Out of the Dark: My Journey Through the Shadows to Find God's Joy

by Mandisa, Natalie Grant (Foreword by)

Overview

Grammy award-winning music artist Mandisa tells an inspiring story of peaks and valleys, trials and joys, wins and losses. Through her gripping narrative, she shows that our choice to trust God can not only overcome our need to understand why bad things happen, but can help us to embrace a life of joy and freedom.

Out of the Dark is Mandisa's exploration of the journey she's taken from when she first became a Christian, to her rise as an American Idol finalist and receiving multiple Grammy and Dove Award nominations, as well as the dark and challenging times she experienced along the way. She writes personally and openly about the hardships she has faced and the way she felt betrayed by God, but also about how God has brought her out of the valley into His glorious light. Along the way, she also shares her struggles in learning how to love her body and care for her health.

Just as Mandisa's Grammy-award winning song "Overcomer" was topping the Contemporary Christian Music charts, her friend for whom "Overcomer" had been written passed away. After losing this close friend to cancer, despite years of prayers on her behalf, Mandisa descended into depression, isolating herself and turning to her familiar friend, food, for comfort. 

Throughout Out of the Dark, Mandisa uses her experiences to address the following themes:

• The pain of grief and loss
• Surviving abuse
• Embracing true beauty and a healthy body image
• Coping with severe depression 
• Healthy-and disordered-eating 
• The role of faith in hope and healing 
• Letting go of shame
• Following your unique calling and passion
• How friends and family are crucial for healing 
• The challenges of 2020, including protecting mental and emotional health while navigating a public health crisis; quarantining; and coping with racial injustice
• Trusting God daily for hope and healing

In the darkness, Mandisa knew God was there - but she wondered if she could trust Him. Even at her lowest point where she saw no human way forward, God was at work, powerfully redeeming her story and calling her out of the dark.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954201019
Publisher:	Dexterity
Publication date:	03/15/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	9,556
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Contemporary Christian and gospel vocalist, American Idol season five alumna, and author of Idoleyes: My New Perspective on Faith, Fat & Fame, MANDISA is a Grammy award-winning and Dove-nominated artist who got her start singing backup for Trisha Yearwood and Shania Twain. Her debut album, True Beauty, featuring collaborations with the Fisk Jubilee Singers and tobyMac, topped Billboard's Top Christian Albums chart. 2013's Overcomer won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Christian Music Album.Mandisa's passions for faith, health and wellness, and mental health are common themes in her writing, both musical and literary. Her fifth full-length album Out of the Dark was inspired by the death of a close friend and the deep depression that followed. Mandisa studied Vocal Jazz at American River College before earning a Bachelor of Music with a concentration in vocal performance from Fisk University. She now lives in Franklin, Tennessee. Out of the Dark: My Journey to Embrace God's Joy and Freedom is her second book.

Table of Contents

Foreword Natalie Grant ix

1 Overcomer 1

2 Only the World 17

3 Good Morning 35

4 The One he Speaks Through 53

5 Good News 75

6 The Definition of Me 95

7 It's Not Over 117

8 I'm Still Here 139

9 Prove Me Wrong 157

10 Bleed the Same 173

11 You Keep Hope Alive 195

12 Breakthrough 215

Acknowledgments 231

Songwriting Credits 233

Notes 239

About the Authors 241

Editorial Reviews

2022-05-25
Gospel and contemporary Christian musician Hundley, with co-author Gosselin, chronicles her struggles with food addiction and depression in this debut inspirational remembrance.

The year 2014 should have been a happy one for the author. She’d just won a Grammy Award for best contemporary Christian music album, and the album’s title track and lead single, “Overcomer,” had become a hit. The song was inspired by Hundley’s longtime friend and former backup singer Lakisha Mitchell, who was fighting breast cancer. “None of us imagined how the anthem would strike a chord with listeners,” writes Hundley, adding that the song provided fans with “hope that with God’s help they could prevail over hard circumstances in their lives.” Hundley was sure that Mitchell would be saved by a miracle, but when her friend died in 2014, the singer’s faith was shaken to the core. Her grief was so profound that she relapsed into food addiction, a condition that had plagued her for much of her life. Over the next 18 months, the author gained 200 pounds and descended into a deep depression. In this second memoir, which shares a title with Hundley’s most recent album and follows Idoleyes (2007), she tells the story of a traumatic adolescence, her embrace of Baptist Christianity, and her rise to music stardom as well as her long struggles with addiction and mental illness. Hundley’s prose effectively marries emotional candor with attestations of faith, switching easily from the language of mental health to that of Scripture: “Turning to food when difficult emotions hit has continued to be a struggle for me. In fact, emotional eating may be something like the ‘thorn in the flesh’ Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 12:7, and something I always struggle with.” She centers her faith in her story while also discussing the professional help she received from therapists. Her perspectives on diversity and intolerance in the world of contemporary Christian music are also engaging. Fans of that musical genre will likely get the most from Hundley’s story, but it also ably sheds light on the immense difficulties of food addiction.

A concise and earnest memoir about music, grief, and faith.

Kirkus Reviews