Why I’m Changing What I Write as a Christian Author

Yellow, Peeps.

For all of my readers who have come to this site hoping to find what they found before… I have a confession to make. Or, a few.

First. I have decided to change what I write.

Prior to about 2020, I wrote sci-fi action and adventure of various flavors. Mostly speculative, a bit of fantasy. It wasn’t Christian, per-se, but it wasn’t something a Christian would feel too uncomfortable reading. I wanted to have people read my work, I wanted an audience, and I thought that was how I had to do it. I had to make my work palatable to a wider audience. Thus, several of my more secular stories are up on Wattpad, and I Indie published two books in that vein. 

I should preface all of this by saying I am not ashamed of what I wrote, nor am I particularly worried that these stories are out there with my pen name on them. They can stay there, just as they are. 

But, and this is where things start getting wonky: I have now rewritten those stories with openly Christian elements and themes, and I will be releasing the newly rewritten editions before – or even instead of – publishing the last two books in the original version series.

(What? Have you gone mad, Pennymaker? Or rather… Madder?)

Maybe! Maybe I have. I’ve grown a lot, though, in the madness.

So here’s why I’m changing what I write, what I’m changing, and perhaps a bit of a challenge to really consider what you write as a Christian.

Why the Change?

You may not know this, but when I started writing Shadow Road, I desperately needed an outlet for a lot of hard emotions. 

My mother was diagnosed with HER2Nu breast cancer in 2017, and I started what would become the first chapter of Shadow Road (Bren in the public coach, writing to her Aunt Saphine) as an attempt to distract myself in the waiting room while my mom had her first CAT scan.

When I started writing, I had no idea that the Lord was going to take me to the absolute end of my endurance, stretch me out until I was paper thin, and whittle me down until there wasn’t enough of me left to stand on my own. At all. I knew there was something difficult looming on the horizon, but I’ve always been one of those strong, independent types. I could handle whatever God had for me. I was fine with making all the lemonade when the Lord threw me lemons. It was a point of pride. I was unflappable. She Who Would Not be Flapped. I could overcome. In fact, I thought that was the point of the lemons. They were just God teaching you to be better, work harder, go farther. Do more. After all, what doesn’t kill you…

What doesn’t kill you might make you stronger, but not always in the way you think

Have you ever heard that little phrase, ‘The Lord never gives you more than you can handle?’ So cute. You might have seen it on a shirt, or as a tattoo. Embroidered on a cushion. I get it, it’s supposed to be reassuring. At the time, I believed it was. I used to say it to people who were going through a rough time. “Cheer up. The Lord won’t give you more than you can handle.” To be honest, there was a bit of unspoken judgment lurking there, a silent, “Why are you wallowing in misery? You can do this. You’re strong enough, you just have to get up and stop being a whiner.”

I don’t say it anymore.

Now I know that whoever originally said that must not have hit rock bottom yet. (Me. I had not hit rock bottom yet.)

They were still clinging to the idea that they could pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, on their own strength. Nothing had come along that they couldn’t actually handle, yet. They were making pitchers of lemonade, not drowning in it.

Here’s another thing I thought I knew: “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.” 

I mean, it’s not wrong at all, He does strengthen, but I was taking that verse out of context. Twisting it a little. That statement always seemed like a sort of backup-explanation-reinforcement of the first one. He won’t give you more than you can handle, and Christ will come along and strengthen you when you need it. You’ll be fine. 

God gives you what He can handle – which is a lot more than you can handle. 

This life is not a Disney movie. Such a harsh thing to say in this era of ‘be a good human and God will be good to you,’ and ‘just believe’, and ‘you are enough’.

It sounds great on the surface, but anyone who has ever had to go through the darkness knows just how cold, terrifying, and awful it is. There aren’t enough rainbows and butterflies and birdsong to make everything better. The lemons often come in avalanches, and you find yourself in well over your head and struggling just to breathe.

If the darkness lasts long enough, you discover just how lonely it is when you’re trying to be the rock for everyone else. That unflappable person who does all the things and insists on making all the lemonade themselves? That person is alone.

