitchers and go into my closet and clean out the skeletons. I remember actually saying that to the Lord.

Speaker 2:

So a couple of months later I actually got a connection with this biblical counselor. It was a woman and, oh my goodness, you know I told I wanted to talk to her about the loss of my friend. I wanted to talk to her about my divorce. I wanted to talk about, I guess, my feelings of failure. But what this woman grabbed onto was when I revealed that I had a lifetime struggle with gender identity. And that's what she grabbed onto and that's what she wanted to work on.

Speaker 2:

And so I remember initial interviews. I had my hat, the brim of my hat, literally covering my eyes. I know, you know your viewers can't see us, but I'm doing it with you. I was like this, and so I was so ashamed that I was revealing this struggle for the first time in my life to somebody else. So so, nancy, she worked with me for four years every week and I like to say, metaphorically speaking, I would vomit on her, on her in her office floor, not literally, but here's all the corruption in my heart. And you know what, nancy, she did. She just kept loving me, loving me, loving me. She set a very high standard for biblical truth, but she kept loving me and loving me, and she changed my life. She absolutely changed my life. So now, because of her, I now believe that God loved me, and I really believe that God loved me. And so I started opening up the word of God. I'd read it many times before, but before it was the message of the God who didn. God loved me, and so I started opening up the word of God. I'd read it many times before, but before it was the message of the God who didn't like me. Now it was the God that loved me dearly, and so it was transforming.

Speaker 2:

I studied the Bible from cover to cover, four or five years in a row and I started wanting to get in serving him. You know I started. I got involved with a prison ministry. Now, today, you know, here I am. I'm the executive director of Gramazan Incorporated. It's a organization. Our goal is to encourage believers across the United States to prepare and share their testimonies with their friends, their family, their co-workers, their neighbors, but it's also I want to encourage churches across America to publish testimonies on their websites. So I'm now the executive director of Gramazin. We just got started, but we're getting some momentum.

Speaker 2:

And, nancy, here you look at who, where I was, and the feelings of failure and all this stuff. What did God do? He called me to be on the radio. So now I have a radio show in New England with over 100,000 listeners a day and it's all about testimony sharing and we're interviewing people across the country. We have the New England Testimony Challenge. I want to get every Bible-believing church in New England to have one testimony aired on my show. So this all came out of the understanding that God now loves me. Now I know that was a long answer to your question.

Speaker 1:

No, it was good. I heard so many wonderful things in there. One thing I want to say is how brave of you to trust another counselor after you had seen one and kind of seems to me that she gave up on you, but thankfully she did say, hey, you do need to go to the hospital. I am thankful for that. But for you to trust someone in that, in that position again.

Speaker 1:

And then the other thing is, is I'm so thankful that you shared these things about failure, about gender identity, about not knowing you know that God loves you, because, as we've kind of talked off air is it's, it's a. It's a disservice to people who don't know God yet to see Christians and not know their story, because we might say, oh, I'm a little sad about how I was or I didn't like that part of my life, so I'm just not going to share about. I'm just. You know, god gave me grace, god loves me, I don't have to talk about that anymore. And how brave of you to share your story. And I think that there are people that are listening that are going to say you know, I can connect with this part, I can connect with this part. I can connect with this part.

Speaker 2:

Well, amen, interesting, nancy. Again, I kept this secret of my struggle. I mean I kept it as a secret greater than any national secret kept by the government I told nobody about, wrote a book about my whole gender identity struggle and I made a Christian novel called the Two Souls of Heidi Lonsbury. Heidi Lonsbury is the name I'm giving that woman who I knew. I'm not going to share her real name, but so I fictionalized her story and so it's really a story of how the other main character in the book, who's Troy Ashford, really is kind of a representative of me. What this book does is it explores an alternative story for my life where God actually took a different approach. And so yet we see that even when he disciplines me the way he does in the book, that he still nonetheless loves my soul very much. And we see, we see god work throughout the rest of the book. So I don't want to say anything more.

Speaker 2:

I would hope that people would be willing to buy the book, but yeah, my whole my whole life struggle and gender identity struggle is in the two souls of heidi lonsbury and we'll we'll link that in the show notes.

Speaker 1:

What would you say to someone who feels like you do they go to church or they used to go to church, but they really don't feel like God could love them, Like maybe they could love other people but he couldn't love me. What would you say to them?

Speaker 2:

Well, Nancy, I don't want to speak for other people, but I can share my own experience. I do believe. I think the evidence of God's love for us is there, for us to see it really is. I think it's abounding. You know, do you ever wake up in the morning and say you know, I can see again this morning? I can hear, I can speak, I can move my hands, I can think, I can create, write, design. Just there we have plenty of evidence of how God shows his love to us every day. So I was.

