Don't Count Me Out: Rage, redemption and Becoming Whole (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798622624353)

She was six years old when she learned to disappear.

By twelve, she was a bully who barked like a dog. By fourteen, she was fighting anyone who looked at her wrong and sleeping with anyone who looked at her twice. By sixteen, she was searching for answers from psychics and palm readers. By her early twenties, she was an ordained minister secretly planning her own death.

Linda Hillman was a walking contradiction. Called to ministry at age six. Preaching by fourteen. An elder in the church. And falling apart in private.

Don't Count Me Out is her raw, unflinching memoir of survival. No polished testimony. No easy answers. Just the truth about a little girl who was molested by her stepfather, who became the bully instead of the victim, who traded her body for a fleeting sense of being wanted, and who hated God for letting it all happen.

This is not a book about how she got her act together. It is a book about how God found her in the wreckage - not to shame her, but to show her who she had been all along.

From the bedrooms where her innocence was stolen to the schoolyards where she became a fighter. From the church pews where she learned to perform faith to the red carpet where she finally stopped pretending. From the courtrooms where she received mercy she did not deserve to the moments where she had to learn, over and over, that God was not done with her.

Told with brutal honesty and unexpected tenderness, Don't Count Me Out is for anyone who has ever been counted out by the church, by their family, or by themselves. It is a witness that no one is too far gone. No wound is too deep. No mistake is final.

Because the same God who met Linda on that red carpet is waiting for you. Not with a list of your offenses. With open arms.

If He can do it for her, He can do it for you.

Trigger warning: This book contains detailed accounts of childhood sexual abuse, physical violence, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and sexual content.