That outlook that says hardship is all about learning to be strong in yourself, for yourself, that outlook is mostly focused on the here and now. This temporal, temporary life. It isn’t aiming toward what this life is meant for. Your strength is great, but it’s secondary.  

Death doesn’t care about your outlook on life. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re strong in yourself. Helping someone deal with a terminal illness doesn’t get physically or mentally easier if you just try hard enough. Making lemonade is really, really hard in the dark.

But that? That is the whole point.

It is only when you have to break down and admit you are not enough, that you begin to truly understand how much of your burden the Father was already holding. All of it. He has all of it.

I know because there were so many ‘what if I had been a second later’ moments, and ‘alright, no one died last night’ mornings. I quite literally saw God take care of the things that I couldn’t, because, again, I was not enough. No human would be. It would have taken three of me. Four of me. More.

Seriously, I dare anyone to pull off being a mom of five school-age kids under the age of twelve, a wife and a homemaker for her own family, while also juggling shopping, housework, oncology appointments, wound care appointments, diabetes appointments, urology and nephrology appointments, physiotherapy appointments, dietician appointments, and the routine daily care for one terminally ill parent, and the cardiology appointments and emergency room visits for the increasing heart problems of the other parent, who is also losing his beloved wife. 

I was a mess. 

But God.

The two most beautiful words in the Bible:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Ephesians 2:4-6

In the middle of all of my weakness and failure, He brought me face to face with that stubborn little spark of faith smoldering in my soul, and I discovered it could not be moved.

Here’s one thing I want you to understand about what made me change what I write: this stuff, this caretaking thing I went through, it wasn’t just a little bit of inconvenience. It wasn’t something a person an somehow suck up, buttercup. It wasn’t soft and gentle and lovely. There was nothing to romanticize about it. Yes, I had time with my mom, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything, it was truly a blessing. Yes, it taught me a lot of big life lessons. But it was also overwhelmingly, excruciatingly hard, and it didn’t stop being hard. It just got progressively harder, and it lasted for years. It was war.  

Have you ever known someone who has suffered from cancer for years? 

That CAT scan I mentioned, way back at the beginning of it all, revealed that my mother’s cancer was stage 4 already. There are 5 stages. At least my mother’s version of cancer wasn’t particularly fast-moving, they said… We did have lots of time to say goodbye, as some well-meaning soul pointed out to me later.

That also meant that the end was not quick. 

My mother was a tall, well-built woman for most of her life. I get my five-foot-ten-farm-girl physique from her. After three years of doing battle with cancer, my mother was little more than a collection of bones. I could wrap the fingers of one hand all the way around her thigh. She was also in constant pain. What started out as breast cancer had metastasized to her lungs, her brain, her spine, and her liver. Cancer makes you run a fever as your body tries to attack it. By the end, her life was quite literally burning out right in front of us. To add to that, my father began having heart problems as he dealt with watching her go.

I’m not telling you this so you’ll be horrified. I’m telling you this so you’ll understand where I’m coming from for this next part.

Seeing someone you love – someone good and kind, who loves you, and who loves the Lord with all her heart, mind and soul, and who taught you to love that same God – seeing that beloved person go through an excruciatingly painful death… it brings you to the brink of some very hard, very dark questions. 

It did for me, anyway. Questions such as:

How could a good God cause my beautiful mother so much pain? 

Why not just let her drift into His arms in her sleep? 

Why not just take her quickly? Mercifully?

To say I struggled with my faith is putting it mildly. 

It all came boiling out on one really difficult night.

This is, to date, one of the deepest lows I’ve ever been through as a Christian. 

Mom was in the hospital again, fighting a nasty infection that wasn’t responding to normal medications. We didn’t know if she was going to pull through, and we had a big family and physician consult. She was nearing eighty, she was diabetic, and on a good day her mind wasn’t quite as sharp as it had been. She couldn’t remember that she had cancer, or why she had to be on medications that made her feel awful. She wouldn’t eat if she didn’t feel like it, wouldn’t get up and move just because she needed to. The first round of palliative chemo we had tried at the beginning had been brutal, and then the followup scan revealed that it hadn’t done anything. The cancer in her liver had become its own thing, and it was taking over. 

