The Connection I Never Saw Coming

Years ago, I watched the movie Inside Out. If you haven't seen it, the story goes inside the mind of a young girl where emotions like Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust are characters, each taking turns at the control panel of her thoughts and behavior.

I laughed, but I also saw a little too much of myself! After decades of riding my own emotional roller coaster—the ups, downs, highs, lows, and occasionally flying downhill screaming!—I began to recognize just how much my emotions could influence what I thought, believed and did. Fear could take over. Hurt could become anger. Disappointment could become discouragement.

But as I studied God's Word, I began to recognize something that changed the way I thought about my thoughts:

My emotions are real, but they don't always tell me the truth. I know, you might be saying “duh,” but knowing this and dealing with it were huge for me.

Feelings matter. God created us with them. But feelings were never meant to determine what is true. I realized I had bought into that lie way too often.

What Am I Telling Myself?

I began learning to ask myself: What am I feeling? Why am I feeling this? What is this emotion causing me to think or believe? And most importantly, what does God say?

That's really where Self-Talk: Change Your Mind, Change Your Life began. At first, I was writing to my younger self—things I wished I had understood earlier about my thoughts, emotions and the lies I had allowed myself to believe.

Then I began thinking, This is what I would want to teach the daughter I never had. Eventually that thought became, Everyone needs to know this!

The process was really pretty simple: recognize the emotion, name it, notice what it's causing you to think and do, and then lay those thoughts alongside the truth of God's Word. Sometimes what we're telling ourselves simply isn't true. When we recognize the lies and replace them with God's truth, our thinking begins to change.

Thus the subtitle: Change Your Mind, Change Your Life.

Years later, however, I would discover a connection I never saw coming.

And Then Came Nubby and Hannah Jo

I grew up hearing bedtime stories my daddy made up about a lovable little dog named Nubby who traveled the world on his magical carpet visiting children. Because Daddy made them up as he went, he never wrote them down. It had been on my heart forever to write about Nubby and his adventures, but it wasn't until this year that I finally did. Nubby and His Magical Carpet was born.

While waiting for the print proof, I began writing some of my own childhood faith stories—memories of learning about Jesus and what it meant to trust Him. The experiences were mine, but I didn't want the little girl in the stories to be me.

Years ago, we had waited seven months to adopt a little girl. We had already chosen her name—Hannah Jo. The adoption eventually fell through, but I never forgot that little girl or the name we had chosen for her. So I knew exactly what to name the little girl who would experience my childhood stories.

In Hannah Jo, Jesus & Nubby, Nubby became Hannah Jo's plush puppy who goes everywhere with her. It's also in these stories that Nubby receives his little blue carpet. I never planned that connection to my daddy's original Nubby stories, but I loved the way it all came together.

Then another connection began to dawn on me.

Remember what I said about writing Self-Talk?

This is what I would want to teach the daughter I never had.

Go figure.

Without realizing it, that's exactly what I had done. I had taken experiences from my own childhood and given them to Hannah Jo. Woven through those experiences were simple truths about Jesus that had been planted in my heart when I was a little girl.

Plant the Truth Early

Those childhood truths didn't keep me from believing lies later or from riding the emotional roller coaster! But underneath it all was something I never stopped believing: Jesus was my Friend. He loved me. He was with me. And I could trust Him—no matter what.

I didn't call it self-talk. I had simply learned some grounding truths about Jesus. And without realizing it, I had written stories that helped Hannah Jo learn those same truths:

Jesus is my Friend Forever. He loves me and helps me.

That's when it hit me: Why wait until we're adults to learn to bring our thoughts and emotions back to God's truth? Why not plant that truth early?

We're not teaching children to deny their feelings. We're teaching them that their feelings don't get the final word. God does.

My emotions are real, but they don't always tell me the truth.

God's Word does.