Sheila Walsh is a Women of Faith speaker and the author of numerous bestselling books whose sales exceed five million copies. In this updated version of LOVED BACK TO LIFE, Walsh revisits her life some 20 years ago when she was still a co-host of  “The 700 Club” with Pat Robertson. During that stint on television, Walsh found herself sinking deeper and deeper into a dark place (and dark night of the soul). She eventually quit her job and admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital. Undone, hopeless and ashamed, she recounts that month in therapy where she was forced to look back to her childhood wounds and how they affected her current state of mind.

"Readers will appreciate Walsh’s candor about her struggle to overcome depression and how it continues to affect her even today. What will be valued even more is Walsh’s heartfelt desire for every person to lean, and lean hard, into the heart of God at each and every step of life’s tumultuous journey."

Within the safety of this hospital, Walsh spent hours with other patients as they discussed their innermost fears and scars, working hard to overcome each by rebuilding their faith and fragile emotional state. She explains how her father’s mental illness and subsequent anger did untold damage to her as a young girl before he was taken away and then died shortly thereafter. Her mom didn’t realize that she believed there must have been something terribly wrong with her for her father to hate her so much. Thus, this childhood scar served to formulate much of Walsh’s unbiblical belief system that drove her to perfectionist tendencies.

Walsh also realizes that whatever misconceptions she formed as a little girl continued to drive her toward keeping herself isolated and safe from intimacy with others. While she could share freely from a distance as a talk show host, Walsh necessarily kept others at bay in her personal life. She relates how fearful she was of anyone who displayed even the minutest anger toward her and how she would pull back or fall into the role of people-pleasing at all costs.

This heartrending text follows Walsh’s life from childhood until current day, and every chapter will break readers’ hearts as fellow Christians wince as she shares painful rejections she experienced at the hands of other Christ followers who were uncomfortable with and/or afraid of her diagnosis of mental illness. Now 20 years older and wiser, Walsh tells the church that they did indeed disappoint and hurt her at a time when she was already crumbling from the inside out…and yet, today, she has a better understanding of why these so-called friends reacted as they did to her illness. She sees the pain that they inflicted upon her as yet another impetus to go straight to the heart of God for healing.

Readers will appreciate Walsh’s candor about her struggle to overcome depression and how it continues to affect her even today. What will be valued even more is Walsh’s heartfelt desire for every person to lean, and lean hard, into the heart of God at each and every step of life’s tumultuous journey.