I had always been able to make people laugh in school, so I really developed that and worked on it and I got pretty good at it and it turned into a career.

Of course it does, Jomes answered earnestly. Many of life's treasures remain hidden from us simply because we never search for them. Often we do not ask the proper questions that might lead us to the answer to all our challenges. We are so caught up in fear and regret, that hope seems a foolish endeavor. Proof of hope, however, is not only possible, it is an overlooked law of the universe.

By your hand, millions - billions - of lives will be altered, caught up in a chain of events begun by you this day.

There are no hopeless situations, sweetheart, only people who have grown hopeless about them. You still have choices you can make.

When I was 19 years old, both of my parents died in the same year; my mom of cancer and my dad in a car accident. Through the next two or three years and a series of bad decisions - all my own, I might add - I ended up literally homeless, before that was even a word. I even slept occasionally under a pier on the Gulf Coast.

We're not trying to raise good kids. We're trying to raise kids who become great adults. That's a very different thing. We all know parents who had kids that when they turned 18 left the house and went nuts.

It's also a lot easier to convince people to read an entertaining story than any other type of book!