I always knew I wanted to be a writer.

I came to Christ in my early 20s.

I write about the trials and triumphs of contemporary life - and often the readers see themselves between the lines of the story.

I write about true-life type things.

My characters are not plastic.

Reader loyalty will stay because I'm not changing.

The general market wants what I do.

There were times when I was so sick of talking about the Bible.

You don't have love without sacrifice; you can't have sacrifice without love.

You need to get down among the people who are the dirtiest and dustiest, and the depravity, and you need to see Christ's light shining there.

You need to have time to really hear God.

You're gifted to do something.

As I watched bookstores close, I began to wonder how that felt for the owners. Owning a bookstore was their dream and now they're struggling and seeing those dreams fall apart.

I can spend 10 to 15 minutes with someone, and they can tell me what they're going through. I may never have gone through that, but I get it on a really deep level.

I developed a deep sadness for celebrities, a pity that they often are caught in a plastic world that runs too hard and too fast, and that many times that world means destroyed relationships with everyone they know and love.

I'm receiving 300 to 500 letters every week from people telling me that God used my stories to save their marriage or to introduce them to Christ or to heal a relationship that had been broken.

Secular writers can tell a story about the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual parts of a character. But no matter how well they tell the story, they miss a facet that is innately part of all of us - the spiritual.