About the Book
Book: Trekking Toward Tenacity: Your Family’s Roadmap to Stronger Mental Health
Author: Chris Morris
Genre: Parenting / Christian Living / Mental Health
Release date: September 24, 2024
Empower your children with the gift of tenacity through these practical, meaningful tools for their mental and spiritual health.
Trekking toward Tenacity walks through Psalm 139 verse by verse, discovering how we can help our children develop mentally healthy habits. The goal is to coach our kids to be more tenacious because we live in a tumultuous world. It can be hard to stay focused on God and on mentally healthy habits in that tumult, but this book gives concrete ways to help kids to do just that.
By teaching parents practical application steps to implement with kids of all ages, ranging from preschool to adolescent, this book will give them new tools to support their families in the quest for better mental health. It will provide rock-solid encouragement for parents who are stressed out and wondering if they’re making the right choices for their families. It provides counterintelligence against the onslaught of increased risks of mental health challenges for children and young adults today.
Click here to get your copy!
About the Author
Chris Morris is a certified mental health coach dedicated to promoting understanding of mental health issues within the church. Because of a lifelong struggle with depression and suicidality, Chris became committed to breaking down the stigma surrounding mental health and encouraging others to seek after holistic health.
As a writer and speaker, Chris has shared his personal story and insights with audiences across the country, inspiring many individuals to take control of their own health, break free from poor theological teaching placed upon them, and seek the support they need. He has published several books on mental health, the most recent being Resilient and Redeemed. His work has been featured in a number of media outlets, including CrossWalk, The Mighty, and Fathom Magazine.
Chris is deeply committed to creating a more compassionate and supportive world and church for individuals living with mental health issues. Through his writing and speaking, he is a powerful voice for change and a beacon of hope for those in need.
More from Chris
I literally wrote the book that I wish I had 20 years ago when I was raising my kids. Being a parent today is tumultuous. Especially in a post-COVID world, mental health is a strong contender for the biggest challenges facing our kids. There are plenty of books out there that give us theories on how to raise our kids, and plenty of books that are full of devotionals to walk through with our kids, but shockingly few books dedicated to coaching our kids to have tenacity.
In my experience, tenacity might be the biggest difference maker between seeing our kids move successfully through life and floundering. It’s a given that challenges will come, whether those struggles look like not making the varsity basketball team or something more serious. We simply have to help our kids know how to walk through the missed opportunities and hard times that will inevitably come into their lives.
Trekking Toward Tenacity does just that. We walk through Psalm 139 verse by verse and pull out practical, meaningful tips, tricks, and conversations to have with our kids to help them develop resilience. News flash: there’s no magic potion we can give our kids that gives them bounce-backability. Instead, this is found through conversation about life and God.
My favorite part of this book was writing the age-appropriate activities in the center of each chapter. Instead of only giving you theology or child psychology data without any practical application, Trekking Toward Tenacity includes specific activities you can try out with your kids. There’s obviously no guarantee that these ideas will work, but I can tell you that they worked for other kids. These are pie-in-the-sky concepts, but activities that have been tried in the real world.
If you’re looking for a book that will arm you with skills to coach your kids on how to develop tenacity in their lives, this is the book for you!
Author Interview
Can you tell us a little bit about what readers can expect from your books?
All my books are a combination of storytelling, theology, and practical advice. In the case of Trekking Toward Tenacity, the storytelling finds its home mostly in the retelling of somewhat familiar moments from the Bible, told in a new light or with new application points from the norm. The theology runs the gamut, ranging from talking about the eternality of God to the kingdom of God. The practical advice in this book is a little different than my other books because it’s categorized into different age ranges. Talking to a five-year-old about the kingdom of God is not the same experience as talking to a teenager, but all too often, as parents, we forget this and either speak down to our kids or talk over their heads. This book helps parents to navigate the tricky theological waters in age-appropriate ways.
What is the greatest advice you have ever been given about writing?
