Mom Creates ‘Anxious Abby’ to Ease Children’s Worries

When Alyssa Cathers became a Christian counselor, she couldn’t find many kid-friendly resources for helping children. So, she decided to create her own.

Meet Alyssa and “Anxious Abby,” the character who’s helping children in the aftermath of natural disasters and other trauma.

This is part 4 of our new 5-part podcast series “Creating for the Creator.”

Visit Alyssa’s website to learn more about “Anxious Abby,” and follow Alyssa on Facebook.

You can connect with us through email at gps@billygraham.org or on Billy Graham Radio on Facebook.

Transcript

MUSIC STARTS

Alyssa Cathers:
00:00:00 I was really affected by this one family who put their child in this kind of big Tupperware container, and they were floating them down flooded waters. And I just can't imagine what a child is thinking in this situation.

Phil Fleischman: Alyssa Cathers [rhymes with “gathers”] was watching the news after a hurricane in 2017 when she had an idea: Maybe she could use her counseling background to create a resource for children who were suffering from anxiety after a natural disaster.

Alyssa:
00:00:30 I'm like, wouldn't that be awesome if I could actually get this into the hands of the chaplains who are actually at the natural disaster sites, because I can't be there?

Phil: Alyssa set out to do just that. She’s sharing her story on this episode of GPS: God. People. Stories. It’s an outreach of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. I’m Phil Fleischman.

Jim Kirkland: And I’m Jim Kirkland. You’re listening to the fourth installment of our five-part series, “Creating for the Creator.”  Anxiety seems to be ever-present today, and you hear of it among children and adults alike, but it’s not new. It’s something Billy Graham addressed often.

Billy Graham:
00:01:09 Worry and anxiety have hounded the human race since the beginning of time. What are we to do about these past, present, and future worries?

Jim: You’ll hear Billy Graham’s answer to that question a little later in the episode. First, a quick reminder to be sure to subscribe to GPS: God. People. Stories. Do so on your favorite app, wherever you get your podcasts, and that way you will be assured never to miss an episode.

Phil: We also want to tell you about a website that can answer your questions about the Christian faith and what following Jesus could mean for you. The address is FindPeaceWithGod.net. That’s FindPeaceWithGod.net.

Intro: GPS: God. People. Stories.

MUSIC TRANSITION

Alyssa:
00:01:58 I had a very supportive and loving family growing up.

Phil: Alyssa Cathers grew up in the Lehigh Valley in Eastern Pennsylvania. She’s the middle child of three. She and her older sister and younger brother spent a lot of time together. They grew up in a Christian home and Alyssa was always involved in church.

Alyssa:
00:02:14 We did go to church and we were part of Sunday school and I used to go to all the different leadership conferences as a youth, a teen. So I had some leadership within the church. I helped with Sunday school. I loved children, loved being around children.

Jim: Even though church was a big part of Alyssa’s life, it wasn’t until she was an adult that her faith went from “religion” to “relationship.”

Alyssa:
00:02:43 Church was important to me, but I didn't understand the idea of a relationship with Christ and my—that I was a sinner and that I was in a need of a Savior and repentance. It was more, growing up, “God is love” message. And so after I had gotten to 2003, that's when I really came to know the Lord.

Phil: God would use several specific parts of Alyssa’s life to draw her closer to Him. We’ll get to that story in a couple of minutes.

Jim: Before that defining moment, though, Alyssa had grown up and gone to college. Her area of study was education and psychology.

Alyssa:
00:03:21 I really wanted to become a child psychologist or child counselor, but I didn't think I would be able to reach all the children that I wanted because of the financial means. I wanted to be there for any child who needed help. So then I decided to become an elementary school teacher.

Jim: While Alyssa was a student at Moravian College—which is now a university—in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, she met another student who caught her eye.