Our options were another round of a chemo that hadn’t done anything the first time, or hospice. 

Just so you know, the only other option if you have terminal cancer and decide not to do chemo… is hospice care. In most cases, the only thing that follows hospice care is the death of the patient. That is what hospice care is meant for. To ease the end of life. It could be a year, it could be months, but in nearly all cases that end is coming… and you are letting it. Which feels very much like defeat.

My mom was a fighter, though. Even if she couldn’t remember what was going on, even if she didn’t have the ability to mentally participate in her own care, she still didn’t want to give up. Not when she had life left in her. She had pluck. She had grit. 

My logical brain understood that it wasn’t kindness to put my seventy-nine-year-old mother through a fresh hell of repeated hospitalizations, constant nausea, encroaching kidney failure, and uncontrollable infections. I understood that it would kill her faster if we did, and there really wasn’t any choice. I was fully aware of those things.

my heart felt like I had just given up on my mother.

As her medical POA, I was responsible for making medical decisions for her when she wasn’t able to make them herself. I had to stand there and sign all the paperwork saying we were going to stop treating her. There is a lot of paperwork involved in putting someone on hospice. Pages and pages and pages of “We’re Giving Up On You” statements and clauses. I hated my signature for months afterwards. 

What really chewed me up, though? The fact that I couldn’t ask her what she wanted. I couldn’t make sure she understood what we were doing. So I did all of that without her permission, without her even knowing. 

And that night, when I got home and stopped moving, it finally hit, and it hit hard.

I was in my bathroom (where I do most of my crying) and I remember just… loosing it. I had been stewing in silent resentment for a long time, trying to bottle up the anger that was seething under the surface. I was playing emotional whack-a-mole: I can do all things through Christ — smack. You shall overcome — stomp. I was trying to keep it together because that’s what Christians did, right? That’s what trusting in the Lord required. It was ungodly to be angry at God. 

But that night I just couldn’t do it anymore.

As I sat there in the space between the bathtub and the toilet, riddled with guilt, silent-heaving my tears into a damp wad of toilet paper, it all came boiling over.

God was in control. That was what I had to believe, if I believed the Bible. But if God was in control, then He could control my mother’s cancer. He could have let her not get it in the first place. 

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to her, and it wasn’t fair to my dad, and it wasn’t fair to me.

God was unfair.

My questions grew and grew, until finally I was screaming them at Heaven. Why my mother? What purpose could any of this serve? Suffering was supposed to teach, but how would any lesson learned possibly be worth this method?

A traitorous thought crept in: all of this would be easier if I didn’t believe in God.

It would hurt less than believing He just didn’t care – that He would inflict this kind of heartache on His people while still requiring them to be good little followers. New questions started bubbling up. Maybe God is just a big figment of my imagination. Maybe I’m an idiot for believing in Him and going along with all the religious hype… Maybe there’s nothing out there at all and we’re all just biological functions…

Turns out it wasn’t that easy to convince myself God didn’t exist. I’ve been saved since I was ten, so that was twenty-eight years of being a Christian that had to be flushed down the drain. I could feel something in my soul resisting, refusing to give in.

It wasn’t a matter of outgrowing Him like I had outgrown believing in unicorns and magic beans as a kid. All the very real things that have always made me believe in a Creator refused to be silent, offering a quiet insistence that there is a Creator, and that everything speaks of Him, from the growth tips of trees and roots to the impossible intricacies of a living cell. The rocks cried out that He was there, the heavens declared His handiwork… 

God wasn’t going to go away just because I wanted Him to stop being there. 

So, what then? 

I couldn’t argue my way into believing He didn’t exist. It wasn’t working. 

This next part is hard to admit as a Christian: in my anger, while admitting I believed God was real, I tried to rip my faith out of me. I hated it. It was foolish. I had been tricked into worshiping a God who didn’t deserve it. So I tried to carve the believing out, to tear it up by the roots and rid myself of it. To grind it down into dust. Just… kill it. Burn it with fire. 

