Six Months Later

Joplin just commemorated the six-month anniversary of the tornado that wiped out a third of our city on May 22nd.

We all have moments in our lives that we will remember forever, that are etched into our brains with the searing heat of the pain and fear of tragedy.  My parents know where they were the day Kennedy was assassinated.  I can remember, as we all can, the details of the morning of September 11, 2001 with crystal-clear clarity, as if it happened yesterday, as I watched with horror as people jumped from the top floors, trying to wrap my mind around the reality of these buildings caving in on thousands of people.

May 22nd is that kind of day for this community.  I’ve heard a hundred stories by now, many in first-person as a therapist trying to help make sense and work through the twist and wreckage of a day that was supposed to be a normal, average Sunday.  I remember my wife and I driving alongside the tornado, only missing driving through the heart of it by a simple prayer and God telling us to go a different way.  I remember seeing the transformers popping and watching as debris swirled within and around the enormous black monster, thinking at the time they must be small pieces of wood and whatnot, and only later learning that they were full-sized buildings, cars, people.

I’ve not been a citizen of this community all my life, but at various times I have called this place home.  My wife and I have been here this time around for six years.  We developed and opened our own counseling practice, which has deepened our roots, as our lives have become intertwined with the lives of others.  We’ve worked in this community and for it, being a part of small church groups and large business ones, staying when we have had offers to move elsewhere.  These were our homes, our churches, our businesses that were destroyed.  These were our families, our lives, our friends that were taken and whose lives were irrevocably shaken.

What has struck me again and again, beyond the grief that wells up at times unexpectedly when I drive past my old practice, now only a slab of concrete in an open field of concrete slabs lined up like gravemarkers, is the insistence that we come back, that our community thrive again.  The overwhelming response of volunteers and people across the country was more than we could take in in those first weeks.  We were, I think, only partially able to appreciate the kindness and selflessness.  The search and rescue crews, the work crews, the cleaning crews, the city managers and politicians who fought for this place, the folks who, bleeding and bruised and confused, stepped beyond themselves to cover a cold woman in a wheelchair or look for a man lost in a crumbled house, and the business owners who decided to rebuild.  I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but then there are times in life when you simply have to recognize the drama for what it is.  There are days when heroism trumps tragedy, when an epic story overwhelms a mundane account of despair.  I think to do less with this day and the days following would be dishonoring to those of us who witnessed these things, and denial of the weight of these past six months.

Six months.  In some ways it does feel like six days or six hours.  Pieces and piles of debris still remain.  Trees are still uprooted, twisted, gnarled.  Some buildings that stood remain standing still, ghosts over the landscape, large and looming memorials who seem to grieve in their darkness, their windows like our hearts still shattered and no longer guarding what is now an empty and broken space inside.  Other structures still lay, flattened and sprawled, where they were knocked and beaten.  The landscape is still at times unrecognizable.  Scarred.  The path cut by the storm undeniable, and still hits you between the eyes when you drive through the city.

So there are these times it seems like days ago, and and other times, it seems like years have gone by.  So much water has now passed under the bridge.  To see new buildings and businesses, some built right on top of the old, like Jerusalem after it would be sacked and destroyed.  Grasses replanted.  Sidewalks reconstructed.  New traffic lights and a few replanted trees.  Houses have begun to be rebuild, some standing in stark contrast to the ruined ones just a block away that haven’t yet been dealt with, standing as proud and defiant reminders of reconstruction.  The hard-won smiles and laughter coming from a man who lost his wife, a wife who lost her child, a family that lost their grandfather, a child that lost her legs, a nurse who still sees all too clearly when she closes her eyes at night the blood and cries and shock of a hospital overwhelmed, a couple that lost their confidence and security in a quiet midwestern city and who lost their American dreams.  New ones, better ones, slowly seep to the surface to take the place of the lesser ones that were blown about in the swirling debris of that fateful afternoon.

I’ve said before that there were 50,000 tornadoes that day.  What I hadn’t thought of is that there are 50,000 stories of change since.  Fifty thousand sets of eyes that see slow and steady growth as well as the sadness still and the brokenness that remains clinging like tentacles through the city and around the hearts of those of us affected.  Fifty thousand kinds of hope, fifty thousand opportunities to come under the shelter of a God who didn’t abandon us and who loves us into wholeness and healing.

Here’s to these last six months of hope, of a kind of demonstrable, tangible hope that I couldn’t have expected or planned for.  Here’s to six more, and may we in these next six months take hold of the kind of life that goes beyond and deeper than death, that brings life and freedom from the debris.

