How my relationship with my parents influenced my writing, really not at all. My dad was a mechanic, my mom a nurse.

The idea of a spiritual heart transplant is a vivid image to me; once you have the heart of somebody else inside you, then that heart is there. Jesus' heart is inside me, and my heart is gone. So if God were to place a stethoscope against my chest, he would hear the heart of Jesus Christ beating.

I don't think I have ever created an entire fiction piece or followed a historical piece and made that into a sermon.

I do think there is great strength, though, in starting a sermon with a story, then returning to that story at the end. That puts book ends to a sermon. It is a real simple technique that communicates to the audience that there is a sense of closure, that they have a package here, or we began and we closed with this. I think that's just a nice technique.

We have a place where we can take people when they come to us with questions so we're not just speaking out of our own opinion. We're really speaking to them out of an authoritative place, not because of what we discovered, but because of what God says.

When no one is watching, live as if someone is.

It's one thing for me to tell people not to worry. It's another thing entirely to quote Matthew 6, where Jesus says, "Why do you worry? The birds of the air, the flowers of the field..." He says, "I tell you, do not worry."