Episode 243: Family Devotions Don’t Have To Be Hard | Ruth Chou Simons

It’s our season wrap episode, and we could not have asked for a better guest. Ruth is a teacher and author, and she knows the real-life challenges of helping kids to and parents to turn their hearts toward God. How can we practice something like family devotions without it feeling too forced? What if husbands and wives are on different pages about how to lead the family spiritually? Is structure helpful or hurtful? Let’s dive in. | Next Steps | Ruth’s site here. Her IG here.  This book here. Her new book here. Join the HIMH Pod FB group here. Sign up to get on the HIMH email list here. 

THIS EPISODE. We literally cried. All of us. And it led to a mentoring relationship between Matt and our guest, Michael John Cusick. Why? We were struck thinking about how to *actually live* in that tension between our faith and our experience. Join us? Next Steps:  Michael’s site here. His book here. Join the HIMH Pod FB group here. Follow Laurie on IG (where she is the most active) here.

As ministry leaders and therapists (Matt and Laurie), we have often wondered: When do church leaders and pastors utilize therapists and para-church ministries and when do they care on their own? Do pastors always outsource? Do they never outsource? What role does the church have for families in crisis? Let’s talk about it with author and psychologist (and lover of the Church), Jennifer Ripley. | Highlights | “The church…will bring you casseroles, but when a crisis shows up, we often don’t know what to do.” “Pastors have a role in a person’s life that a therapist or medical doctor does not have.” “A Church community can provide healing in ways that others cannot. I can provide that somewhat as a therapist…but a whole community that holds people and gives them opportunities for growth? That’s beautiful.” | QOTW | What was your favorite children’s book while growing up? | Next Steps | Her book here. Join the HIMH Pod FB group here. Follow Laurie on IG (where she is the most active) here. Sign up to get on the email list here.

If the average age of pornography exposure is between 8 and 12 years old, and the majority of Christians are looking at it regularly, we need to talk about it.    Specifically, documentary creator and author John Michael Bout helps us ask and answer:   How can we help our kids prepare to see it? How can we help them recover? What hope do we have?   | Highlights |   “Parents are often like, ‘We live in a technological world. I know there is pornography out there. I have no idea what to do!” We can throw our hands in the air, and bury our heads in the sand. I always want to say to parents, ‘Yeah, this is hard. This is challenging. We live in a unique time. But God has given you everything you need to talk about sexuality.” “At the heart of every situation where there is pornography going on, there are good and holy desires. They are finding their end in a counterfeit—in the wrong thing.” “There are good studies to show that the first person to teach on the topic will become the expert. As a parent, you want to be the expert when it comes to questions of sexuality.”   | QOTW |   What is something you have purchased off a cookie ad or As Seen on TV and it was actually good?    | Next Steps | The trailer here. The site here. Join the HIMH Pod FB group here. Follow Laurie on IG (where she is the most active) here. Sign up to get on the email list here.

It’s so easy to identify as “I am what I do” or “I am how I feel.” The next generations especially seem to feel this pull. How can we help Gen Z and Alpha understand who they are in Christ? How can we start with our own identity so we speak from a place of firm-footing instead of hypocrisy? Author and therapist Jonathan Holmes is here to help lead us. | Highlights | “A gospel identity is one that is received and not achieved.” —Jonathan Holmes “All of us parents can struggle with wanting to make our kids into our image, rather than helping them fulfill and live into their image-bearing capacity.” “God’s first words about sexuality are ones of invitation not prohibition.” —Jonathan Holmes | QOTW| If you had the time and the desire, what sport would you want to get really good at? | Next Steps | His IG here. His book here. Join the HIMH Pod FB group here. Sign up to get on the email list here. 

Many parents feel a mixture of emotions about screens: On one hand, we see they can be useful tools. On the other, we feel a lot of shame because we are probably addicted to them ourselves and we let our kids use them too often.   We feel shame, anger, and . . . gratitude?   How should we feel?    How can parents approach screen time with their kids—and move us all from fighting to flourishing?   Christian dad, tech-guru, and founder of Protect Young Eyes, Chris McKenna, is here to help us.   | Highlights | “Some of the loudest voices advocating for our children are coming not from the Church.” —Chris McKenna “There is no other issue on earth today that is at risk for darkening the hearts of our children than their digital spaces. It must be the thing we talk about second most to Jesus Christ.” —Chris McKenna “This is Brain against the Game—not Kid versus Parent. If our child acts wild after stopping a game or show, our instinct is to think, ‘This is my kid is fighting back against me and being disobedient.’ That stirs up anger and confrontation between us. But if parents can remember, ‘That game is harming them. I am going to be upset at the *game* because of what it is doing to my precious child.’ That pivots our anger into empathy.” —Chris McKenna | Next Steps | Follow Protect Young Eyes on IG here. Read Protect Young Eyes Resources here. Join the HIMH Pod FB group here. Follow Laurie on IG (where she is the most active) here. Sign up to get on the email list here.