“And here, in dust and dirt, O here do the lilies of His love appear.”
-W.H. Auden

 

Experience and Reflection

There exists this model of therapy called Accelerated Experiential-Dynamic Psychotherapy.  It’s a complicated title to a fairly simple approach, but one that is profound for a community that prides itself more on professional distance than on entering into the muck and mire of a person’s story to help them find the redemption and way of life in it.

So this approach, AEDP, has in it the basic concept that we learn best by two complimentary steps.  The first is experience.  Another word would be “encounter.”  By this we mean not mere intellectual understanding or learning some rote fact or absorbing some information.  We mean the real and raw process of something, the journey into a new territory somehow.  Therapeutically, we often mean the experience of some emotion and memory as an encounter with another person present who can help navigate and offer life into the usually painful and, because of that, often blocked part of themselves.  A place that is ungrieved.  A memory too painful to recall.  Insight into themselves or the world or a particular relationship that hasn’t been acknowledged consciously.  A thought too threatening to deal with alone.  That gets expressed and experienced in the presence of a salient figure, a person tuned into their experience.  The dragon in the cave that’s threatened them for so long, that they’ve run from and feared, finally gets dealt with.  It’s encountered and slain.

The second step is reflection.  Apparently, and research seems to support this, we cannot learn or grow by mere experience.  We need to take time to reflect on it, to put words and meaning to what it is we’ve been through.  Wisdom, it might be said, is comprised of these two crucial elements — to first enter in and deal with whatever is at hand, and the second is to find the meaning in it, to ask the tough questions regarding it, to see it for what it is.  This is the “dynamic” part of the model’s name, AEDP. And we might add one more piece to the therapeutic approach that is included as a fundamental aspect — community.  That’s a given.  That’s what therapy is all about, the journey through difficult stretches of the trail with someone who can offer a hand-hold and a familiar and hopeful voice when the light grows dim.

I think the developers of this model, building on more than a hundred years of clinical practice and deep thinking about what it takes to help people change and grow, have landed on something profound.  Of course, I always want to equate these things back to Scripture and ask, “Does the Word of God support that?”  Is there evidence that this is truly a way we are made as people that we need to think deeply about and incorporate somehow into our daily living and our spiritual disciplines.  The first person that comes to mind is Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, after Jesus.  He did quite a lot of reflection, and fairly deep if you consider the Proverbs he wrote and potentially even Ecclesiastes.  A philosopher, really — and one that, incidentally, was instrumental in leading me to the Lord to begin with.  And then you have David, who experienced quite a lot in his life, suffering as well as glory.  Maybe more than anyone else in the Old Testament.  And he reflected on everything.  Then you have Paul, whose missionary exploits are the stuff of legend.  And then he reflected on them.  Just take a look at Acts or his letters to Timothy.  Teaching for him was a way of reflecting.  Oh, and Jesus.  This seemed to be one of the ways he instructed his disciples in the art of living in the Kingdom of God.  He would teach them something, then demonstrate it through action.  Reflection and experience.  Sometimes he reversed this and would help them experience something totally different than what they’d ever thought, and then reflect on it, tell them more about it.  He did this occasionally with his parables.

I’m a reflector — I like to reflect on things.  It started way back for me when I would crawl onto the roof of my house as a kid and stare as deeply as I could into the stars.  That for me was when experience and reflection kissed, and wonder burst through.  I’m not sure we can do both at the same time, but I would feel myself to be so small against such an immense backdrop, and then reflect on the expanse of the stars and be filled with awe.  And then I would do it again, always trying to feel myself get smaller and smaller.  It was a wonderful feeling to experience, especially when at other times it seemed as if I was the center of my little world and all orbited me.  Finally, I wasn’t.  And I have carried that practice on in my spiritual life, even now considering it something so crucial that withholding it is like holding my breath.  Last night my wife and I watched a Discovery channel documentary on the ocean and ocean life.  Narrated poorly, it still showed some of the extremes of creativity that God employs in creation.  I’m flooded again with wonder and awe, and now internally reflect on how immense is this Heart behind all hearts.

I think the first time I ever really heard something related to my calling was when I heard Amy Grant talk about Rich Mullins, posthumously.  She said that he would go to the edge, look over and see what was there, and come back and write a song about it.  That’s exactly what I’m talking about.  Experience and express.  And by doing so, extend our concepts and understanding of this Lover God and the life He’s invited us into.

