Trekking Toward Tenacity Interview and Giveaway

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!

Interview with the Author

  1. Why do you think the topic of your book is important?

In today’s world, parenting is harder than ever because being a kid is harder than ever. This is especially true because of the increase in mental health conditions in preadolescents and young adults, not to mention the incessant humming of social media in the background of every child’s life. We all want practical tools to help us on a regular Tuesday evening in July to engage with our kids in meaningful ways about what’s actually happening in their lives.

This is precisely what Trekking Toward Tenacity offers parents. Using Psalm 139 as the jumping off point, this book acts as a tour guide for parents who wonder how to give their kids bounce-back-ability in their faith and with their mental health. Each chapter includes age-appropriate activities to use with your kids to help them understand the topic, because talking to a six-year-old and a seventeen-year-old is not the same.

  1. Why do you think this topic is needed?

Statistics tell us that mental health conditions like depression and anxiety affect 53% of all Americans in a post-COVID world, and those numbers are even higher with children and adolescents. In a perfect world, no ten-year-old would have suicidal ideations, yet suicide is one of the leading causes of death among Americans under the age of eighteen. Something has to change.

The only way something can change is one family at a time, as parents engage or maybe re-engage with their kids about developing tenacity in their mental health. The world is perhaps uglier for youth than it has ever been before, so we have to as parents give our kids a toolbox to combat the forces that are aligned against them. Trekking Toward Tenacity provides that toolbox in the form of conversations, practices, and activities to have with your kids. You can equip them for what really is a battle for their livelihood.

  1. What is your favorite verse and why?

It’s a tie between two verses in Romans 8, verse 1 and verse 31. Verse 1 says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, and verse 31 says God is for us. Both of these are cornerstones to my faith walk. I grew up in an unhealthy home with conditional offers of love alongside heaping spoonfuls of condemnation, and this influenced the way I saw God for many years. Once I understood that condemnation never comes from God, I found a new level of freedom in my life. Now I am able to reject condemnatory thoughts that come my way and move forward instead with more positive and uplifting thoughts. In the same way, I struggled because of my earthly father with the idea that God the Father could be unequivocally for me. Surely, I thought, I must disappoint him regularly and he wants to distance himself from me because of how I behave. Yet this radical verse says that God is for me, without any conditions. That’s a message that many of us need to hear throughout our days.

  1. What is one thing readers would be surprised to learn about you?

I wrote Trekking Toward Tenacity in eight days. I flew out to Portland, Oregon to get away from everything familiar to me, rented an Air BnB, and wrote 8-10 hours every day for a little over a week. At the end of that time, I had a 47,000-word manuscript.

I don’t want to give the impression that I always write my books this way. In fact, I’ve never written a book like this before, and I wonder if I could succeed if I tried it again. But for some reason, with this book, I was able to find and stay in the focused groove of productivity that I needed to pump this book out in record time.

  1. If you could sit down with someone for five minutes, what would you say to them?

Let’s assume for the sake of this question that the person I am sitting with is a Christian, and that they are struggling with a sense of self-doubt. I would read Ephesians 2:10 to them in the New Living Translation, which says that we are God’s masterpiece and are created for good works. Then I would ask them, “What keeps you from feeling like a masterpiece?” After listening to them talk about this for a while, I would reassert that in God’s eyes, they are a masterpiece. God is proud of them and shows them off to the angels and the cherubim in heaven. He beams with pride when he thinks about them. And this is why he’s created specific, unique good works for them to accomplish. These are good works that nobody else can do, because they are based on the specific, unique characteristics of this person. I would encourage them to even go so far as to look in the mirror every morning for a week and declare, “I am God’s masterpiece!” Because it’s the truth.

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.

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/00adcf54132


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