Parents and caregivers of the next generation need help to lead their kids in an affirming-LGBTQ world.   Our guest and author, Rachel Gilson, said it well on today’s episode: “Even my friends who had great discipling moms and dads didn’t grow up in this cultural moment. Their moms and dads didn’t have to help them navigate these cultural questions.”   She continued: “So even they feel out on a limb: ‘No one prepped me for this.’ There is a panic of feeling without a guide and lost. That’s no one’s fault but it’s where a lot of us find ourselves now.”   Parents were not prepared for this. How do we live and teach the next generation wisely?   We also talk discuss:   How do we engage this topic not with a culture-warrior mentality but a Jesus mentality? When do we talk about sex and sexuality? How can we teach our kids a gospel identity?   | Highlights |   “We are made for love, but for love that is richer and deeper and thicker than our culture is currently telling us it is.” “If I talk about sex and sexuality in a way that is calm and confident, I am going to signal to my daughter that she is never going to be shamed for asking questions, and that she is not going to cause me to curl up into embarrassment and fear. “I worked as a campus minister with college students for a long time. I kept asking the kids who grew up in Christian households and came to university and who were strong in the faith, ‘Why did you not get inoculated to the gospel? How did this become real to you?’ The number one answer I heard over and over and over again was, ‘It was real for my parents. As in, when they did something wrong, they asked for forgiveness.’”** | QOTW |    What generation do you actually belong to and which one should you belong to?   | Next Steps | Snag Rachel’s book here See her site here: https://www.rachelgilson.com We talked with Rachel about temptation on the show here We talked with Rachel about friendship here We mentioned thinking through school systems with a certain lens. This is the episode Laurie was referring to.  

Discipleship is something Christians are talking about more.   It’s so important. But…what is it?   Today, author and pastor Eun (EK) Strawser helps understand what discipleship is as well as:   --How can we become a community that centers discipleship?   --How can we know if we are doing it “right”?   --How does parenting relate to discipleship?   | Highlights |   “Discipleship means to imitate Jesus within the context of a community for the renewal of the local place around you.” “If discipleship is centered within a community, then that also means within a family.” “The discipleship of deficiency develops because people self-disqualify themselves all of the time. Jesus set out and said, ‘Every one of you who are making an intentional decision to imitate me within the context of community, you are a disciple maker. Go and make more.’ If that’s the call, then that should not be a leadership call. Making disciples should not be a criteria for leaders. It should be a baseline criteria for every congregant.”   | QOTW |   What do you need to prepare for winter?   | Next Steps |   Eun’s book here Her IG here. Join the HIMH Pod FB group here. Follow Laurie on IG (where she is the most active) here. 

This episode left us speechless.   Today, we are joined again by psychologist and author Dan Allender to talk about the most important part of parenting: Your marriage.    (If you are a single mom or dad, we bless you and intersperse much of the conversation with relating the conversation to close friendships.)   For those of us who are married, why is that the most important part of marriage? Dan tells us well:    “Our children are given the gift of watching the reality of love and life brokenness and beauty being played out in the theater of our marriage,” he says. “They are in the audience watching closely—far more closely than we presume. If our marriage doesn’t have the ability to actually name brokenness but also glory in one another, our children are going to be hungry souls looking for what they were made for.”   Okay, Dan. Help us out, friend. How can we lean in without setting the bar too high or low?   This episode is one we will be going back to again and again.   | Highlights |   “The process of growing in maturity is a family affair.” —Dan Allender “You can communicate well in marriage when you learn to suffer on behalf of the other.” —Dan Allender “My story needs to be known by my spouse well enough and deep enough to be able to engage it. Eventually, our kids need to know our stories. Each and every detail? No. Age appropriate.” —Dan Allender   | QOTW | What is your go-to birthday dinner?   | Next Steps | Talking with us about “Sexuality and Shame” here. We also talked with Dan and Cathy Loerzal about “Which of the Six Types are You?”  here. Check out Dan’s sites here and here. Snag his latest marriage book here. Join the HIMH Pod FB group here. Follow Laurie on IG (where she is the most active) here.

To launch our spring season focused on parenting and discipling the next generation, we are starting with YOUR QUESTIONS. We toss around:  “What parts of ‘the sex talk’ were helpful for us when we were growing up?” “How can we protect our kids’ bodies without being a helicopter parent?” “How can we approach school systems that don’t agree with our beliefs?” “Should we talk to our kids about p*rn even if they don’t have unlimited access to the internet?” Pull up an earbud and join us! | Highlights | “My parents taught me, ‘You are not defined by your behavior by your sin. It does not identify you or define you.’ That was very helpful in critical moments.”—Steve O’Dell “One of the biggest indicators for how well people will recover from trauma is if they know they have a place they can come in the event that something does happen.”—Matt Krieg “If our kids are going to hear an unbiblical worldview of marriage and sexuality in their schools, they need to hear the gospel vision of marriage and sexuality in our homes ten times more.” —Laurie Krieg | QOTW | Do you have a word, a focus, or theme for the year? | Next Steps | Jay Stringer’s book we cited Julia Sadusky’s book My friend, Phylicia Masonheimer who talks a lot about parenting from the home here. Join the HIMH Pod FB group here. Follow Laurie on IG (where she is the most active) here.