But just like my soul had insisted God was real, my faith in Him wouldn’t go away, either. It was still there, after all of that, saying that God was God, and He was my God.  

Cold, furious, I gathered that faith up, and I commanded God to take it back. I wasn’t going to be fooled by Him anymore. I didn’t want to believe. I didn’t want Him. I was done, absolutely done following a God who would hurt people for no reason.

A sort of numb, empty silence followed that moment. The kids were quiet. My husband was quiet. It was just me, alone in the dark. 

For all of three agonizing heartbeats I thought, this is it. I’ve turned my back on the Lord.

There wasn’t a rush of freedom, like you might expect if I had just liberated myself from an oppressive religious system.

There wasn’t any certainty that I was right, or that I was finally learning to stand up for myself. I hadn’t ‘put my abuser behind me’. It was just… stillness. Waiting. 

I can’t explain what happened next in words. There aren’t any big enough. One second I was angry and lashing out, the next I was at the edge of a vast, immeasurable space… It wasn’t there, really, I hadn’t left my bathroom floor, but I felt like I was being examined by something so endless it defied all understanding. Before it, I was less than a grain of sand. A blip of existence facing Eternity itself. And yet this being was there, and it was fully aware of me, and it knew who I was, and it knew because it had created me.

And I knew Who that being was. I knew all the way to the marrow of my bones. That knowing sang in the frantic thunder of my heartbeat, and poured through my veins like ice water.

God was there, looking at this puny little soul who had just spat her faith back at Him.

It was terrifying. I wound up flat on the bathroom tile, shaking like a leaf, but there was nowhere to hide. There was nowhere to go. He could see me. Search me. Sift me. He could see every corner of me, read all my sins, all my hidden things, all my pettiness and selfishness and wrong desire. He could see the anger burning in me. 

There was no way to lift my head under that examination. There was no way I could be anything but filthy, with my sins piling around me, festering in my soul. I was a traitor, with no way of deserving anything, much less mercy. I couldn’t offer anything. There was nothing I had that hadn’t been given to me. Breath. Life. All of it had come from this same Creator.

And yet, that Creator was also my Savior. He had given Himself for me.

The Son had come from glory and gone to the cross, taking all that guilt and filth on Himself so that I could come before the Father without dying where I stood. 

And I, in my arrogance, had just thrown that aside. As if the Father’s love in sending His only Son to save me had meant nothing. As if all the pain and the agony Christ went through because of me meant nothing. 

But this God wasn’t angry. He didn’t meet my fury with damnation and brimstone. He didn’t speak in tongues, or send a vision of angels, either. I couldn’t see anything at all other than the inside of my eyelids. It was more like my own thoughts weren’t mine. The words of Ephesians 2:8 ran through my head in this strangely quiet voice that brought only peace with it. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast…”

Immediately, there went my silly little soul, running straight to my Heavenly Father like a child, weak and shaky, but with that spark of faith still very much alive, still clinging to Him as though I hadn’t just tried to cut it out of me. It ran to Him because He still wanted me, despite what I had just done, and it ran because I was still His.

From before time began, I had been His.

That small, peaceful wordless voice spoke again into the silence: My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.

In that moment, my heartbeat slowed down, and all my fear was gone, as if it had simply been blotted away. 

Here’s a question for those who may be saying, “Well, you obviously were suffering from PTSD, and psychotic breaks will do that to you.” Do hallucinations do that? Can stress-triggered delusions suddenly lift your anxiety and your guilt and make it easy to breathe? Can mind-numbing fear make you suddenly sure that you are loved beyond measure? Does insanity make you feel as if your wartorn soul has returned to solid, unshakable ground, and that the storm has finally gone quiet?

Or, maybe, could it be possible that heavy emotional distress opens your soul to the presence of the Lord?

I know what anxiety feels like, and this was the opposite. Not even just the opposite, it was the absolute absence of it.

I may write stories, but I’m not someone who enjoys being overly sentimental or illogical. Yet, I have no way to explain any of what happened that night in any other way than to say God was with me. 

