What if the hardest chapters of your own life were actually training you to write the very story someone else needed to read?
I’m Anna Moore Bradfield. In this episode of God’s Power Stories, I sit down with fellow biblical fiction author Matthew James Elliott, a writer, former ministry leader, and the creator of a world where the Kedoshim live, a fictional universe set in the time of the early church.
Matthew grew up largely raised by pastors at the Salvation Army church his father served, while his mother struggled for years with serious mental health battles including depression, anxiety, and what he now understands to be a spiritual gift of discernment that manifested as night terrors and a sensitivity to spiritual warfare. Those same struggles of depression and anxiety would eventually become Matthew’s own. Now, they shape the emotional realism at the heart of everything he writes.
We talk about his books—Finding Philemon, The Cyprus Journal, The Ephesus Pages, and his most recent release, The Hope of Inheritance —and why he chooses to release his stories episodically, almost like a modern-day Charles Dickens serial. He opens up about the book he’s currently writing, A Broken Embrace, which connects a paralytic healed at the pools of Bethsaida to a firsthand account of the crucifixion. It was a scene that started as five hundred words and became an entire chapter because, as Matthew put it, researching the details of the cross brought him to tears.
This conversation is about more than craft. It’s about what happens when a writer stops trying to build a platform and starts simply obeying what God has given him to say and how the darkest seasons of our lives so often become the very things God uses to reach someone else.
Key Takeaways:
- Our pain is not wasted. Matthew’s years of watching his mother’s mental health struggles, and later facing his own, didn’t disqualify him from ministry through writing. They equipped him for it.
- A parent’s final blessing can shape a lifetime. Matthew’s mother’s dying prayer over him—passing on her spirit of discernment—became the foundation for his life verse and his calling.
- Writing can be a form of processing, not just producing. Matthew often writes scenes in real time as God is revealing something to him personally, using his fiction as a form of spiritual journaling.
- Shifting from platform-building to obedience changes everything. Matthew shared how God redirected his focus from selling books to simply being faithful to the stories he’s been given to tell.
- Biblical fiction gives permission to wonder. Imagining what could have happened in the margins of Scripture can help readers relate their own struggles to the very real, very human people of the early church.
Key Themes:
Mental health and faith · Writing from lived experience · Generational blessing and legacy · Biblical fiction as ministry · Obedience over platform-building · Grief and healing · Spiritual discernment
Who Will Benefit:
This GPS episode is for writers who wonder if their pain disqualifies them from being used by God, for anyone processing mental health struggles within their family of origin, for biblical fiction readers and writers looking for a new series to dive into, and for anyone who needs to hear that God can turn even our darkest seasons into the very thing someone else needs to read.
I’m honored to be one of the featured authors for Matthew’s biblical fiction blog tour: (19) PenWorks of The Word Blog Tour – Part One | Facebook
I’m Anna Moore Bradfield. This is God’s Power Stories.
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