When it comes to telling stories, I’ve always had some theme to cling to. Some of my stories are tales of love where two men find each other and figure out how to navigate their lives together. Some stories have a touch of magic and fantasy. Ten of them are tied to an aspect of mystery.

As I’m preparing to come out with my 20^th book—yes, I’m kind of excited about that, too—I found myself focusing on a theme that I didn’t expect the book to sway to, but I’m glad that it did. White Christmas in the Desert circles around the theme of faith.

When most people think of faith, they think of their religion, that their belief in God is at a certain level where their lives rotate completely around that faith. While I’ve had this faith in a higher power throughout my life, I haven’t always been comfortable with religion itself. I’ve tried a couple of times to connect faith with religion, often with unpleasant results.

Many religions and faiths tend to look down on same-sex couples, and while most folks nowadays won’t condemn you to your face, there are still many who believe the verse from Leviticus where “lying down with mankind” is an abomination, so since I’ve come to terms with who I am with my sexuality, it’s been hard for me to see religion as beneficial to my life and my well-being.

That has slowly changed as my relationship with my sweetheart, Todd, has deepened. Although raised in a Catholic household, when I first met him, he was going to a United Church of Christ in Sturgeon Bay. Recently, we’ve been going to a similar church outside of Shawano, one that has embraced us as a couple, and it’s not only helped me with my own faith, but that of the characters in my book.

You always want to try to make your main characters different in each book, and when it came to writing a story about a father making his eight-year-old son’s wish of a white Christmas come true, I knew faith needed to be a factor. Obviously, faith in one’s self to go to extreme lengths to make your child happy is important, but I wanted my protagonist to have a strong faith in God, as well.

On more than one occasion, Meldrick approaches his pastor seeking input on important decisions in his life. While asking for guidance about how to bring about a snowy wonderland in the desert is obviously foremost on his mind, he also makes inquiries into his relationships with the people in his life, including the man he eventually falls in love with, Jesse.

Meldrick’s faith also is put to the test later in the book when his son is almost kidnapped by his ex-husband’s fiancé. I wrote a scene where he’s in the parking lot at the hospital and he says a prayer for his son to heal from some injuries he suffered, where he comes to terms with the fact that, while he’d been focused on his son’s happiness, he almost lost sight of the fact of how fortunate he was that his son was in his life.

There also may or may not be a miracle that takes place in the book, furthering the theme of faith. However, I don’t want to give away the ending—that wouldn’t be very Christian.

Still, it was nice to be able to explore faith as I was writing the book, and I have to believe that the speed in which I wrote the first draft of this book—almost less than half the time it usually takes me to write a first draft—was a sign from above that this story was meant to exist and was meant to be told. While I’ve written Christmas-themed novels before, this story seemed to emphasize the Christ portion of the word a little more.

I hope all writers explore faith at some point in their writing. While it doesn’t have to explore religion, the pursuit of spirituality is always something that everyone should engage in at least sometime in their lives. I’m not sure if I’ll do it again, but doing it with White Christmas in the Desert was quite an interesting ride.