Alyssa:
00:03:45 He was in the education department one day and I had seen him and he actually had walked in with another female friend. And I remember saying to myself, “Oh man, the good ones are always taken,” because I thought he was—[laugh]—I thought he was taken, but I found out later that he was actually not taken, that that was just his friend and I really started to try to get to know him and asked him to a dance and he accepted and he really started pursuing me then after that.

Phil: And it worked out! Alyssa and Glen ended up marrying each other. Today they have three children at home, ages 10, 12, and 14, and one adult daughter who’s blessed them with six grandchildren.

Jim: Back before they had such a big family, Glen and Alyssa were close to Glen’s grandmother. It was her life and death that helped lead Alyssa to accept Jesus as her Savior 20 years ago.

Alyssa:
00:04:42 Her name was Gram. So I tell my testimony through Gram, the sand dollar, and three second graders.

Jim: Gram had a huge influence not just on Alyssa and Glen, but on their entire family. When she passed away at age 99, it was tough.

Alyssa:
00:05:00 When she died, we were really rocked to the core. We really—we were grieving heavily. And at the time, I was a second grade teacher and I had gone, after Gram had died, I had on my mind the sand dollar she used to have hanging on top of her bed.
 
Phil: Maybe you’ve heard of The Legend of the Sand Dollar. If not, we’ll tell it to you in just a minute. But Gram had shared that story with Alyssa and Glen before she passed.

Alyssa:
00:05:28But at the time, I didn't really listen too much. I just kind of like, “Oh, that's nice.” And we were putting her to bed and as I was—after she had died, this sand dollar was so on my mind, I couldn't get it off my mind.

Phil: This is where Alyssa’s second grade students come into the story.

Alyssa:
00:05:46 One girl named Jessica—she had come up to me, and she's writing a journal, and in her journal she asked, “Can you spell the word ‘recognize’?” I thought, Wow, “recognize” is a pretty big word for a second grader. “What are you writing about?” And she said that she was writing about how she was at a concert and a singer named Graham recognized her. When I heard the word Graham, it just jolted me back to Gram who had died and all my feelings about her and my love for her.

Jim: A little later that day, another second grader, named Allison, approached Alyssa to show her something that she had picked up on a recent trip to Florida.

Alyssa:
00:06:25 And when she took the item out of her bag, it was a sand dollar. And I couldn't believe it. I looked at this sand dollar and I was—my mind immediately went back to this sand dollar picture that Gram had hanging above her bed.
 
Jim: Then a third student, named Holly, surprised Alyssa again.

Alyssa:
00:06:45 She came up to me and she said, “Mrs. Cathers, did you read the postcard from Allison?” I said, “Oh, no, no, I didn't read it yet, but I'll get to it,” cuz I was really busy. I set the postcard aside and I hadn't read it. Holly was persistent. And I didn’t understand why because she didn’t even send the postcard. It was her friend, Allison. So she went over, picked up the postcard, came over to me, and handed it to me, and said, “Mrs. Cathers, you have got to read this postcard.” So I looked at the postcard, and it was a postcard of a sand dollar that Allison had sent from Florida.

Phil: On the back of the postcard was The Legend of the Sand Dollar. As that story goes, the sand dollar symbolizes Jesus Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection. The five holes, for instance, represent the nails pounded into His hands and feet—and the spear that pierced His side after He died on the cross.

Alyssa:
00:07:44 And I read through it, and when I saw that and I saw the life of Christ was kind of symbolized in the sand dollar, I just knew for sure that God was real. And I knew that I absolutely wanted a relationship with Him, that nothing was gonna stand in my way. It was like a life-changing moment that God showed Himself and the reality of His existence to me through these three children. And right after the struggle and the grief process of Gram dying, He brought me that hope. And after this realization that “Wow, God orchestrated all this in one day with three students that had nothing to do with each other.”

Phil: Alyssa had already believed in God, and she had heard about His love. But, she had never grasped the enormity of His grace until that day at school.