I don’t know if many read this blog.  I’m okay with that either way.  I’m not sure I would read it myself if I didn’t write it.  It’s a chronicle of my journey, and it’s as much for me as anyone else.  I’ve written professionally before, and it was something I did for others to read, not necessarily something I wrote for myself.   If I ever write a book, I think my MO will be to write something that is meaningful to me, meaningful to write, something I need to read, something I need to hear and experience.  And, hopefully as a byproduct, something others will as well.  I want it to be a reflection of my experience with God so that others will be compelled toward experiential interaction with Him.

 

The Most Intimate Part

“His Holy Spirit, breathing in you, is the most intimate part of your life…” -Ephesians 4:30, The Message

Oh yeah.  Oh yeah!  I forgot, somehow.  Through the busyness and mire and muck of life I’ve forgotten that this Spirit of His in me is this active and alive in me, for me, through me.  That sounds ridiculous to write it out like that, but it is true.  I’ve lived my life lately in a very unbelieving way, forgetting that my soul can feast on this most intimate of all experiences, given freely, mine for the taking, daily, moment-by-moment.

There’s so much that could be said here.  And more that will be.  But for now, I want to settle back into this most awesome and earth-shattering of all truths: He dwells in me, home in me, abiding in me, mine to know, making me “fit for Himself,” as Paul continues in the same verse.  “Don’t take such a gift for granted.”

Okay, then!

 

Stout-Hearted

“Wait and hope for and expect the Lord; be brave and of good courage and let your heart be stout and enduring. Yes, wait for and hope for and expect the Lord.” -Psalm 27:14, Amplified

I’ve been in the waiting for quite awhile in this past season of my life, and even now.  My wife and I are eager, hopeful, yet live with much longing as of yet unfulfilled.  We are living well in it, but that is not an easy thing to do.  Waiting patiently but also passionately, intensely but also intimately.  Ultimately, the “stuff” we’re waiting for — the growth of our family a significant element of that — is really a longing for Jesus, for the Father, for the Spirit to abide and for the Kingdom to come and advance in us and through us.  That is what is behind the curtain, beneath our longing.  And that is the promise and guarantee whispered by God within…

“The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come!’ Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life.” -Revelation 22:17

I want to be among the stout-hearted, waiting eagerly and expectantly (Romans 8:19), hoping, anticipating, actively, passionately waiting.  And in the meantime?  Fan into flames the inner fire of God’s life in me.  Stout-hearted, fiery hot, courageous, slaking my thirst in the waters of life.  I’ve not had the best balance of this.  My posts here have diminished, and with that, I’m sad to say, some of the flames.  I’m a chronicler; I write what God shows me, and by doing so I take it in, embrace it, let it do its work in me.  Paul tells Timothy to fan into flames himself the gift of God in him (2 Timothy 1:6).  That’s his job, his responsibility, not God’s.  I’ve been asking God to make me stout-hearted, and so He’s giving me longing unfulfilled.  I’ve been asking Him to set me aflame with His life within, and so He gives me the poker of writing and points me to the smoldering embers.  He Himself will be the bellows (John 3).

This is vague and general, I realize, but I’m only trying to recapture what the Spirit is breathing in me; refinement comes later.  Polish isn’t the point; it’s passion He’s after.  The passion is in waiting expectantly, hopefully, stoking all the while, courageously becoming large- and strong-of-heart.

 

The Soul’s Worth

I’m reading through a book by Gerald May called The Dark Night of the Soul.  Gerald May was a psychiatrist who, in his own words, became weary of the medical profession’s way of handling the soul of patients.  He eventually became a spiritual director and author of several works related to spiritual development.

In Dark Night of the Soul, May, exploring St. John of the Cross’s work by the same title, discusses the work of the Lord God deep within a person’s being as a mysterious and beautiful thing, an intimate work that is initiated in love and is designed to free us for love.  St. Teresa of Avila was a contemporary of John, and in fact, he counted her as one of his spiritual mentors and teachers.  Being contemplatives, both Teresa and John recognize the utter worth of the human soul, its beauty and goodness.  May quotes Teresa as saying, “I can find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul… we can hardly form any conception of the soul’s great dignity and beauty.”

Those words certainly sound mystical to our ears.  We rarely speak of the soul today, although it is gaining more attention in some circles, like  Christian psychotherapy.  John and Teresa recognized it as, next to God Himself, the most beautiful and worthy thing.  They loved it, adored it, respected it, because they began to see that God treated it with such dignity and love, that Jesus came for ransom of it and freedom for it.

