Honest in the Dark

PREFACE

Who I Am and Why I Wrote This

I need to tell you who I am before I tell you what I believe. Not the bio version. Not the credential list. The real version.

I am RD Sullivan — most people know me as Sully. I was born in 1976 to a minister and a housewife. Military family. Church family. From the time I was three years old, people said I had healing hands. That I would throw tantrums because a name would surface in my mind and I needed to go pray for that person. That I went to hospitals and people walked out healed.

That sounds like a gift. And it was. But gifts given to children before children know who they are — before anyone teaches them how to carry what they carry — become burdens. I got tired of being called on for what I could do. I got tired of being the boy with healing hands. So I stopped wanting it.

I have dyslexia. My mother used to push me hard until I read correctly. I would read the same passage five times before I could get through it. Eventually it worked — I started reading three to five books a week. But what also grew from that season was a voice in my head that said I always had something to say — and not as a compliment. As a command to disappear. To make myself smaller in rooms where my presence was too much.

I carried that voice for decades.

At thirteen, my grandfather died in his room. My mother was asleep. My father had not been in the house since the divorce — a divorce I had engineered at ten years old by choosing to stay with my mother because I knew that whoever kept the child kept the house, and my mother had no job and nowhere to go. A ten-year-old boy sacrificed his own need for his father to save his mother from being homeless.

Nobody taught me that was winning. I just did it. Because the man had left and I was the next male in the house.

I washed my grandfather’s body that night. Alone. Remade the bed with white linen. Learned to turn off emotion to function. Because someone had to and there was no one else.

That is where I learned to move in the dark.

I have been divorced. I have been institutionalized. I have attempted to end my life forty-two times. I have sat in a holding cell in December 2019 — a man with doctoral degrees and a word from God — and had a stranger ask me to pray. And I prayed. Because the call does not go away even when you want it to.

I have three earned doctorates and a felony record. I have a platform and scars. I have a word from God and a diagnosis. I have been consecrated and broken and rebuilt and broken again.

And I am still here. Not because I was strong enough. Because He was faithful enough.

That is who I am. And that is why I wrote this.

This book is not theory. It is testimony. It is the honest account of a man who fought for joy in the dark — lost the fight more than once, kept getting up, and eventually found solid ground.

I am writing it so you can find it faster than I did.

INTRODUCTION

More Than Feelings — The Real Fight for Joy

“These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” — John 15:11 (KJV)

UVSB: “I’m telling you this so that the joy I carry gets planted in you — and grows until it fills you all the way up.”

I performed wholeness while bleeding out for years. That is not a metaphor. That is my biography.

I stood behind pulpits, counseled broken people, laid hands on the sick, built platforms, trained leaders — and not one person in those rooms knew that the man doing all of it was running on empty. Not one person checked. Not one person asked. Because I was performing it so well that there was nothing to check on. The sermon was tight. The presence was strong. The word was accurate. And inside the man delivering all of it was a fracture that had never been named.

I am not telling you this for sympathy. I am telling you this because you may be the same person.

You may be sitting with this book right now in the middle of your own performance — holding it together for everyone around you, functioning in your assignment, moving in your gifts — and dying quietly in a place nobody has clearance to enter. And the lie you are living inside says that the darkness you are experiencing is evidence of something wrong with you. That a person with your calling, your history with God, your years in the Word should not feel this way.

That lie is what this book dismantles.

What Darkness Actually Means The presence of darkness in your life does not indicate the absence of God in your life.

Read that again. Out loud if you have to.

Darkness comes to genuinely saved, genuinely Spirit-filled, genuinely committed believers. Not sometimes. Regularly. Throughout the entire history of the people of God — from the

Psalms of David to the letters of Paul — the experience of spiritual darkness has been a documented reality for people who walked closely with God.

THE HONEST KINGDOM LENS

A significant strand of contemporary charismatic and Pentecostal culture has built a performance framework around joy — one in which your emotional state is treated as the primary evidence of your spiritual condition. If you are happy, you are in faith. If you are struggling, something is wrong with you.