Alyssa:
00:08:38 And it was at that point that I really started my journey with Christ. I was really—after this amazing story—I was really convicted of my sin. Like I realized that all the things that I had done wrong in life, and I sought to make things right with people. I called people up, asked for forgiveness from them, asked forgiveness from the Lord. And I really feel that this was the time when I repented, turned away from my sin, and realized I needed Jesus as my Savior—and that He was going­—I wanted Him to take control of my life and be everything to me.

Jim: The next steps on Alyssa’s journey of faith led her to become a youth director, and that eventually led her back to her dream of counseling children.

Alyssa:
00:09:26 I was on a trip with this young teen and she was telling me about her family life. And it was at that point where I knew for sure—I remember turning to my husband and saying, “Glen, I finally know what God wants me to do. He wants me to be a Biblical counselor.”
 
Jim: Alyssa emptied her teacher’s pension to pay for seminary. She earned a master’s degree in counseling, and in 2006 she accepted her dream job—working with children and families as a Christian counselor.

Phil: One thing Alyssa quickly discovered was that there were not a lot of resources for counseling children, particularly from a Christian perspective.

Alyssa:
00:10:02 There was really nothing much out there on counseling topics such as anxiety or anger or depression or divorce or anything like that. I was making up my own resources in the office, and I thought, Well, if I'm having to make up these resources, I might as well try to share it with others.

Phil: That’s how the character “Anxious Abby” came to life. Alyssa began working on a book for children that was fun, colorful, and faith-based.

Alyssa:
00:10:30 I really wanted to help kids with anxiety. I wanted to give them a picture of anxiety in something that a child could understand.

Jim: So, how do you show anxiety in a picture book?

Alyssa:
00:10:45 So that's where the backpack and the worry characters came from. The backpack is symbolizing Abby's collecting of thoughts in her mind that are weighing her down. So each fluffy worry character is actually like a worry thought that we might experience in our minds, and as it jumps into Abby's backpack, it's showing the physical burden—like, sometimes we actually feel physically weighed down.
 
Jim: Anxious Abby, the story’s protagonist, is a little girl who’s worried about going to summer camp.

Alyssa:
00:11:16 As Abby gets to go to camp, these worries are coming and jumping in her backpack and continuing to weigh her down. She actually panics when her parents leave.

Phil: But then Abby meets some friends and helpers at camp, and she begins to learn about how to deal with her anxiety.

Alyssa:
00:11:34 Coach Courage shows her how to take her backpack off, that she actually has a choice, and anxiety does not have to be your identity. You don't have to be Anxious Abby. You can actually take the backpack off and give it to the Lord. So there's a scene in there where she goes to the cross and hands her backpack of worries over to the Lord with a thump. It's like this big thump of worries falling down, and you see the worries kind of scrambling out of the backpack, which is kind of fun. At that point, I don't leave the readers there because I show them that when we give their anxiety over to the Lord, we don't stop there. We have to then replace the worries with God's truth, otherwise the worries are just gonna come back. There's a part in the story where I talk about: If you choose to think about God's truth, the worries will stay away.

Phil: The book is called, Anxious Abby and the Camp Trust Challenge: Bible Truths for Kids Who Worry. It came out in 2017.

Jim: Many of the characters in the book are based on Alyssa’s family. The illustrator, Beth Snider, was able to draw Alyssa, Glen, their children, and even some grandparents into the story.

Phil: I think that’s so cool. About a year after Anxious Abby and the Camp Trust Challenge was released, Alyssa felt compelled to start work on a second book. It was in response to a particularly brutal Atlantic hurricane season.

Alyssa:
00:12:59 There were some hurricanes that happened in 2017. It was Hurricane Harvey, Irma, Maria—just like one after the next catastrophic, just devastation. And I had seen­—I remember looking on the television and watching the news, and I was really affected by this one family who put their child in this kind of like, big Tupperware container, and they were floating them down flooded waters. And I just can't imagine what a child is thinking in this situation.
 
