By Mimi Keel
The academy-award winning movie, “Inside Out,” follows the inner emotions in the mind of a young girl, who is navigating all the feelings that come with moving to a new city. Five personified emotions- Joy, Anger, Fear, Sadness and Disgust are the main characters who administer Riley’s thoughts and actions. Director and screenplay writer Pete Docter is brilliant in how he animates these five core emotions, giving them voice and showing how they impact Riley’s life.
Humans experience 100 different emotions as they move through life. And often with the rapid pace of life, challenging emotions are avoided or stuffed away. Docter’s creation of a story to name and show the interplay of these emotions is refreshing.
The poetry and songs in the Book of Psalms similarly describe human emotion and the inner workings of the heart. The authors of the Psalms express to God the full range of human experience from the joys on the mountaintops of life to the darkest hours in the valleys. King David, along with eleven other known and many anonymous authors got real with God as they wrote the collection of 150 poems and songs about what they were experiencing in their lives. They shared their fears, their joys, their praises and their anger.
They cried out to God for help, expressed their doubts and confessed their sin. David wrote songs to God while he was shepherding his flocks. He wrote songs to sing with his harp to soothe King Saul’s troubled mind. David later hid in fear from Saul, who was hunting him, in the Caves of Adullam. It is said that he wrote poetry to God there asking for help.
The Book of Psalms was one of the first books that drew me into my relationship with God. In it, I found honesty of real people. I found people who were talking to God about their life. And I found common language for my inner life. The Psalms provide common ground for kids and families to connect around feelings and emotions we experience. Kids can find themselves in the songs and poems of real people. The writers put into words their deep joy, confusion, disappointment, impatience, hurt, relief, and many other feelings. They model what honest communication with a caring God looks like.
In the movie, “Inside Out,” Joy kept trying to make Sadness stay in the circle she drew for her. Joy kept saying, “Riley just needs to be happy!” But by the end of the movie, Joy realized that joy comes from being able to express sadness. The movie ends with Joy and Sadness joining together to help Riley and her parents move toward each other in their sadness about missing their life in Minnesota. And they’re able to comfort each other and then create a new core memory that is both happy and sad.
May you find refreshment in the honesty expressed by the writers of the songs and poetry in the Psalms. May they offer opportunities for honest, meaningful sharing about joys and heartaches in your family.
Here are a few ideas you might try at home-
1. Let kids help choose a psalm they’d like to read.
- Look up the backstory of the psalm…Who wrote it? Find out the context.
- Invite everyone to listen for a word or phrase that pops out as it is read aloud
- Read it aloud.
- Invite all who’d like to, to share their word or phrase. And ask if anything else comes to their mind from the psalm.
2. After reading a few psalms, invite everyone to write and illustrate their own psalm based on one feeling they are feeling about something going on in their lives. Here are a few psalms that grade school kids at Jacob’s Well Church wrote in chalk recently.
3. Write a psalm as a family.
4. Sometimes it’s hard to find the words to pray. Try praying the words of a psalm that resonates with how you are feeling.
5. Plan a summer family movie night – Inside Out 2 is set to come out on June 14. Riley is in middle school now and three other characters join her inner world – Anxiety, Envy and Embarrassment.
About Mimi Keel: Mimi serves as the children’s ministry pastor at Jacob’s Well Church in Kansas City, Missouri. She works with her team to create environments that capture the imaginations of children with the kingdom of God through innovative pedagogy, healthy relational community, and classic spiritual formation practices. She also enjoys life with her husband Tim, their adult children, and grandchildren.