Speaker 2:

I think my thinking that God doesn't love me was intentional, was deliberate, it was a rebellious thing. So, honestly, I would encourage you you know the listeners out there to truly understand that we are rebels from God. That's our normal state of mind. Every human thinks he or she is the God of their life. They can do as they please, say what they want, be who they want to be, define truth for themselves you know my truth and decide what is good and evil. They rely on their own strength and follow their own advice. This is a recipe for anxiety, insecurity and feeling unfulfilled and unloved by God. So, for me, part of this coming to terms of God loving me, I, I had to confess my rebellion from god I had to ask for forgiveness of my sins through jesus christ and I had to surrender my life to christ.

Speaker 2:

I literally said, father, take over my life and and use it for your honor and glory. And that's when I really began to feel and and a uh, like a tidal wave of god saying to me I love you so much. Because I think I was the one who wasn't listening. It wasn't that he wasn't telling me he loved me. I was the one who wasn't listening to it. I didn't want to hear it. I don't know if that helps other people, but that's what helped me to really understand the love of God.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's really good. I like that kind of a perspective switch on on how you, how you view God. Yes, you said you. You went into the prisons. Could you tell real briefly about what that was like?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, sure I was in. I got connected with a guy in Bucks County, pennsylvania, and he has today a very I don't know what the word is it's not prosperous, it's a very effective and growing prison and addiction recovery ministry. I'll just throw out the name, I'll just name drop here Bob Szafranski Christian Life Prison and Recovery Ministry. That's right, clprm. Uh, uh, christian life prison and uh, recovery ministry that's right, clprm. So, uh.

Speaker 2:

So I I met up with him and in his team, goes into the prison in philadelphia, was specifically current from hold prison and it was the largest prison in philadelphia, had over 3 000 inmates, and uh, and these are people that have done it all, you know, this is not, uh, you know people that have done it all, you know, this is not, you know people that have traffic tickets. So he invited me to go in one time to do go in with him the prison ministry. And boy that's. I don't know if you've ever done that, nancy, but go, but you know you have to go through all the check in with the guards and you got to go. The steel doors shut behind you and another steel door shuts behind you and you're stuck in here and so you're, you're, you're, uh, walking through these, these prison halls, and so they had a, they had a chapel in there and you know, nancy, this was so incredible, I'm so excited to talk about it. So I would stand at the door and greet the guys coming in and they were like high-fiving me and handshaking me and welcoming me and I think or even prisoners gave me a hug because they wanted to hear the gospel and they saw us as people coming in with the beloved gospel of Jesus Christ. And so I was in this room.

Speaker 2:

These men had no pretense. It's not like, oh hey, I had a nice vacation home or I'm gonna go to France. You know there was no. You you're going into a church and you're competing with other people. These were broken men saying you know, these were murderers and probably rapists and whatever. And they're saying, you know, I saw them. They're lifting their hands up to God and, oh, I need forgiveness of my sin.

Speaker 2:

I've never experienced I guess you can hear it in my voice I've never experienced a worship service like that. So I went in multiple times and one time, you know, bob asked me to preach and I'm more of a, I go to a more of a conservative denomination, so I suddenly sound like a Pentecostal preacher. I mean, I was like filled with the spirit. I'm like, uh oh, I just my son came up to me, he went with me that that time and he came up with me after the. I spoke like who are? But so I've never experienced a worship service like that before. And I will say that when I moved up to massachusetts, where I live now, I spent also did 18 months in juvenile detention ministry. So I went in to a juvenile detention what's a prison? It's, I don't, I don't know what you call it, but it is behind bars and so I had the opportunity to work now with younger people, young men who had committed some serious crimes as well. So that's my experience with prison ministry.

Speaker 1:

Wow, Wow. So Gramazin is Amazing Grace just backwards, which I love. We are both passionate about stories and testimonies. How do you think the church can be transformed by people's testimonies?

Speaker 2:

church can be transformed by people's testimonies. Yeah, I think there's maybe four ways in which a church congregation can be transformed by a deliberate and intentional effort program to encourage the believers in the congregation to share their testimony. First of all, it's self-examination. So people think about their testament is they're kind of forced to look into their heart and examine, reflect upon their life. What has christ done? Or where do I need to grow? Or or what, what has god been teaching me?

Speaker 2:

And I think we get so busy nancy in our lives we don't take time to really have those moments of reflection of what's going on in our spiritual life. So the whole idea of a church talking about testimonies like hey, let's, as a church, start producing testimonies. It's going to cause individuals to think about where they are in their faith and where they need to grow, and I think that's really good. Second of all, it would be inspiration. So when someone in a church steps up to share their testimony publicly, it inspires other believers to do the same. One person leads to two, more, which leads to four, more, which leads to eight, and testimony sharing can create a movement within a church, perhaps adding new life to a congregation that maybe is a little stale. A church just needs that first person who is willing to step up and share their testimony publicly. So I know you have listeners to your podcast, so is there one person in your podcast that can go to their church and say hey, I would like to share my testimony.