Phil: In 2018, Abby and Frankie’s Help for the Hard Stuff was published. It’s a workbook for children who have experienced a natural disaster like a hurricane.

Alyssa:
00:13:43 Counseling children is so much different from counseling adults. Like, when you counsel children, you have to know how to play, you need to know how to use arts, music, puppets, whatever you have to capture the heart of a child who loves those things. You have to figure out what does the child like, and make their learning opportunity through those manipulatives. So when I created the workbook and also the Anxious Abby book, I wanted to include ways that parents can dig in with their kids in meaningful ways that kids will understand.

Jim: Alyssa will tell you that publishing a book is a challenge, but marketing—that can even be harder. She wasn’t sure how to get the new workbook into the hands of the families who could use it most.

Alyssa:
00:14:32 Because I'm not going to natural disasters [laugh], I'm an at-home mom [laugh], so how do I get it to the right people? And I've loved all of Franklin Graham and Billy Graham's work with BGEA and Samaritan's Purse. It was actually a dream of mine to get my workbook out there through their Rapid Response Team chaplains.

Jim: The Billy Graham Rapid Response Team, or [BG-RRT], is a network of crisis-trained chaplains from all across the country, and even around the world. They deploy at a moment’s notice whenever disaster strikes.

Phil: Thousands of [BG-RRT] chaplains have comforted and prayed with hundreds of thousands of people in the aftermath of both natural and man-made tragedies. Alyssa believed her new workbook could be an important tool in the work of the [BG-RRT].

Alyssa:
00:15:23 I'm like, wouldn't that be awesome if I could actually get this into the hands of the chaplains who are actually at the natural disaster sites, because I can't be there? [laugh] So I was like, “OK, Lord, You got me this far. I know You're gonna provide the rest of the way.”
 
Phil: Alyssa reached out to the Rapid Response Team’s office here in Charlotte. They didn’t have a resource specifically designed for children, so they were interested in learning more about Alyssa’s workbook, Abby and Frankie’s Help for the Hard Stuff.

Jim: The book went through a thorough vetting process before getting the green light to be distributed to the chaplains. Then, with the help of her graphic designer and her church community, Alyssa raised the money that was needed to print the books.

Alyssa:
00:16:05 And then once they were printed, I sent it to the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team chaplains, and then they put it on their trucks, and then when it goes out to deployment, that the chaplains can pull from that when they have a family or children that they see could use the resource.

Jim: So far this year, Billy Graham Rapid Response Team chaplains have deployed to deadly tornadoes in Alabama and Georgia, catastrophic flooding in California, and three different shootings across the country. Now, when they meet a child who’s been affected by trauma or loss, they have a Christ-centered resource to share.

Phil: Alyssa explains how secular resources for children are different from “Christ-centered” ones, like hers.

Alyssa:
00:16:49 So if you don't believe in God, you have to find your comfort in something. So the secular point of view, or their worldview, is that: I'm gonna empower this child to become almost like their own god, where they are the answer to their problems; their answer to their problems are found within themselves.

Phil: That worldview not only fails to hold up in times of trouble—like when a hurricane strikes—it’s also the direct opposite of what Christianity teaches.

Alyssa:
00:17:19 God is all-powerful. He's all-knowing. He's all-sufficient. He's going to give me the power to get through. He's going to give me the strength. He is going to give me the wisdom. And so that's where my trust, my hope, is, in the Lord. It's outside of myself. I don't have to be in control. The other model is I'm in control. The Biblical worldview is God is in control, He's sovereign, and I can seek Him, and I can do things that I didn't think I could do because He is going to give me all things that I need in the moment.

Jim: Those are the kinds of lessons Anxious Abby readers are learning as they process difficult feelings and situations. And one of Alyssa’s greatest joys is hearing that her books have helped a child.