My good friend Jim Woods gave me an amazing piece of advice about writing. He told me that my readers should never learn something about me or my life that my wife doesn’t already know. You see, I’ve always been an extremely transparent writer from the very beginning, but I didn’t always have the best sense of appropriate boundaries. I wrote a guest post for Jim’s website, and one of the sentences in that post mentioned that I was telling his readers a secret that even my wife didn’t know. Jim actually refused to publish the article until I had confirmed that my wife already knew the secret.
It's all too easy to get enamored with trying to please our mythical readers, especially in digital spaces. We have to resist the urge to overshare. We don’t owe our readers anything. On the contrary, it’s the real, actual, living, breathing humans in our daily lives that deserve to know us the best.
Can you share 5 random facts about this book?
- My children were the guinea pigs for every idea contained in this book. They didn’t know it, and I didn’t know it, but this book doesn’t exist with 26 years of me practicing parenting on them.
- The original title of this book was The Mentally Healthy Family, but the publisher felt that this title fell flat, so we moved to the current title.
- I talk about Star Trek and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in this parenting book, which is probably a first.
- I suggest having your kids try to complete a complex obstacle course in the dark as one activity in the book, and I even encourage the reader to shout out play-by-play commentary during the process.
- We do a deep dive into the story of Hagar and trauma.
What was the most rewarding part of bringing this book to life?
This is a weird one, but I learned that if I hole myself up in a room with almost nothing else to do, I can accomplish remarkable things as an author. Trekking Toward Tenacity was drafted over the course of eight days at an Air BnB in Portland, Oregon. I was feeling some stress about finding the time to pen this book for a lot of reasons that I won’t get into, and then my wife pitched the idea of doing a very serious writing retreat. Not the kind of retreat where you eat popcorn, reminisce with friends about the good old days, and get a little bit of writing done every day. No, she suggested that I plan to write a minimum of seven hours a day for about a week and see how much I can get accomplished during that type of compressed schedule. Well, Trekking Toward Tenacity is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 words. That’s the amount of writing work I can get done in eight days of focused energy. I never would have imagined in a million years that such a thing would be possible for me. I know that I’m a quick writer, but this honestly astonished me.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
I want my readers to know that the darkness in the world isn’t greater than the hope they can find in Christ and in the words of the Bible. I want them to be able to combine the knowledge of child development with some practical discipleship tools and become coaches for their kids, giving their kids a full toolbox of ways to become and remain tenacious. I want these parents to learn how to fight for their kids, and to teach their kids to fight for themselves.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. Before you go, where can readers keep up with what’s next?
My website is www.chrismorriswrites.com – that is the online hub for everything happening in my writing world. I also have a Substack that readers can subscribe to in order to hear more about what I’m thinking about and working on right now. It’s called Resilient & Redeemed and can be found here: https://resilientandredeemed.substack.com/
Blog Stops
Its Mama Safe, January 16
Book Reviews From an Avid Reader, January 17
A Reader’s Brain, January 18 (Author Interview)
Guild Master, January 19 (Author Interview)
Debbie’s Dusty Deliberations, January 19
Artistic Nobody, January 20 (Author Interview)
Texas Book-aholic, January 21
Aryn the Libraryan, January 22
Back Porch Reads, January 23 (Author Interview)
Locks, Hooks and Books, January 24
Simple Harvest Reads, January 25 (Author Interview)
Mary Hake, January 25
Truth and Grace Homeschool Academy, January 26
Fiction Book Lover, January 27 (Author Interview)
Happily Managing a Household of Boys, January 28
A Modern Day Fairy Tale, January 29 (Author Interview)
Giveaway
To celebrate his tour, Chris is giving away the grand prize of a $75 Amazon gift card, a copy of Trekking Toward Tenacity, and a free Audible copy of my previous book Whispers in the Pews: Voices on Mental Illness in the Church!!
Be sure to comment on the blog stops for extra entries into the giveaway! Click the link below to enter.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
"Pleasant words are as a honeycomb: sweet to the soul and health to the bones." Proverbs 16:24