Celebrating the Launch of Tell God How You Feel

Launch day is almost here! Tell God How You Feel: Helping Kids with Hard Emotions officially releases on Friday!

This is my first children’s book and I’m excited to share it with you. Tell God How You Feel is a discipleship tool for parents to use to help their children learn to bring their emotions to the Lord in prayer. It helps children learn to identify and verbalize their emotions. It helps them learn that God cares about their emotions. It helps them learn to see God as their place of refuge in all the cares of life.

The book contains separate stories, each focusing on a specific emotion all children feel: fear, sadness, rejection, loneliness, and gratitude. The characters in each story learn about what God’s word says about these feelings. They learn about people in the Bible who felt those emotions. They learn how to tell God about their emotions and ask for his help. Each story contains discussion questions which help parents talk with their children about their feelings and about the God who loves and cares for them. If you are familiar with my book, A Heart Set Free: A Journey to Hope Through the Psalms of Lament, then you’ll recognize that this book is inspired by it. It plants a seed in the hearts of children, giving them a beginning understanding of what it looks like to lament to God all of their feelings.

We all have habits in how we respond to difficult emotions, many of which we developed as children. Some of us distract ourselves from what we are feeling. Others pretend we are feeling fine when in fact we are not. As a Weight Watcher’s commercial from a few years ago revealed, some eat in response to any emotion they feel—whether good or bad. Rather than develop unhealthy responses to emotions, my hope is that as children grow and mature, they will develop the spiritual habit of turning to the Psalms and using its prose to help them shape their own prayers and laments to the Lord.

Want to learn more about the book? You can view a sample here. It’s available for pre-order now and will officially release on Friday. Are you on social media? Be sure to visit my Facebook page and @christinarfox on Instagram this week to enter for opportunities to win a copy.

Join the Launch Team For Tell "God How You Feel"

I’m excited to share with you about my new children’s book, Tell God How You Feel: Helping Kids with Hard Emotions, releasing March 5.

We learn from an early age how to navigate the difficult emotions of life. Fear. Sadness. Worry. Loneliness. Rejection. For some of us, we learn to avoid painful emotions. Others of us may “feed” our emotions through various temporary distractions. Still others may hide or cover them up. Yet the Bible teaches us to bring all our hurts to God.

Tell God How You Feel is a discipleship tool for parents to use in engaging their children with their emotions. It is designed to help children learn to bring their emotions to God and tell him about all their sorrows, fears, and hurts. It teaches them the process of Biblical lament.

Tell God How You Feel contains stories about a set of siblings, Mia and Josh. Each child faces difficult emotions and throughout the stories we see their parents help them learn to identify and verbalize their emotions. They teach them about those in the Bible who felt hard emotions. Mia and Josh then learn to pray to God and tell him how they feel.  These read aloud stories are ideal for family story times with thoughtful questions and discussion starters at the end of each story.

Want to have access to the book before anyone else?

Want to join me in discussing the book with other readers?

Want to participate in fun challenges and giveaways?

Then join the launch team! You can click here to learn about all the details and to sign up. Invite your friends!

I look forward to seeing you on the team and sharing with you about this discipleship resource to use with the children in your life.

Blessings,

Christina

Discipling Our Children Through Their Failures

There are many hard and difficult things about parenting. Potty training for starters. The candy aisle at the grocery store. Watching your child suffer from illness. Early adolescence. I could go on.

There's one area of parenting that hits me right in the heart. It's painful to watch and hard to endure. It reminds me of my own heart and my own weak flesh. But it's part of life and something our children need us to disciple them through. What is it? Failure.

We have all failed at something in our life. Perhaps we didn't make the team we tried out for. Maybe we studied hard for a test and failed. Many of us know what it’s like to not get a job or promotion we wanted. Perhaps a ministry we created crashed and burned. Or a dream we long hoped for never came to fruition. In one way or another, we all know what it’s like to fail. 

How we respond to and handle failure is crucial. And that's where our children need our help and counsel. Because they will experience failure in life. It may look different than the failures we’ve experienced. Some of the failures our children experience may seem small, but their response to failure now, as children, will help them when they face bigger failures in the future. For example, helping our children learn to fail a test now will help prepare them when they fail to get the job they want in the future.

Disciple Your Children Through Failure

Teach them to lament their failures: Failure is disappointing. It hurts. Our children may be frustrated with themselves, maybe even angry. They may be sad that they didn’t achieve the thing they worked so hard for. As parents, we ought to expect our children to have an emotional response to failure. Having emotional responses is part of being human. We need to listen to those emotional responses and respond in understanding and empathy. We also need to help our children learn what to do with those emotions. The Bible teaches us to come to God with our emotions. We need to help our children learn to cry out to God in lament. We can model it for them by praying out loud, telling God about the disappointment, sadness, anger, or other feelings associated with a failure. We ask God to be with our children and help them work through it, to be their comfort and peace. We also praise God for who he is and what he has done, acknowledging that he knows and rules over all things. We encourage our children to lament to God on their own as well.

Remind them why we fail: When our children fail at something, it’s a good opportunity to remind them that no one is perfect. Humans are limited and finite. We make mistakes. We forget things. We don’t always get a perfect score. We can affirm the longing they have for perfection because we all have that feeling that things are not as they should be. We can remind our children about the Fall of man and what happened to our first parents. We can also point forward to eternity when all things will be made right.

