There are a lot of inspiring stories around the world about people that answered the call of the Lord and left their comfortable lives behind to pursue their dream and do something that really matters. Such is the story of Katie Davis in the New York Times best-selling book Kisses from Katie. As Katie herself would put it, this is not a book about her, but “a book about Christ who is alive today and not only knows but cares about every hair on my head. Yours too. I’m writing this book on the chance that a glimpse into the life of my family and me, full of my stupidity and God’s grace, will remind you of this living, loving Christ and what it means to serve Him. I’m writing with the hope that as you cry and laugh with my family you will be encouraged that God still uses flawed human beings to change the world. And if He can use me, He can use you.”

Kisses from Katie follows the life of an eighteen-year-old senior girl from Nashville, raised in a middle-class family and is also popular in her school, president of her class, and homecoming queen. She breaks up with her boyfriend, disobeys her parents, and loses almost all of her friends, so she could move to Uganda where she doesn’t speak the language and only knows one person.

So what drove this young girl do something like that? Well, she definitely didn’t go to Uganda to party, considering that this is what’s on most eighteen-year-old’s minds. For the believers, the answer is actually quite simple: a passion to follow Jesus.

It all started in 2006 when Katie visited Uganda for three weeks and she found herself moved by the people there, so much that she had to go back and care for them. And that’s what she did. In 2007 after she graduated, she returned to Uganda so she can teach kids at an orphanage. Immediately she faced all kinds of challenges, personal struggle, and a spiritual awakening. But her love for the people of Uganda just kept growing and the next year she started a non-profit organization which supported more than a hundred students and she also adopted eight girls. Today her organization Amazima supports well over 400 students and she now has 13 daughters.

Though many would consider what Katie did a bit radical, in her mind she truly believes that her journey is simply following God and doing her best to trust Him and whatever He presents before her.

Thanks to that her time in Uganda have been accompanied with different kinds of miraculous intervention, but that doesn’t mean that it was without any difficulties. It is painful, it is repetitive, but she continues to walk the path laid before her because she learns to see Jesus in all the people around her.

Katie’s story is full with all kinds of life’s difficulties, however it is in the hardest places, where we can do nothing but rely on God’s will, we feel closest to him.