I was saved before that moment, I trusted in Christ for my salvation before that moment, but ever since that moment, there is no longer any hesitation in me. No shred of doubt. There is a God, and I am saved – not because of anything I did, but in spite of myself. My faith is not my own. It didn’t come from me. It was the Father who gave it, and Christ who won it, and no one can take it from me. Not even me.

Eventually I got up off the bathroom floor. 

My faith felt strange – like I was trying to wear a suit that had been beaten thin, stretched too far, and wrung out of shape. My mother was still sick. She was still dying. It still hurt. God didn’t take away that part.

But the Lord did offer me this comfort: my mother was and still is His, and this life isn’t the end. It’s not even a drop in the bucket. She is now raising her beautiful soprano voice in praise of her Savior, dwelling in the eternal glory of the Lord, and all her pain is gone. I will see her soul again. 

What didn’t kill me did make me stronger, but not in a way that the World would call strong.

I was a pastor’s daughter. I lived for the Lord, obeyed His Word, loved my Savior, worshipped and prayed regularly. In my pride, I thought I was doing alright. I was beyond stumbling into big sins… Then God knocked me off of the whitewashed pedestal of self-reliant self-righteousness I had built for myself and stuck me in the refiner’s furnace. 

That little spark of faith is now battle-scarred and battle-tested, but if I could go back, I wouldn’t avoid the furnace.

in the midst of the fire, I saw first-hand the work of the Lord.

For me, that was what my mom’s cancer was. Fire. It hurt. A lot. But in that fire, God showed me how far I could fall, and that I was very capable of stumbling if I was depending on myself and not on Him. He made me realize that I was not enough – but that He IS. I was putting all my trust in the wrong place.

That’s how that verse needs to be read: “IN, THROUGH, BECAUSE OF CHRIST’S STRENGTH I can do all things.”

That shift in emphasis from I to Christ changes everything. The Lord gives you what He can handle, and He will strengthen you and equip you to cling to Christ’s strength and not your own, for He is the one who holds all things in the palm of HIs hand. He is the goal, not your personal earthly strength. Eternity is where you belong, not this world. 

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

2 Corinthians 12:9-10

How could that realization not have an impact on my writing?

Here’s a hint: it did. 

God Changed the Yardstick I Measure My Work By; Ergo, My Writing Has Changed

I think, really, what changed the most was how I see God. Before I hit that melting point, I knew God existed, and I knew He was there, but there wasn’t a great sense of immediacy. It was too easy to think I had to do everything myself and God just pitched in now and then. I wasn’t standing on rock-solid assurance that He was actually in control until I understood I wasn’t in control at all.

All those ‘what if I had been a second later’ moments really start to add up, when you’re looking for them, and then, funny thing, once you start realizing just how much He is doing, you begin to see the things you do differently. You start measuring your success by a very different yardstick.

What Changed?

To get back to the underlying reason for this post, I finished the original version of Shadow Dance (i.e. Book 2) in the middle of 2019. I got about two thirds of the way through finishing Book 3 when I ignored all the advice I had ever read online, and Indie published the first two books. I think I assumed it would be easy to finish Book 3 in six months.

Then we put Mom in hospice. 

She went to be with the Lord on January 2, 2020. Three months later, Covid hit. My Dad had a stroke and wound up in a nursing home that same spring. My husband’s job took us on a cross-country move to Virginia in early 2021, and then I had to get a ‘real job’ to help ends meet.

I kept chipping away, but progress slowed considerably, and time has a way of changing perceptions.

Before I had even finished Book 3, I began to realize I had grown out of being satisfied with writing ‘clean secular fiction.’

Eventually it was too hard to ignore it anymore. I was tired of muffling my faith in the name of mass appeal, when in fact I am NOT ashamed of my Savior, and I have so much to be thankful for. 

And, really, how many woman-hours was I spending on something that didn’t have much to do with the Lord? Colossians 3:17 kept roaring forth to stab at me. “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus…”

I finished the project, though, and got it worked up and edited. Designed the covers, got the paperback formatted. Then, as part of the backmatter, I wrote a letter that was meant to go at the end of the last book, sharing the gospel, challenging my readers to intentionally trust the Lord in everything. It read more like an apology for not putting those things in the story in the first place.

