The 1980s knew how to create a feel-good movie. The actors and actresses might have had cheesy hair and strange clothing styles and makeup, but iconic films, like Back to the Future, Goonies, and The Karate Kid, left viewers cheering and feeling on top of the world as they left the theatres. This summer, the movie, Maverick, brought back the same feeling and topped the movie charts because of it.

When entering a tourney or jousting contest, a knight would often approach a fair maiden sitting in the crowd and ask to fight in her honor. We, too, have a champion fighting for us and His record is undefeated.

Flexing doesn’t come easy. The body must first break down to build muscle. As the muscle fibers repair themselves, they heal back stronger. Faith can be the same way. When life throws a challenging crisis our way, our faith can flounder, doubts creep in, or in some way we break down, but then God lets us know He’s been by our side all along.

You matter to God. You're His child, and you're on His mind constantly. He's concerned about you. His heart breaks for whatever struggles you're going through.

Ever felt stuck in a rut? The idiom comes from the early pioneer days when covered wagon wheels would get stuck in the grooves or channels of a dirt road where prior wagons had passed. The wheels would get bogged down by the deeper holes or forced along a specific track. Ruts can be an emotional state.

Oh, Lord, it’s Hard to be Humble When you’re Perfect in Every Way is a song by country singer Mac Davis that my dad used to sing to my brother and me with a smile and a teasing glint in his eye. The lyrics are a satirical look at the life of being a rock star.

Gowns have been ironed and pressed. Parties have been planned. Parents have purchased their tickets and reserved their seats. The commencement speakers have practiced their speeches. Four years plus have been working toward this one moment

Try to find a fictional book that isn’t about relationships. Man-verses-nature stories, like Cast Away or The Martian, where the hero fights to survive in isolation, might come to mind. However, in both movies, the struggle was to return to their friends and loved ones and how they handled the absence of personal interaction.

My friend’s hands shook as she showed me the pages of the book Concussion that her son had been assigned to read as a sophomore in high school. She’d highlighted the pages...

My oldest son is starting to look at colleges. Stacks of brochures arrive every day in our mailbox with smiling faces of young adults on the front, all of them stating they have state-of-the-art programs. The pressure to measure up increases as grades, essays, and S.A.T. scores threaten to limit your options or categorize kids into specific levels.

I woke this past Saturday at 5:30 am, and my blood turned to ice as I turned on the news. The Governor of Kentucky stood in front of a podium, and the electronic banner beneath him read, Massive tornado hits Kentucky. The screen changed to a map of a red line that ran straight up the state’s western side—right to where my parents lived.

Nothing happens to water until it reaches 32 degrees. Until that marker, ice won’t melt and water won’t freeze, but once the temperature hits that degree, things start to happen. Life can be a lot like water. We wait and we wait, and nothing seems to happen.

In writing, the doorway of no return is the situation that pushes our hero into a new normal. In the story’s opening, a glimpse of the hero’s life as he knows it is depicted until something rocks his world. The hero is thrust, whether willingly or unwillingly, into a new normal.

Dig deeper is typed into the margins of my rough draft.

My novels all follow a pattern. The heroine and hero are going about their daily lives trying to maintain the status quo when an inciting incident throws their ordinary world into chaos. This new struggle reveals wounds and insecurities and forces them to figuratively look at themselves in the mirror and realize they are broken. Up to that point, they’ve been either ignoring their issues or trying to fix the brokenness by themselves. The problem is, they can’t. And neither can we.

I love feisty heroines who stand their ground, put their foot down, or dish it back out to the hero. I’ve never considered myself a gutsy person. Sure, I like rollercoasters, but I’ll climb the curtains if I see a spider.

What do Froto Baggin’s from Lord of the Rings, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, Marlin from Finding Nemo, and Luke Skywalker from Star Wars all have in common, besides being movie characters?