Guest Post by Annie Hutchison, Author of Through Dark Places: The Life Lessons and Spiritual Disciplines That Enable Miraculous Healing

I know this is a difficult season. Life is chaotic, unpredictable, and hard. You have enough problems on your plate and writing down everything you’re experiencing may feel like a pointless added burden. So why should you write your life story?

This world is filled with brokenness, pain, and suffering, but you are not the only one who is experiencing this. Sure, you can take your blessings, your glimmers of hope, and your triumphs and call it a win, but you could be so much more than just a person who experiences losses and victories.

You could be a person who dares greatly and writes their true, unfiltered story to leave a sort of map for the next poor soul suffering in a similar way. You could share how you made it out of the darkness and safely into a lighter season.

I entreat you to write your life story because it holds miraculous power to heal, encourage and transform the lives of those who need to read it.  Your life is a beautiful gift, and no one would blame you for wanting to simply enjoy living it. But I beg you to look around yourself, look into the blackness filling this world and sucking the joy from the marrow of people’s bones, and choose instead to shine brightly.

All of the pain and suffering you once endured has a greater purpose than just refining your own soul, it has the power to show love and kindness to people who are still suffering, and who don’t know if they will make it one more day.

Your life story, your testimony of the radical transformation that God has done in your life, is the only real way to share God to the hurting.  

I am not speaking without experience. I would never beg you to do what I was too afraid to do myself. I wrote my story because I believe that the world needs to know that miracles still happen, that God is still gracious and merciful to the lost, and that there is an eternal hope that can transform your mental illness and weary spirit into mental health and spiritual vitality.

I wrote my story of healing and transformation because I want you to know that Jesus is still in the business of miracles. I want you to know that I am flawed and sinful, and yet God looks on me with eyes of grace: he sees me with great delight, not because I am special, but because I accept his free gift –and so can you. I want you to know what he has taught me and how he guided me out of my darkest years because I want those who are suffering as I once was to experience transforming hope.

People need hope that if God could love and heal a broken, miserable failure like you, then he could surely love someone like them. They need to know the depths of his love by how it has been poured into your life.

Your life is a beautiful story, are you brave enough to write it down and let it uplift others?

Annie Hutchison spent over 20 years battling mental illness before she was miraculously healed from a disorder with no known cure. In 2019, Annie began writing down all of the lessons and practices that she had learned with the hope that her transformation story might enable others to heal from mental illness as well. In 2022, Annie published her first book, a fusion of memoir and self-help titled, Through Dark Places. Annie is passionate about inspiring others to seek Jesus and find healing.