If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.

You can't tell a good story without conflict - the story can't be beautiful or meaningful. We're taught to run from conflict, and it's robbing us of some really good stories.

Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon.

The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is 'Do not fear.' It's in there over two hundred times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn't let fear boss us around. Before I realized we were supposed to fight fear, I thought of fear as a subtle suggestion in our subconscious designed to keep us safe, or more important, keep us from getting humiliated. And I guess it serves that purpose. But fear isn't only a guide to keep us safe; it's also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

I started Storyline after I'd accomplished all my goals and still wasn't happy. I'd become a New York Times bestselling author, which was my goal from high school, and yet I was less happy after accomplishing my goals than I was before.

It blew my mind that what I was thinking was actually applicable to people's lives, and it certainly revolutionized family.

When I was in love there was somebody in the world who was more important than me, and that, given all that happened at the fall of man, is a miracle, like something God forgot to curse.