Christian bands like the Newsboys, DC Talk and Hawk Nelson formed the soundtrack to Grace Semler Baldridge s life as a teenager. The musician, known professionally as Semler, remembers holing up in her bedroom as a child, writing songs in her head and imagining what it would be like to be onstage with Reliant K.

But just as surely as she loved Christian music, there was another thing Semler thought she knew with absolute certainty: There was no place for a queer teen like her on those stages.

So when the 30-year-old Los Angeles resident woke up on Tuesday and spotted her songs topping Apple Musics Christian album charts outranking industry titans like Lauren Daigle and Chris Tomlin she said it felt surreal.

Its just been so encouraging and heartening, she told HuffPost. I keep thinking about how this would have meant so much to me when I was 13 or 14 years old, to see an openly queer artist talk about being queer and struggling with faith and being hopeful with God and being mad with God sometimes.

Im so grateful to be part of what I think is a movement towards inclusion within a faith community that has been largely exclusionary, she said.