Hi God, It's Me!: E-Prayers for Teenage Girls

By Catherine DePino

Hi, God, It's Me: e-prayers for teenage girls appeals to pre-teens and teenage girls of all religions. Its user-friendly prayers help girls connect with God, family, and friends in an upbeat, joyful way without being preachy. Using a unique, e-mail format, this interactive prayer book encourages girls to problem solve and find answers to the everyday concerns as well as to the bigger problems they face. Above all, it helps them connect with God and talk to Him in an intimate way as they would to a best friend. The book presents a great teaching tool for youth leaders, parents, and family members. It's also an ideal gift for teens!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781618423191

Catherine DePino

Dr. Catherine DePino is the author of four books about bullying. Blue Cheese Breath and Stinky Feet: How to Deal with Bullies, a chapter book published by APA, has been translated into different languages and is widely used in bully prevention programs. Her parenting book, Who Says Bullies Rule?: Common Sense Tips to Help Your Kids Cope, gives parents practical tools to help children overcome bullying. She also wrote Real Life Bully Prevention for Real Kids, a teacher resource book. Additionally, Catherine wrote many grammar/writing books for teachers to use in their classrooms. Catherine holds a doctorate from Temple University and has served as an English teacher and department head in the Philadelphia School District and as a student teaching supervisor for Temple University. View her website and contact her at www.catherinedepino.com.

Book preview

Activity

Introduction

User Guide

E-mail and texting put you in touch with your friends. Hi, God, it’s me!: e-prayers for teenage girls is an interactive journal that gives you a user-friendly way to get in touch with God.

Each chapter in Hi, God, It’s Me focuses on a different area of a teenage girl’s complex life. For example, Chapter One: Living://striving.balancing.coping, focuses on the responsibilities and pressures of everyday living, such as school, activities, driving, competition, work and volunteering. This chapter suggests ways for you to make sense of and organize your thoughts and feelings when day-to-day responsibilities seem to pile up on you.

Each topic within a chapter has e-mails to and from God expressing concerns as well as activities related to each topic to help keep you thinking and discussing. Use the e-mails in the book as a starting point for your own ideas and opinions. Try to bring a part of yourself to everything you read and to respond in your own way to the prayers and questions. You can write your own notes, thoughts, prayers, and reactions either in a journal, on a piece of paper, or in an online notebook that you set up on your computer.

Each topic in the book contains the following elements:

Topic

Write Message

This is an e-mail to God that expresses some concerns you may have about a particular topic.

You Have Mail

This is the message from God that acknowledges your feelings and concerns and offers possible approaches to handling the issues.

Reply

This is a message of thanks and awareness from you back to God.

Download File

What If?

This part asks you questions that get you thinking how you might change, better, or ease a situation.

Before you answer the What If? section, you might want to choose a meditation to help you mellow out and put you in the mood to do some creative thinking. There are a few suggestions for this in the back of the book (see Appendix.)

Connect with a Friend

Here you can share your ideas for problem solving, your experiences, and your feelings with a trusted friend. You can connect any way you want, such as talking face-to-face or on the phone, using e-mail, or texting, if you only have a few minutes.

Choose a friend you feel comfortable enough with to confide in for the Connect with a Friend section. After you discuss the questions, you and your friend might want to think up your own questions on the topic and compare answers. Feel free to agree, disagree, and debate the topics with your friend.

If you decide to use e-mail, you can save your e-mail conversations. Like keeping a diary, having a record of what you write will allow you to go back to what you wrote and look at your ideas and opinions. From time to time, you can ask yourself: How have I changed? How have I stayed the same? Am I happy with who I am now? What do I need to do to make things even better?

Just as you do when you write regular e-mail, be careful not to write anything that you wouldn’t want anyone else to know. Express your opinions, but just use your good, old common sense.

Send God an Instant Message

Write a personal message from you to God. Believe that you are actually writing/talking to God. He is listening, you know. Then open your heart to hear God’s words; you may receive some advice you never expected!