I know this framework intimately. I lived inside it for decades. I preached it. And I watched it wound people who deserved better. The result is a congregation of people who perform joy they do not feel because they are terrified of what their darkness says about them. Concealed darkness does not heal. It festers. If it doesn’t make sense — make change.

The Ground You Stand On The ground is this: God’s acceptance of you is a legal verdict, not an emotional transaction.

“Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” — Romans 5:1 (KJV)

UVSB: “So since God has cleared our record through faith, we’ve got real peace with Him — and that’s all because of what Jesus did.”

The Greek word dikaioo — to declare righteous. Forensic language. Courtroom language. A permanent irrevocable verdict based not on your performance but on His. It does not fluctuate with your emotional state.

I am justified. I am righteous in Christ. The verdict of heaven over my life is not based on how I feel today. It is based on what Jesus did two thousand years ago. That verdict stands.

I call this gutsy guilt — the ability to come to God as you are, in the dark, without pretense, knowing that your guilt does not disqualify you because His righteousness has already covered it.

FIGHT QUESTIONS — FOR INDIVIDUAL USE

• What lie has the darkness been telling you about your standing with God? • Can you articulate in your own words what justification means for your specific situation right now? • Write one truth about your identity in Christ and speak it out loud today — regardless of how you feel.

FOR GROUP USE

• How has your church community handled the subject of spiritual darkness? Has it been addressed honestly? • What would it look like to create space for people to be honest about dark seasons without spiritual judgment?

CHAPTER ONE

Real Darkness, Real Saints

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” — Psalm 23:4 (KJV)

UVSB: “Even when I’m walking through the darkest stretch — the kind of darkness that feels like death is close — I’m not shaking, because You’re right here with me. Your authority and Your guidance are what keep me steady.”

December 2019. A man sits in a holding cell.

Not a criminal. A man with doctoral degrees and a word from God — sitting in a holding cell on a cold December night with nowhere to go and nothing left to perform.

That man was me.

I am not going to tell you everything that led to that cell. What I will tell you is this: by the time December 2019 arrived, I had forty-two attempts behind me. I had a marriage that was fracturing. I had a church that had already decided I was taking too long to get myself together. I had watched the people who were supposed to be the field hospital become the second wound. And I had been running — from the darkness, from the pain, from the version of myself that kept showing up no matter how fast I moved — for longer than I could remember.

And in that holding cell on that December night, a stranger looked at me and asked me to pray.

I prayed.

Not because I felt like it. Not because I was in a good place spiritually. Not because I had manufactured the presence of God from somewhere inside the rubble of what I was.

I prayed because the call does not go away even when you want it to.

The Question Nobody Asks Out Loud

Can a Spirit-filled, genuinely saved, tongue-talking, God-fearing, consecrated, Word-believing Christian experience prolonged seasons of spiritual darkness?

Yes.

Not as a theological concession. As documented biblical reality.

“How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily?” — Psalm 13:1-2 (KJV)

UVSB: “God — how long are You going to act like I’m not here? Seriously — how long? I’m dealing with this alone in my head, grieving every single day, while the people against me are winning. How long is this going to go on?”

This is not the prayer of an unbeliever. This is the prayer of the anointed king — the worshiper, the psalmist — writing from inside a real dark season and refusing to dress it up. God did not rebuke him for the honesty. God preserved it in the canon.

Elijah knew this darkness. Fresh off the fire falling on Mount Carmel, he sat under a juniper tree and asked God to take his life. God’s response was not rebuke. Not a sermon on weak faith. God let him sleep. Provided food. Said: “Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee” (1 Kings 19:7, KJV).

THE HONEST KINGDOM LENS

The church makes two consistent errors around spiritual darkness and both cause damage. Error One is the Accusation Error — the assumption that prolonged darkness is always evidence of specific sin. This is the theology of Job’s friends. God rebuked them for it explicitly. Error Two is the Passivity Error — the spiritual fatalism that calls darkness God’s will and offers nothing practical. Simply wait. Simply trust. No tools. No strategy. Truth navigates between both errors. You are called to active, informed, faith-filled engagement.