Speaker 2:

And maybe that can start a movement in the church. I would like to encourage them to do that. I think the third reason that testimony sharing is great in a church is connections. So we often go to church with people whose backgrounds are unknown to us. Meanwhile, we feel intimidated by our own past. For example, we don't want people to know that we had struggled with drug or alcohol addiction in our past or for me it was gender struggle. Well, when someone steps up and shares a testimony of, let's say, drug or alcohol addiction, you now have at least two people in the church who have a reason to connect with one another.

Speaker 1:

I like that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and the testimony sharing sparks conversation, and conversation sparks friendship and builds community. So I think a testimony sharing culture can really be a community builder within a church. And then finally, of course, we want to have local outreach right. So my concern is that people drive by our churches and they think I can't relate with those people. Those are holier than thou, they don't never have had broken lives or messed up lives. But if the churches would publish their testimonies on their website or perhaps their social media pages, and now the neighbors would encounter these stories and go, you know what? There's broken people in that church, just like me, and they found hope. And maybe, if I go to that church, I will find that hope as well.

Speaker 2:

So creating a culture of testimony sharing is missional, it's evangelistic, it's about the gospel, and so our vision at Gramazin is there's a day when, just like you know, hey, you want a cup of coffee. Where do you go? Right? Well, here in New England we go to Dunkin' Donuts, but many other people might go to Starbucks or something like that, and I am from Philly, I got to put a plug in for Wawa down there, but so, yeah, I would like the day when someone goes. I'm despairing, I'm discouraged. Where do I go to get stories? Oh, the local church website, the church website down the street. And so those, to me, are the four reasons why churches would be blessed by getting involved with testimony sharing yeah, no, that's so good.

Speaker 1:

So, as we're wrapping up, I've just loved chatting with you and appreciate your testimony um what is your favorite bible verse or story.

Speaker 2:

Well, no question, my favorite Bible verse is 2 Corinthians 1, 3, and 4. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles. Why? So that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. So God pours out comfort into our lives, nancy, because he wants us to give that comfort to other people, and so that's kind of the Gramazan verse, that's our Bible verse.

Speaker 1:

I love that. What are you grateful for?

Speaker 2:

Oh, the list is really long. Like I said earlier, I can thank God for my eyesight, I can thank God for the little kitten that's underneath my feet here, but I think for me it goes down to three things. I'm grateful for salvation. At one time I was spiritually blind, but Jesus opened my eyes for the need for the gospel. Number two I'm grateful for transformation. The people that know me well, Nancy, know that there's ways I need to grow. I'm far from a perfect man, but I've changed in many ways and I've put a lot of my old ways behind me, and so I'm thankful for the transformation. And then, thirdly, I'm thankful for the calling that now God has led me to write books I've written five books now and to lead this, this movement, and to be on the radio, and so I'm very thankful for the calling as well that's good.

Speaker 1:

What kindness have you shown or what kindness have you seen from someone in the last week?

Speaker 2:

well, uh, this is really as funny. I've loved music all my life. I mean, I just love music and but I never imagined myself ever being a songwriter. Oh God, in his sense of humor, had me connect with a guy named Peter Mercurio, and so he's kind of the musician and composer and I'm the lyricist and I'm also the song idea guy. So we're out producing music. We're going to have several songs released later this year, guys. So we're out producing music, uh, we're gonna have several songs released later this year. But so he no longer has time to teach me guitar. So this guy from rock party, who's actually interviewed on my radio show, bob morris, uh, he has. He has said, yeah, hey, I'd like to teach a guitar. So, um, and for free, you know. And so we got together last night. We we're right looking at the ocean while we're playing guitar and uh. So I'm really thankful for his kindness to offer his skill and his time to teach me.

Speaker 1:

So, oh, that's so great. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. You have a lot of wonderful things going on in your life right now.

Speaker 2:

I do. I'm not naive to know that there isn't more adversity in the future, and I also believe even today that my ministry is under spiritual attack. So it's not always going to be everything's going to be wonderful, but God is faithful all the time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's a good reminder during those times. Well, thank you for being on, thank you for sharing your story and being bold enough to share some of those parts that that you felt that God didn't love you through at that time. And I know that there's many parts in there and I feel like someone's going to be able to connect with that and, like you said, not only just say, oh, connect with it, but then see the hope and the love and the joy that has gone, and I think that's the important part. So, thank you for sharing that.

Speaker 2:

You're welcome and I invite any of your listeners to reach out to us at grimazincom. There is a contact us page link at the bottom. Contact me. I'd be glad to talk with you.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's so awesome. Well, thank you, charles and everyone. Thanks for listening to Ordinary People, extraordinary Things, where your story is His glory. Thank you for joining us. If this has been impactful for you, please share it. Share it on social media. Send a text with the link to listen to this episode. Thank you for listening anywhere that you listen to podcasts and until next time, remember your story is His glory.