Discuss

This last section gives you questions to get you talking with your friends, your family, a teacher at school or religion teacher–whomever you choose. Give your opinions and ask for theirs. Think about what you learned from your discussions.

The main purpose of Hi, God, It’s Me! is to help you connect with God, to learn how to talk to him like a friend. It encourages you to problem solve and to find answers to both the everyday, routine concerns and the bigger problems in your life. Hopefully, it will also challenge you to help others to see God as you see God–close, approachable, and always on your side, no matter what.

A Message for the Adults in Your Life

Whether your teenager has received this book as a gift or is using it as part of a religious education program, you are an important part of her learning and prayer process. Hi, God, It’s Me! seeks to make God accessible to teenagers and to make prayer a pleasurable and lifelong experience. This book is directed to pre-teenagers and teenagers of all religions.

Throughout the book, God offers practical advice in solving problems young people face with both everyday dilemmas and heavy problems. But God also offers support and suggestions for problem solving and positive interactions with oneself and other people. God’s responses encourage readers to be more confident, resourceful, and self-reliant, although sometimes there are no easy answers.

Hi, God, It’s Me! gives parents and teachers a starting point for discussing value-related topics with children without proselytizing or preaching. Some of the topics, like fear and understanding suffering, may ask your teen to think about and discuss issues she hadn’t talked about much before. It’s important to listen to what your teen thinks about these topics, but it’s also helpful to express your views on all of the topics in the book, based on your life experiences.

If you’ve learned something from personally going through an experience, it will enhance your teen’s understanding of the issue. Ask her how she would handle the problem. Talk to her about some of the struggles she’s faced, but let her take the lead. As your teen interacts with the prayers and activities, she may request your advice and support.

She may also ask you to share your experiences about growing up, or she may want you to discuss an issue brought up in one of the chapters. Conversations with parents, teachers, and other trusted family members will help your teen grow in faith and will assist her in sorting out problems and facing moral dilemmas.

The Download File sections encourage teenagers to think of resourceful ways of coping with the temptations they face every day. They also motivate young people to brainstorm ways of living their faith and to use their prayers as a basis for personal and societal transformation. Each section has a specific purpose in enhancing a teenager’s relationship with God through prayer, and is interactive in the sense that it asks the reader to bring her own life experiences to the text and to converse with friends via journals, conversations, and e-mails.

The What If? section prompts readers to stretch their imagination in addressing issues addressed in the Mail sections of the book. Students can think about how the questions make them think of more problems and situations related to the topics in the prayer section. You and your daughter (or students) may want to compose additional questions related to the topics and to spend some time answering them. Teachers could ask students to think up their own What If? questions and use them for small group discussions. Groups could then share their most interesting questions and answers with the class.

The Connect with a Friend section encourages the reader and a friend to share ideas about the various topics. Students can also confide in one another about problems as they come up and offer suggestions for fresh approaches to dealing with the problem.

Students can connect with friends in a variety of ways such as e-mail, talking in person or on the phone, and texting. Some friends may want to write a good old-fashioned letter if they think the question warrants it. Friends can act as a constant support system for one another. They may want to continue e-mailing one another and talking about their own concerns long after they’ve read the book.

The Send God an Instant Message section gives readers a chance to talk to God directly about the issues that impact on their lives daily. It asks them to think critically and to consider viable solutions to their problems as they’re writing to God. As a class project, teachers could ask groups of students to create their own instant message ideas based on the topics.

Students would respond to the question: If you could send God an instant message on this topic, what would it be? They could write answers, and those who want could share them with the students in their groups. Students could also draw questions at random that other students have written and write their own messages in response to the questions. Students could create, illustrate, and display a bulletin board or collage bearing their messages to God and share them with other classes.

The final activity, Discuss, motivates teens to discuss the prayer topics with classmates, family, and friends. Parents could write some of the questions, fold them, and leave them in a bowl on the dinner table. Family members could take turns drawing a topic each evening or whenever they want. The question would provide a focal point for a lively family dialogue on the prayer topics.

Classroom groups could stage discussions and debates on the topics and invite members of the community to participate. Of course, some topics that require the student to discuss a topic with a family member would require