The Physical Side of Darkness Your body affects your spiritual experience.

I hold a doctorate in psychology. The relationship between your physical condition and your capacity to experience spiritual joy is real, documented, and significant. When the body is depleted — through illness, trauma, hormonal disruption, or exhaustion — the soul’s ability to register the felt presence of God is genuinely diminished.

This is your permission — pastoral, biblical, and clinical — to take your physical health seriously. If you are in prolonged darkness, see a physician. Pursue counseling. If a doctor determines medication is appropriate, use it without shame. There is no spiritual virtue in refusing medical help for a medical condition.

You Are Still a Saint Wherever your darkness is coming from — sin, warfare, physical condition, trauma, grief, or a combination — you are still a saint. The seed of God is in you. The darkness does not uproot it. You are in a valley. There is another side.

FIGHT QUESTIONS — FOR INDIVIDUAL USE

• Which error — accusation or passivity — have you defaulted to in your dark season? • What physical factors might be contributing to your spiritual experience right now? • What does it mean to you that David’s honest prayers are preserved in the Bible?

FOR GROUP USE

• How does your community handle the intersection of mental and physical health with spiritual wellbeing? • What would it look like to create a culture where people can acknowledge dark seasons without spiritual stigma?

CHAPTER TWO

You Are Not Lost in the Dark

“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.” — Psalm 23:1-3 (KJV)

UVSB: “God is running things for me — I have everything I actually need. He makes sure I get rest and restoration. He puts me where peace is. He brings my soul back when it gets depleted.”

The darkness tells you two lies, reliably, in every dark season.

The first lie: You are alone. The second lie: You are lost.

I know what it is to sit in your own place — genuinely alone for the first time in your adult life, your mother on hospice in the next room, no church behind you, no marriage in front of you, no role to perform — and hear nothing but the echo of everything you have lost. That was my life after the bottom fell out.

And in that silence — that specific, terrifying, unmanaged silence — God said one sentence. Not thunder. Not vision. One sentence. Quiet and surgical.

A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.

I sat down with every translation I had. I went into the Greek. The word dipsychos — double-souled. A man with two souls pulling in two directions simultaneously. But the fuller picture is more precise: a man without focus, with many directions, whose aim never lands in the center. Unstable in all his ways — not some ways. All of them.

I had not been double-minded. I had been triple-minded. Quadruple-minded. My mind was fractured across every identity I was trying to hold simultaneously — father, pastor, preacher, husband, son, doctor, community leader, man, wounded boy, performer, prophet. All of them running. None of them whole. None of them talking to each other.

And everyone who called me their stability, their source, their strength — was standing on an earthquake.

At 3am I called a bishop — a friend. And I just kept saying it: It’s my fault. It’s my fault. It’s my fault. He thought I was about to end my life again. I told him no. Just listen.

Nine months I sat in that revelation. Nine months of accepting the diagnosis. Repenting not for sins but for self-abandonment. For giving people a fractured man and calling it ministry. For building platforms on a foundation I had never examined. For performing wholeness while bleeding out.

The place where I bottomed out is the exact place where the foundation was laid.

You are not lost. You are at the bottom. And the bottom is not the end of the story. The bottom is where the ground is. And ground is what you build on.

THE HONEST KINGDOM LENS

One of the most underaddressed crises in the contemporary church is the widespread lack of genuine assurance of salvation among people who are actually saved. In Pentecostal and charismatic contexts assurance is often tied to the quality of current spiritual experience. When the dark season sets in and the feelings go quiet the assurance collapses.

This is theologically backwards. Assurance is grounded in the objective reality of what Christ accomplished — not in the temperature of your current spiritual feelings.

David’s Cry and David’s Wait “I waited patiently for the LORD; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God.” — Psalm 40:1-3 (KJV)

UVSB: “I held out for God — stayed in it, didn’t quit — and He turned toward me and actually heard what I was going through. He reached down into the pit where I was stuck, pulled me out of the mud that was taking me under, and set me up somewhere solid.”