Alyssa:
00:18:12 There was a woman named Allison who had reached out to me and she had been living in Alaska. She and her son and her family had gone through a 7.1 magnitude earthquake in Alaska. And her son, at the time, was around five, and he was suffering since that time with really post-traumatic stress, and just any times any kind of, any type of weather would come up, he would get nervous and afraid.
 
Jim: The little boy’s name is A.J. He read through the first Anxious Abby book with his mom when bad weather was coming their way.

Alyssa:
00:18:54 And she said at first, he was afraid and he didn't wanna read the story cuz he was so focused on the storm. But she said as she started to read it that he started to relax and he really started to enjoy the story. And she said that once he got to the end of the story, she was saying how he told her, he said, “Mom, will you tell the lady that wrote that book that she did a great job?” And that was so special to me.
 
Phil: A.J. still reaches for his Anxious Abby book whenever the weather starts to make him nervous.

Alyssa:
00:19:29 Like if storms come up, he'll go up and grab the Anxious Abby book. And he also went through the Help for the Hard Stuff workbook and he was able to process through his emotions surrounding that devastating earthquake. And he was able to really get some help through God's truth and through the workbook. So, that’s really—his success story is really, you know, why I do the resource.

MUSIC TRANSITION

Jim: Alyssa Cathers [rhymes with “gathers”] is a Christian counselor who helps children give their worries to God. And we want you to know that you can give your worries to God, too.

Phil: We have a website called FindPeaceWithGod.net, and it was created to help you do just that: Find peace with God. It’s a safe place to ask spiritual questions and even chat live with a trained volunteer if you’d like. We hope you’ll check it out and share it. Again, it’s FindPeaceWithGod.net.

Jim: Up next, a word from Billy Graham about anxiety, and then, a sneak peek at our fifth and final episode in this series, “Creating for the Creator.”

MUSIC STARTS

Voice-over: You’re listening to GPS: God. People. Stories., a podcast production of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Billy Graham:
00:20:53 Worry and anxiety have hounded the human race since the beginning of time.

Voice-over: Billy Graham …

Billy Graham:
00:20:58 What are we to do about these past, present, and future worries? Our guilty past, our anxious present, and the unknown future are all to be cast upon Christ. Fretfulness and anxiety are lost in the wonder and amazement of His wonderful grace. We can have peace and joy in the midst of the troubles and anxieties of life if we put our trust in Him. Have you put your life in His hands? Wisely improve the present by committing your sin and your burdens to the Savior. Believe me, God's grace is more than adequate for these times.

Jim: Many years after Billy Graham gave that message, God’s grace is still more than adequate for these times. If you want to put your trust in Him today, there is no better time. You can do that by going to FindPeaceWithGod.net. Or if you’d rather talk with someone, there’s someone waiting for you. Our prayer line is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week at 855-255-7729. That’s 855-255-PRAY. 855-255-7729. As Billy Graham would often say, “Don’t put it off. Make your decision today.”

Phil: You’ve been hearing from Alyssa Cathers in part four of our five-part series “Creating for the Creator.” So, next week is our fifth and final installment, and our guest is Ben Fuller. He’s a rising star in the Christian music world.

Jim: Before Ben was sharing the light of Christ through music, parts of his life were incredibly dark. We want to give you a heads up notice that his story includes thoughts of suicide with a gun.

Ben Fuller:
00:22:45 Sixteen years old, I was ready to kill myself. I didn't feel like I was loved. There was just a moment in my life that I was like, “This is not worth, it's not worth going on,” you know? I saw the funeral line, I saw my mom find me. I saw what it did to those that did love me. Like it just—anyway, and I was able to just let the gun go. I believe that God showed me those things, even though I didn't have a relationship with Him or know Him.

Jim: This is going to be a powerful story. This would be a good time to make sure you are subscribed to GPS: God. People. Stories. Thank you for listening to this episode. I’m Jim Kirkland.

Phil: And I’m Phil Fleischman. This is GPS: God. People. Stories. It’s an outreach of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association—Always Good News.

CLOSING MUSIC

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