There’s a quiet expectation around Christian fiction that it should feel safe, that it should avoid the darker edges of life and focus instead on what’s uplifting, encouraging, and easy to hold onto.
And while those kinds of stories certainly have their place, faith has never been that simple.
It’s lived out in real lives, and real lives are rarely neat. They carry grief and questions and broken relationships. They hold moments of doubt that don’t resolve overnight, and wounds that don’t disappear just because we wish they would.
And yet, somewhere along the way, we’ve grown comfortable telling stories that skim past those things, as if avoiding them somehow honors the faith we’re trying to portray.
But the stories that have stayed with me never looked like that. They stepped into hard places instead of around them. They allowed characters to wrestle and question, to carry the weight of what they’d been through. And more often than not, that’s where grace showed up the clearest—not in the absence of struggle, but in the middle of it.
That’s part of why the Mark of the Lion series by Francine Rivers stayed with me the way it did.
Those stories didn’t turn away from suffering or soften the reality of what the characters faced. They stepped into the brutality, the questions, and the cost of faith. And somehow, without diminishing any of it, they revealed grace in a way that felt all the more powerful because of it.
I remember finishing those books and realizing that this kind of honesty is what makes a story feel true. Not because it was easy to read, but because it didn’t pretend faith was easy to live.
And that realization has stayed with me ever since.
That’s what drew me to write the kind of stories I do. I write historical fiction rooted in real human experience. These are stories of individuals and families shaped by their choices, their circumstances, and sometimes by the weight of generations before them.
Stories where faith isn’t assumed but tested. Where people don’t always get it right the first time… or the second. Where redemption doesn’t come cheaply, but it does come.
They’re not always easy stories, but they’re honest ones.
Because I don’t believe faith is weakened by acknowledging the hard things. I believe it’s revealed through them. I believe grace meets us right there, not after everything is cleaned up and resolved, but in the middle of what still feels unfinished.
So, if you’ve ever longed for stories that don’t rush past the hard parts, that don’t pretend everything is simpler than it is but still hold onto hope…you’re in the right place.
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