There is a recent movement in Christendom to recognize what’s been called the “good heart.”  This “New Covenant” movement (as one author puts it), which I believe God is very much behind, seeks to bring to light the inherent goodness and strength of a heart given over to Christ, that it is no longer “deceitfully wicked” as the Scriptures say of a heart detached from Him (Jeremiah 17:9), but rather “good” and even “noble,” to quote Jesus (Luke 8:15).  This runs counter to much contemporary theology, which seems to see the heart as perpetually wicked, and which tries to operate a kind of “sin management,” in Dallas Willard’s words, to keep the believer from running amok doing all kinds of bad things.

The implication of the “good heart” theology is pretty radical.  It means that we can begin valuing the deep heart within once more, and recognize the awesome thing that it is.  It means we can work with one another to help set each other free, and that once we are disentangled from all the briars (what John of the Cross calls “attachments”), we can “run in the paths of [God's] commands” (Psalm 119:32) and walk in the “path of life” (Psalm 16:11) that God shows us.  We can drop the sin management stuff and bring dignity back into our ministry with folks.

What stands out to me in what Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross say is that recognizing that the heart is “good” isn’t enough.  They push the envelope even further.  They suggest that the heart (or “soul” in their vernacular) has “great beauty.”  John writes that once we enter fully enough into union with God, we will see ourselves aright.  ”The soul,” he says, will “see herself as a queen.”  This is far beyond merely being “good.”  This is a kind of glorious honor, an extravagant dignity.  The soul is ravishing.  Glorious.  Beautiful beyond compare, especially to the One who made her.

Could this be a part of the “secret wisdom” that has been “hidden” and that “God destined for our glory from before time began”? (1 Corinthians 2:7).

In our Christmas hymn, we sing of how “the soul felt its worth.”  But how often has that happened?  How many people do you know who can say, truly, “I have felt the weight of my soul’s worth, and it is beyond telling.”  Can you say that?  Can i?  What is that, the soul’s worth?  What could that be?

Sitting in my office meeting with people day after day struggling with life, what would it mean for me to recognize that, no matter how scarred and damaged and suffocated their souls may be, they are still beautiful and the reason for the Great Invasion brought by Christ?  I wonder, what would this mean to our ministries and our churches if we were to really believe it.  What would it do to our personal lives, our interactions with God and with one another.

 

Dealing with Death

Many of my favorite authors say that they write what they need to read. Philip Yancey is especially fond of talking of his writing as a wandering journey of faith, where he is wrestling with and trying to hammer out his understanding of some aspect of life. He deals with grace and disappointment and longing for the Kingdom, those sorts of things. A lot of the stories I post here are things I need to read. Some time back, I told a friend that the only reason I post these things to the internet on a blog instead of keep them in my private journals is that it’s nice to have access to them anytime, anywhere. It sounds to me a bit ego-centric, but it’s a help for me to be able to access these stories and reread them at various times. I don’t have to go digging through my journals trying to find something. That’s especially true as I process through something someone smarter than me has said or realized. I work their insight into my soul like kneading yeast into bread. This blog is my work surface, the words my rolling pin.

This morning, I found myself re-reading the About the Invitation portion of this blog. I say there that “these pages..are the blood-and-guts expression of a man’s journey of passionate and at times faltering faith through this world…” I often write about the beauty or adventure or desirous seeking after God. My posts are most often expressions of hunger and reaching toward Christ. But, in the spirit of the About page, I realize I need to feel free, too, to write about “times of faltering faith.” I’ve got them. God knows I do.

So here it is, my first truly “faltering faith” post. I have no idea where it is going to end up, but this is where I need to start: a dream…

I’m standing in an overgrown field. It’s been neglected for quite a few years now. The barn is dilapidated. Where cows and horses once grazed, only weeds remain. The sounds of children running and playing have been washed out by the hollow drag of air across the fallen timbers. The sky, a bright blue in my memory, is now a pale grey, as if it is sick with mourning. No one lives here anymore. The life that once filled this place has vanished.

Another scene: I’m sitting with a man who has come to the end of his days, at least he wishes it were so. For as long as he can remember, though the days have been filled with activity, it has been activity for activity’s sake, and they have felt only empty, and he feels emptier having lived them. He knows nothing, and everything he once knew seems as dust. He has nothing to stand on. Life for him has been one long, unblinking daze.