Notice the sequence: I waited. I cried. He inclined. He heard. He brought me up. He set my feet. He put a new song in my mouth. What David did: waited and cried. What God did: everything else.

Your Security Is In His Hold, Not Yours

“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.” — John 10:27-28 (KJV)

UVSB: “The people who belong to me recognize when I’m speaking. I know them personally. They go where I lead. And I give them life that never ends — they will never be destroyed, and no one has the power to take them from my hand.”

Your grip may go weak. Your faith may shrink to a mustard seed. But His hand has not moved. I spent nine months in the revelation of my own fragmentation. I did not feel God for stretches of that season. But I was never out of His hand.

FIGHT QUESTIONS — FOR INDIVIDUAL USE

• Which lie of the darkness is loudest right now — “you are alone” or “you are lost”? How does Scripture directly answer that lie? • What is the difference between your grip on God and His grip on you?

• Write out John 10:28 in your own words as a personal declaration.

FOR GROUP USE

• How does your community teach assurance of salvation? Is it tied to emotional experience or to objective biblical truth?

• What would it look like to be genuinely present with someone in a dark season without trying to fix them?

CHAPTER THREE

Move Anyway

“And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” — Galatians 6:9 (KJV)

UVSB: “Don’t quit doing what’s right just because you’re exhausted. The harvest is coming — at the right time, for the people who don’t give up.”

The darkness wants you still.

The pull toward inactivity in a dark season is not laziness. It is the reasonable-sounding argument that you should wait until you are better before you move. Until the feeling returns. Until the joy is back. And while you wait for the feeling the darkness grows denser.

I learned something in December 2019 that I had known theologically for years but had never felt in my body the way I felt it that night. A stranger in that holding cell asked me to pray. Everything in my circumstance said I was in no position to be the praying man in that room.

I prayed because the call does not go away even when you want it to.

When I was thirteen years old and my grandfather died in that room, I did not have a theology for what I was about to do. I washed his body. I remade the bed with white linen. I turned off emotion to function. Because someone had to move and I was the only one in the room.

That thirteen-year-old boy was practicing — without knowing it — the exact discipline this chapter is calling you to. Moving in the dark without the feeling. Not performing health he did not have. Doing what the moment required.

Biblical Waiting Is Not Passive Waiting on God is not the same as stopping. The Hebrew word for wait in Isaiah 40:31 is qavah — to bind together, to gather strength by twisting strands together like rope. This is not passive. This is the active gathering of available strength and binding it to the faithfulness of God.

THE HONEST KINGDOM LENS

Performing joy means pretending you feel something you do not feel in order to manage what others see. It produces no internal change. It only deepens isolation — now you are not only suffering, you are suffering in disguise.

Fighting for joy means acting in alignment with truth while being honest about the gap between what you feel and what you believe. The fighter is not pretending. The fighter is refusing to let the feeling have the final vote on whether they obey. That is not hypocrisy. That is faith.

Joy Is Part of Your Duty “Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.” — Philippians 4:4 (KJV)

You do not command what happens automatically. Paul wrote that command from a prison cell. Not from abundance. From his own darkness. Gladness is in the command. Not the aspiration. The command.

Thanksgiving As a Weapon Begin to thank God out loud. Not fabricated enthusiasm. Deliberate, specific, honest gratitude for what you can still see is true — even in the darkness.

Thank You that I am still here. Thank You that Your Word is still true even when I cannot feel it. Thank You that my standing in

Christ has not changed. Thank You that this season is temporary.

This is not denial. This is defiance. Move anyway. Thank anyway. Show up anyway. The doing is often how God breaks the darkness.

FIGHT QUESTIONS — FOR INDIVIDUAL USE

• What is the smallest possible act of faithful motion you can take today? Name it specifically. • Where have you confused passive waiting with biblical waiting? • Begin a gratitude list right now. Write five specific things you can thank God for today.

FOR GROUP USE

• How does your community handle the difference between performing faith and fighting for it? • What is one act of service your group can engage in together during a dark season?