At my church, we are doing a series on the book of Acts that my pastor has entitled “World Changers.” Every week we look at a story in Acts of the Apostles and discuss how those people were changing the world after the death and resurrection of Jesus with the founding of the Christian church. And every week my pastor poses the question “Whose world will you change?”

I immediately knew my answer to this question: those who read my writing. I was pretty good in all subjects in school, but the one thing that always just spoke to me was writing. And now I know why—that God has called me to do this, that this is what I’m meant to do in this world.

As I’ve said here I had a really hard time figuring out how to write after I became a Christian two years ago. I then had a new understanding of how God wanted to use me through my writing, but I didn’t know what to say. I knew I didn’t want to write Christian fiction. Though these books are great, I personally didn’t want to be limited to that small shelf in the bookstore that no one reads unless they’re already a Christian. I figured out that I needed to write more mainstream fiction that could be the little nudge people need to turn towards God.

The result of this realization was my upcoming book Somewhere Only We Know. This book is about abuse and violence against women, a subject which I became passionate about in college. Unfortunately a lot of the stories I heard about victims of violence ended with them losing faith after seeing so much bad in the world. What I tried to show in my book is that God can provide the healing that you’re looking for when you’ve lost all other hope.

I tried to not be preachy about this in my book, as no one likes to read stories like that. But God does have a presence in my story. And that’s because he asked me to tell this story for him. All I want to do with my writing is inspire people with the hope they’ve been looking for. I want to be a world changer.