All Christians

I have to be upfront at the beginning of my review, I love to listen to Shauna Niequist speak. As a counselor, I find myself drawn to the therapeutic interventions of Dialectic Behavioral Therapy that talk about being present, experiencing life as it is now, and allowing it to help you decrease the impact mental illness can have on one’s life. This pairs well within the Christian faith as we experience God today in our lives as well as see how God speaks into our lives through prayer, Scripture, worship, and fellowship. So when I saw a book called Present Over Perfect, I knew I needed to read it.

This is chapter five of the Quit Giving Up ebook. You can get the whole thing in our shop now!

For those that see psychology as a bunch of hokey, you are going to have a rough go of this article. I encourage you to read through the whole article before you share your concerns.

Positive thought placement is a cognitive behavioral therapy idea that states sometimes we struggle with motivation, depression and anxiety symptoms, or self-esteem but simply changing our thoughts can change our attitude and motivation.

This is chapter four of the Quit Giving Up ebook. You can get the whole thing in our shop now!

Creating something that you want to be great is a really difficult process. I’m not even talking about the need to come up with how to create it, the process of deciding what to create, or how to get in front of people’s faces with good marketing. I’m simply looking at the idea of making something that is great, but not necessarily needing to be perfect.

That word ‘perfection’ is a very tricky thing because you want to make something that is worthy of your time and recognition but ultimately perfection is a falsehood. It’s a goal that cannot be reached, yet we strive for it every day. We know it deep down, but keep running after it.

I love free resources. I will always check them out. But when I see what Ability Ministry offers on their resource page and the quality of what they are giving away, it’s amazing!

Whether you are looking for what should be the first steps of your church or the next steps, a gifts inventory on where to put volunteers in your ministry, or a church survey to decide on what the needs are in your church, they have it.

This is chapter three of the Quit Giving Up ebook. You can get the whole thing in our shop now!

When you are feeling down, depressed, rejected, or exhausted, it’s hard to find motivation. That’s the whole point of this series. I want to help someone kick it back into drive and move forward. I realized I need to establish early on with this book that most of the hard work to get motivated needs to happen when you are already running at full steam.

Let me explain.

Stress is annoying. We see it in teenagers needing to take the ACT, in young adults trying to raise children, in older adults with helping their parents who are getting older. It’s in the big things like taxes and moving, but also the little day to day issues of “do I have enough gas to get to work?,” “who is staring at me?,” and “did I leave the curling iron on at home?” But this is not just an emotional issue, it affects your brain and therefore your whole body. So, what do we know about how stress affects your brain?

This is chapter one of the Quit Giving Up ebook. You can get the whole thing in our shop now!

Everyone has heard the quote “work smarter, not harder.” I’d use the phrase all the time when I was in full-time ministry and in my teenage years, mostly to justify why I didn’t want to do physical labor and instead be lazy. The problem with this is many times our version of smarter only takes into account the outcome and we are actually working harder to be smarter, but still working way too hard. Here are a couple examples.

At the end of last month, we told you we were going to have a new website design and we delivered. The hope is that 2020 we begin to expand what ChurchAndMentalHealth.com is able to offer. The focus is still to unite the Church and mental health, now with more resources. The next step is finally here and comes with our new shop being live!

The book It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way is written by Lysa TerKeurst as well as president of Proverbs 31 Ministries, a ministry I love and believe you should check out if you haven’t before. This book looks at her life in the midst of heartache and looking to where God is in her life. For Lysa, she sees how her life has shattered, but in so doing, she may not have to suffer but be transformed.

This week, I had the opportunity to give a presentation on the topic of domestic violence and mental health to a women’s domestic violence shelter for the staff. The hope of the presentation from the shelter was to better educate staff on how the two are linked as well as give a laymen’s understanding of what mental illness disorders there are and the impact it can have on domestic violence victims.

I wanted to share some of the statistics and information I found in this presentation.