EVEN at 11, Grace Timms stood out from the crowd. Forget fashionable hairstyles or idolising the latest boy band: Grace wanted more than anything else to find peace with God.

Grace was brought up in a Christian home, but it was when she went on a camp with other girls her age from her church, that she realised she had yet to become a Christian in her own right. She prayed and committed her life to Jesus.

"I gained so much from that camp," says Grace "After that I just wanted to seek God more and more." Searching for the next step as a Christian, the way forward became clear to Grace when a young girl who had just started to come to church expressed a desire to be baptised. Grace knew she needed to do the same. Her own baptism, at 16, was a powerful turning point.

"I cried all the way through," she recalls. "I felt completely clean inside, knowing that God had taken all my sin away and replaced it with His love."

Later, approaching the end of her A-Levels, Grace was faced with a series of important choices. Friends seemed to have their paths planned out: university, career, money, family. They expected her to go the same way. But Grace just didn't know what the future held for her: all she knew was that she wanted to follow God's guidance for her life, not her own ambition. Grace felt the stress of uncertainty:

"I didn't know what to do, what the right decision was. I had to cry out to God: and He answered me." This sense of God's guidance brought peace to Grace. University wasn't for her. Once that decision was made, Grace took flight. She became a fully-fledged member of the Jesus Fellowship, also embracing a radical shared lifestyle in a Jesus Fellowship Christian Community house in Leicester.

"This is the opposite way to this consumer-driven society", she says with conviction. "God gave me passion and vision for Christian community."

"Just when I needed direction, God showed me how empty the alternative would be. I stayed with some of my friends at University, but their lifestyle didn't appeal to me at all; it seemed shallow compared to the things God was showing me."

Where will Grace go from here? She expresses excitement about young people she's involved with in Leicester: "I long to see them move onwards in God". And she's learning to trust God. "He is unpredictable, but I'm ready for whatever His plans are."

For Grace, the important thing is that she knows God has a plan for her life - and she is determined to follow it.

"Everyone I knew at college had different priorities from me. There it was all about ambition, career and bettering yourself. God is my priority. What I'm doing now isn't for my sake, it's for His. And it works!"