Help them learn from their failures: There are always lessons to be learned in failure. Often, after a failure has first happened, it’s not the time to teach those lessons. But after their emotions have settled down and they are ready to talk about it, we can help our children think through what happened and consider what they learned from it. Perhaps failing a test reveals a need to study more or study in a different way. Perhaps not making the team means more practice is required. There may also be some lessons to learn about perfectionism, idolatry, and dependence upon God in all things.

Point them to Christ who never failed: Above all, we need to point our children to Christ who was perfect for them. He never failed. He lived the life we could not live and died the death we deserved. When God looks at us, he doesn’t see our sin, but sees Christ’s righteousness. Though we may fail, Christ never will. He will be for us what we can’t be for ourselves.

Failure is a part of life. It’s hard for all of us. But it’s important that we help our children learn and grow through it. They will fail at things; we need to teach them to fail well.

The Battle of Emotions

My kids are one belt away from earning their black belt in martial arts. One of the tasks they have to accomplish to before receiving the belt is to break a stack of four wooden boards with their hand. In a recent attempt, my youngest hit the boards over and over without success until the instructor said, “Why don’t you stop and try with three boards instead?”

“I want to keep trying,” my son responded.

He kept at it and finally broke the stack of four. The instructor then turned it into a lesson on perseverance for the rest of the class.

Painful Emotions

In my own life, I lack such perseverance in the face of hard and difficult things. When something becomes too painful or challenging, I give up. I resist pain and heartache and difficulty. If I see a trial looming ahead, I turn and go the other way. When it comes to painful emotions, I do all that I can to control, ignore, cover up, hide from, or resist those emotions. Anything but actually face them and work through them.

But it is in working through them that I learn more about God, who he is, and what he is doing in me...to read the rest of this post, visit enCourage, my writing home today.

A Heart Set Free and a Giveaway

It's here! My book is here! The baby that I gently carried and nurtured into existence has finally been birthed. On Wednesday, my book will officially be available for sale and I'm so excited to share it with you.

For those who have read my writing for a while now, you know that I often write about emotions. I can't help it; I am trained as a counselor. My goal in writing about emotions has always been to point my readers to the truth of the gospel and the hope they have in Christ. And that's the goal of my book as well. 

Are you often led by your emotions? I am. I think many of us are. Our emotions often rule us. They guide our decisions. Sometimes, they even hold us hostage. 

When hard and difficult emotions enter our lives, we often have go-to responses. We have usual ways we handle our emotions. We might pretend they are not there. We might try to distract ourselves from them. We might try to control them in some way. But how often do we turn to God in his word and in prayer when our hearts are breaking or we are frozen with fear? How often do we cry out to God when we've been hurt by others or when life is overwhelming? How often do we bring our cares to God in lament?

A Heart Set Free is about the art of lament. It is about learning from the Psalms of Lament so that we might then voice our own laments. It is about following the structure and pattern of the laments, a pattern which moves from sorrow to joy; from fear to trust. But it is ultimately about Christ, the one who lamented for us and who has fulfilled all the cries of our heart. 

Here are a few more facts:

1. It's not a Bible study: That's one of the first questions everyone asks. No, it is not a Bible study. It is a book about the Psalms of Lament. It could however be used as a book study with a friend, counselor, or small group.

2. It's a primer on the art of lament: We don't know how to cry out to God when we are afraid, lonely, abandoned, or filled with sorrow. This book follows the structure and pattern of the laments and shows us how to cry out to God.

3. It's not a cure-all or ten-step program: We all like how-to lists. We all like to follow ten steps to freedom from some problem. This book is about journeys and about the process of bringing our sorrows and fears to the Lord. Coming to God with our heartaches often results in greater joy, but not because we followed a particular program. Difficult and painful emotions will be a part of life until Christ returns. This book is about finding our hope in Christ, not in methods or false substitutes. 

4. Though lament is about sorrow, the book is ultimately about joy: This book teaches the art of lament, of crying out to God and seeking his help and salvation. But it is ultimately about coming to the place in our tears where we can trust, praise, and worship God even when life is hard. It's about joy linked with sorrow. It's about knowing that one day all our tears will be wiped away forever. 

Here's what a few others have said about the book: 

"Some days feel like a roller coaster ride--up and down, and if possible sideways ... Christina doesn't ignore our emotions, rather she drives us from the wild ride to the freedom found in Jesus." ~ Trillia Newbell (Author of Fear and Faith and United)

"Christina shows us from God's Word the importance of trusting Jesus with our emotions, even when we are weeping. With theological integrity and practical suggestions she tenderly teaches us the language of lament and how our lamentations can take us to the gospel." ~ Susan Hunt (Pastor's wife, former Director of Women's Ministry for the PCA and author of several books for women and children.)

"... I wish I had Christina's book back when I became a believer. It would have saved me a lot of painful emotion-stuffing and foolish emotion-ignoring." ~ Gloria Furman (Author of Glimpses of Grace, Treasuring Christ When Your Hands Are Full, and The Pastor's Wife)

"... invites us to vulnerability, transparency and trust - particularly when life is hard ... offers practical, empathetic help for those whose emotions have taken them captive in a time of upheaval." ~ Jen Wilkin (Author of Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Mind)

To read a review of my book, visit Rachel Miller's blog. 

To learn more about my book, or get your own copy, click here: A Heart Set Free: A Journey to Hope through the Psalms of Lament.

This is a week of giveaways. So keep coming back to enter! Today's giveaway is one copy of my book, a journal I had hand painted from Sarah Vrooman Designs, a purple (my favorite color!) ESV Bible and a stamped bookmark from The Hand Stamped Heart. Enter below. US residents only. Update: Kim is the winner of this giveaway. Congratulations, Kim!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Note: This post may contain Amazon Affiliate links.