On August 25, 2018, Kayla Stoecklein lost her husband, Andrew–megachurch pastor of Inland Hills Church in Chino, California–to suicide.
Fear Gone Wild (available now) is her intimate account of all that led to that tragic day, including her husband’s panic attacks and debilitating bouts of anxiety and depression.
“I think I cried as many tears as there are words in the book,” she shared with the Christian Post. “But it was so therapeutic and I needed to do it. It really helped me in my healing journey to write it all down and one day be able to share it with my boys. God gave me the strength to do it.”
The book was written from that “messy middle place” in the healing process — which she described as the “space where the good memories of Andrew were still so fresh, yet the pain of his death was still raw.”
“My heart behind the whole book is that Andrew’s life would be defined by the way he lived, not the way he died,” she said. “God doesn’t waste pain. I hope our tragedy would be somebody else’s triumph, that our story would reach into the darkness and save somebody else’s life.”
Amen!