Yet another scene: A woman sits across from me. She is broken, damaged by years upon years of neglect and abuse. Something deep within her was stolen as a little girl, and she has lived a desperate life trying to get it back. Nothing has worked, and in fact has only led her to darker and scarier places where she has had to bargain her way back again. She now exists with even less of herself than she had when she left her painful youth. She is alone, holding only tattered fragments of herself.

The stories continue. One after another after another. To say that “something” has been stolen, that “something” has been lost, is perhaps the greatest understatement of all time. To say that “things are not what they should be” is terribly, tragically, true. So much so that to look at life square in the face hurts deep within and freezes the soul like stone. Only the bravest can do such a thing, or those leaning on the crutches of addictions. And yet, this is the first place we are asked to go. This is the first thing we need to do, to see the desperation of our situation. We are utterly, totally, completely lost. We are barely alive, alive only enough to know we are not alive and the life we dreamed of has alluded us.

Don’t get me wrong. I have sit through hundreds of evangelical presentations and sermons to reach out to the lost with something of the hope of the gospel. They are (mostly) very good, and very true, and very needed. But they also often skip over the painful truth that we are not the people we should be. It’s often as if the presenter or preacher is also too afraid to look square at life and say, “We are a dead people. We have lost everything.” Yet, that’s where so many are. I know that to be true. My days are spent walking among the dead-at-heart and lost-of-soul.

Before the gospel, the good news, can mean anything, we must take a hard look at the life we have in our hands. Small. Silly, really, in the way we cling to such small things. Fragile. A shred of something, but we don’t really know what the original was. We hold a piece of a mosaic but cannot see the picture. Only shades of color, and even that is fading.

There is a hope. It is a great hope. The news is a great news — that we get to have life — LIFE. We get to breathe in gulps of life-giving oxygen again. Our blood gets to run warm through our veins again. Somehow, to our amazement, the broken fragments can come back together. The empty spaces filled. We can have again what we are made for. But it does not happen apart from taking a hard look at what we get and realizing, oh, finally realizing, we cannot get there on our own. We are dead. Only a life-giving Spirit can bring us back.

The promise of Jeremiah 31:13, that “maidens will dance and be glad, young men and old as well. I will turn their mourning into gladness; I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow” only happens as we are first familiar with our sorrow. Looking around at the brokenness around us, what other choice have we got? “Because of this,” wrote the prophet Micah, “I will weep and wail… I will howl like a jackal and moan like an owl” (1:8) This is the only way to make sense of James’ command to “grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom” (4:9). Jesus promises us that He will turn our grief into joy again. Why? Because He will be all that we lost, and we will see Him. Our life. Our everything.

Maybe this isn’t so much faltering faith as it is a burdened heart. What is the only other appropriate response to suffering but to weep with those who weep for their loss.

 

Apprentice Training

When we moved into our home a few years ago, we turned one of the spare bedrooms into an office.  Bookshelves line the far wall of the room, and sandwiched between two of them, right in the middle of the wall, sits a large desk.  It’s a simple one, with only a flat writing surface and some shelves beneath, nothing to block the view from the window right above it that looks out onto the street.  So not the best view in the world, but it does, at least allow for natural light and the view of an occasional bird or two and a small bit of the weeping willow in the front yard.

It used to, anyway.  The desk is now overflowing with scribbled notes, used manila folders, piles of books and notepads and journals.  Even the office chair will, on occasion, serve as an overflow, and more often than not now we’ll have to move stacks off of it to the floor in order to sit down to the computer, which also has as its residence the overpopulated desk.

When I started grad school two and a half years ago, I did pretty well keeping organized.  Everything had its place.  After each semester, I would place papers, folders, books, notes, and the like in a particular location, usually in a reserved spot on a bookshelf.  And my brain, too, would feel nicely organized.  Categorized, even.  Statistics and Research here.  Family Therapy there.  Human Growth and Development in another spot.  Marital Therapy in yet another.  None of that lasted long, though, and several spaces in my life are now simply flooding over.

Let me say something at this point about my field.  Marriage and Family Therapy is a really unique profession for several reasons.  For one, there are an endless number of problems folks can be having internally or in relationship to someone else for which they are seeking help.  Second, there are an endless number of  approaches to helping folks with these problems.  Third, how the problem manifests itself or seems to exist for one person may be totally different than for someone else, based on their unique personhood and experiences.  Many therapists will work in one of (you guessed it) an endless number of specializations.  Fourth, there are a seemingly endless supply of helpful resources, some of them written by wise and experienced healers and helpers, from which a therapist fresh in the field like myself can glean.  Fifth…. well, you get the picture.  Lots of possibilities.

