Secrets on show

Lecturer’s book the basis for church’s Health Week

Sonja Larsen
Editorial assistant, Connections
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia

A book by an Avondale College of Higher Education lecturer has served as the basis for the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s annual Health Week (May 1-7).

The theme of the week, “The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your emotions,” is a quote from Dr Darren Morton’s Seven Secrets for Feeling Fantastic.

Pr Kevin Price, director of Adventist Health Ministries for the church in the South Pacific, describes the book as a quick and easy read to improving emotional health. “Health Week has traditionally focused on physical health and nutrition,” he says, “but we see a real need for emotional health, too, because it contributes to your overall health.”

The church distributed copies of Seven Secrets for Feeling Fantastic and a DVD of one of Darren’s lectures to each Adventist church and school in Australia and in New Zealand as part of Health Week. Publisher Signs Publishing Company now plans to reformat, revise and reprint the book.

Seven Secrets for Feeling Fantastic demonstrates the benefits of a Christian approach to healthy living by drawing on Darren’s experience as a physiologist. Motivated by curiosity—particularly about what neuroscience revealed about how the brain worked and the implications it had for living well and longer—Darren, a senior lecturer in health and exercise science in the School of Education, wrote to “illustrate not just what the secrets of feeling fantastic are, but also how and why they work. That’s an important distinction. Understanding makes a big difference.”

His message is simple: “The world can be a negative place and many people, Christians included, are not experiencing the joy of living God desires for them. This book helps remedy this.”

Seven Secrets for Feeling Fantastic is available from Adventist Book Centres.