My Story
I am, first and foremost, a sinner saved through God’s grace. I am also a wife to Ben, mother to Elyse, Oliver, and Isaiah, and a Christian fiction author. To quote the song “Nobody” by Casting Crowns, “I’m just a nobody trying to tell everybody all about somebody that saved my soul.”
I’m also a writing fanatic—and I’ve been at it for a long time! I wrote my first book “The Giant Apple” in first grade at the dinner table alongside my mom. It’s a riveting tale of a tiny apple that falls off a tree, then proceeds to grow into the biggest apple in the world. You’d think I would grow into a fantasy writer after such a story!
As a kid, you would’ve been be hard pressed to find me without a book tucked under my arm. I was that kid getting in trouble for rushing through her work so that I could dive back into my book! I fell in love with The Little House on the Prairie books as an older elementary student and went on to read the entire series once a year until high school. Then, in high school a dear mentor from church loaned me a Karen Kingsbury novel, Even Now, and I just knew that Christian fiction was the genre I’d write it one day. I just knew it.
At the same time that I was falling in love with Christian fiction, my youth pastor was helping to sharpen my writing skills and encouraging me to take real steps into the field as I wrote skits and Christmas plays for the youth group to perform. That first Christmas play was pretty cringey, ya’ll—but each year they improved as I gained more confidence as a writer, and by my senior year I had written a play that caught the audience—and, quite frankly, myself—off guard with it’s exploration into darker subjects such as alcohol abuse and domestic violence. It was quite powerful! Many people encouraged me to major in English at college the following year.
And I almost did.
But I also felt called into a field where I could practically live out my faith, as I’ve always had a soft heart for the broken—the misunderstood, the poor, the lonely, the hurting. Because of this, I decided to pursue a degree in social work, which allowed me to daily come alongside hurting people to lift their spirits and give them hope for their futures.
The love of writing never left me, however, and during my freshman year of college a story began to overtake my mind. I felt as though I was living in two worlds—the real world and the fiction one always swirling around in my brain. In order to survive in the real one, I had to get the story out on paper. So, I spent many nights writing until 2am as the story poured out of my heart—the skeleton for my first novel, Another Ending, taking shape in the quiet darkness of my college dorm.
From the very beginning, I wanted my books to serve a greater purpose than simply entertaining people. I wanted them to be tools. Tools to educate readers on the social issues I am most passionate about, including sexual assault, unplanned pregnancy, abortion, self-harm, suicide, domestic violence, and poverty. Tools to challenge my readers’ faiths and inspire them to draw closer to Jesus. To provide an easy way for readers to share the gospel with others. For me, this is more than entertainment.
It’s a mission field.
I pack these stories with heartbreak because that’s the world we live in, isn’t it? And what does a hurting world need?
It needs hope. It needs light.
It needs Jesus.
And that is what you will find in the pages of my books—stories of broken people and shattered hope searching for hope in the darkness. But you’ll also read about a redeeming God who takes all that pain and uses it for our good and for his glory. You’ll read about a kind and compassionate God with never-ending love and mercy—“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.”—Lamentations 3:22-23
It is my hope that these stories point you to Jesus, that they remind you of his great love and faithfulness. And if they do, I pray that you will take these stories and pass them along to those who need to hear the good news.
