Bestselling author Karen Kingsbury addresses students

Bestselling Christian author Karen Kingsbury visited Liberty University Monday, challenging students to be passionate about their own life story.

“The story that will matter the most is the one that you are writing with the days of your lives,” Kingsbury said, using “writing” as an analogy for living a Christian life. “What you want at the end of your time is for people to say of you that you wrote a bestseller with the finite number of days God has given you.”

Kingsbury has written more than 50 novels and has made the USA Today and New York Times bestseller lists. While she was first published 14 years ago, she has been writing stories since childhood.

In Monday’s convocation she encouraged students to “love well, laugh often and find their life in Christ.”

Students overwhelmingly responded with laughter as she shared a personal story about an embarrassing moment during a family vacation, when she fell down some stairs at a theme park and everyone thought she was part of the act. She told students it’s important to not take life too seriously.

“What I like most about her is that when she speaks I feel like I’m reading a book. She is a natural story teller,” said junior Kate Shickel.

She encouraged young writers to chart their ideas and read in the genre that they want to write.

“School is a hard time to read for fun but do it anyways,” she said. “To be an author you have to write a book, so at some point there is no class you can ever take to prepare you except just sitting down and writing.”

Kingsbury and her husband Don are the parents of six children, three of whom they adopted from Haiti. She has spoken at Liberty before for an Extraordinary Women’s Conference, but this was her first time in convocation.

Kingsbury and her family first visited Liberty together a year ago for a tour and now her oldest son, Tyler, is a freshman and a member of the worship group LU Praise. She said she hopes all of her children will attend Liberty in the future.

“If heaven had a university it would be Liberty. This place is amazing,” she said. “I’m from the West Coast and there literally is no comparison to any university there.”

After convocation Kingsbury signed books and met with students, faculty, staff and the community at Liberty University’s Barnes and Noble bookstore.