Which got me thinking: why not put it in there? What would that even look like? How would it work?

There were other questions. Who even reads Christian Speculative Fiction? Will I sell anything? What if I make people angry because I’m no longer writing for a general mass-market audience?

Those last questions have stopped worrying me.

When it comes down to it, all I’m worried about anymore is, “Does this honor God to the best of my ability?” “Am I pouring my effort into something that glorifies God?” “Am I living for God and not myself?”

So here I am *cough cough* years later with a re-imagined, openly Christian version that is markedly different from the original. 

While the basic building blocks of the story are the same, the setting is now our earth rather than some mysteriously familiar ‘other’ place and time – which means that Bren can refer to the real Word and the real Triune God of the Bible without giving me an apoplexy over creating a false god. But (because I still love worldbuilding) it takes place in the future after a global near-extinction event has obliterated everything we know today, since… you know… plot. 

This version is laced with themes of forgiveness and repentance, learning to trust in the Lord absolutely, finding identity in Christ not the world, and walking through fire on the strength of an Almighty God. These are things I have been through, things that are part of the fabric of who I am as a Christian, and I will admit to blatantly transferring them to my MCs. (Oops… but also, not oops.)

Maybe this new version can encourage someone, or build someone up. Maybe it will turn a soul to Christ. That’s my hope. That is my goal, my new yardstick. To serve God without flinching.

Where Have All the Old Books Gone?

The original versions are still available for free on Wattpad, and I will leave them there. If I ever have to take them down, I’ll offer them on a platform like Draft2Digital, still for free. Why? Because I appreciate my readers who have binge-read them all and who have loved them enough to come back to re-read them over and over. You have no idea how much encouragement you have been to this bedraggled writer. 

In closing

Life is short. My mom had eighty years on this planet, but she still died. My father has now also passed on into glory. I don’t want to ‘harsh your mood,’ but death is right there. You might not think it is, but… it is. So where will you wind up when it comes for you?

I’ll leave you with this.

Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

John 11:25-26, ESV

This is the free offer of the gospel.

If you feel that pull, don’t wait until you think you’re ready. Don’t wait until you’ve ‘had your fun and you’re ready to go,’ or you’ve ‘cleaned your life up’ enough. You can’t be ready. There’s nothing you can do to make yourself ready. Not by yourself. Only the Son has ever been ready. No amount of ‘believing in yourself’ is going to make you right with God. There is only One way, and that is through Christ. 

How do you do that? By acknowledging your NEED for a savior, by seeing that yawning gulf between you and God, by realizing how much your sins have cost, and by repenting of them. And then, once you have fully grasped that you don’t deserve mercy, and you could never earn it for yourself, THEN look to the Savior. See the purity of Him, the Love that gave Him, and trust that Jesus has taken all of your sin on Himself so you can be saved. Once you have truly understood that Jesus is all you need… reach out and take hold of Him. 

If you found any of this offensive, please know I’m not baring my heart like this out of hate. it takes all my introvert guts to do this.

Maybe it doesn’t bother you at all. If that’s the case, I hope it encourages you to draw closer to the Lord. If it does bother you… Just… Maybe ask yourself why? I mean, would you be offended if I offered you a free donut? You would probably just take it or… not take it. (Jesus is infinitely better than a doughnut, IMHO.)

But if you feel strongly about the changes I made to the Shadows Rising series, send me a message through my Contact page (just pick a platform, I check them all fairly regularly). I’ll try my best to respond. Or, if you want to reach out and have a chat with someone who cares about your eternal soul, I’d love that too. If you find that you really, really want to convince me that God isn’t real, bring it on. (Tried that myself before – didn’t work.)

Thank you again for taking the time to read this. I appreciate you so much.

Sincerely, 

Anna

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Here are some great articles and resources that have helped me go through the fire:

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/god-give-can-handle

https://www.esv.org

https://www.opc.org

(Note, I am not officially representing any of these sites or groups, and I am including them here for informational purposes only.)