One of the most exciting things about my present situations is that as an intern I am exploring these possibilities by working with a large number of different issues, and exploring a few different tried-and-true approaches to treating some of these unique problems.  (Even focusing on “problems” reveals a kind of approach, and not every approach focuses on problems.)  It’s been nearly a year now that I’ve been seeing patients, and I can still say that at least once a week I encounter something I have never seen before.  That’s another unique aspect of the profession.  I am constantly kept on my toes and forced to be not only humble in learning and creative in trying, but also deeply dependent upon walking with God.

Now maybe my stacks of books and mile-long Amazon wish list make a bit more sense.  I find myself often living out of the urgent: I must learn about this; I must be ready for that; I must be able to work well with this… It can be quite exhausting.  By the end of a work week my brain often feels like Malt-O-Meal: mushy and expanding, running out of my ears.

I’ve been searching for awhile for another perspective on all of this, a way to understand both what I am doing and what I need to do as I prepare, as my hands are “trained for battle,” as David put it in the Psalms (18:34).  This morning, I finally got a glimpse of a picture simple enough to work for me (and so simple that it was easily missed).

It’s from Jesus.  I mean, of course it is — God gave this picture to me this morning — but I mean that the words come right from His mouth, in Matthew 13:52.  He says this: “Then you see how every student well-trained in God’s kingdom is like the owner of a general store who can put his hands on anything you need, old or new, exactly when you need it” (The Message).

There it is.  It’s a simple thought, really, but there’s a lot there.  We get to be students of Jesus, trained in living life that is truly life, and who has these treasures stored up within our deep hearts, able to pull out what’s needed when it’s needed.  These treasures may be encouragement, exortation, caution, teaching, compassion, empathy, direction, clarity, meaning, joining with someone in the mess of their life — all these things.  More importantly, though, and more to the point of life in the Kingdom, I think these treasures have to do with presence, with the weight of our lives impacting someone else.  I think the treasures are, simply put, our hearts, and the grace to join in relationship with someone else from the heart.

One of the pitfalls of my graduate training is that, in focusing on theories of counseling and techniques of therapy developed over the decades by hundreds (literally) of practicioners, we begin to think, even subtly, that for every person, every issue, every broken place, every event, we have to have an answer, a fix, a solution.  Especially in the culture we’re in, where microwavable meals are ready in minutes, technology changes quickly, and medical advances allow for restoration of physical injuries and illnesses that would have spelled disaster even just a few years ago.

But that’s not the invitation of Jesus.  That’s not His way.  Think of it.  He could have handed us a playbook on day one, a set of principles and techniques to live out in every circumstance of life (though, admittedly, it would be quite a thick volume).  He chose instead of give us one, and leave out libraries worth (John the Beloved may have been expressing some of the frustration at leaving out so much — see John 21:25).  And the book He left us with is chock full of one repeating, alluring, frightening intrigue:  relationship.  Covenant.  Friendship.  Intimacy.  Connection.  Like it or not, that’s His desire with us.

And it makes sense.  I can’t imagine how disappoined we’d be if when we were young our father handed us some notes and said, “Son (or daughter), here is everything I know concerning anything you’ll run into over the next 10 years.  Inside are all the instructions that I want you to carry out and everything I want you to do, including where you are to be 10 years from now when I’ll come back and see how you’ve done.”  Forget that.  No way.  That’s slavery, not intimacy.  Rather, for those of us who had good fathers (and for those of us who didn’t, think of what you would’ve wanted with your father), we were invited into relationship… he taught us how to bait a hook, how to ride a bike, how to count money, what to do when you like a girl (or, for daughters, how boys only “want one thing” at that age), and how much he delights in us, how proud he is of how we’re doing.  We need counsel — we go to him.  We get hurt, we need his affection.  We get an applause at our school play, and we look for his face in the crowd.  With him we learn to walk, we wrestle, we feel his strong protection, we grow up to be like him.  Eventually, we share a beer and a steak with him and talk about politics and local happenings.  We share life together.  That’s the ideal, anyway.

That’s a picture of what we’re invited into with God.  He wants that with us, and more.

Jesus’ mission is one of healing and restoration, right?  It’s a ministry He laid out in Isaiah 61, that He announced in Luke 4:18-19, and that He comissioned for us to carry on — see Luke 10:19, Mark 16:15-18, John 16:8-15, Matthew 28:18-20.  He isn’t interested only in this work getting done; He’s interested also in joining us while we do it — or us joining Him while He does, as it’s probably better said.  This is the kind of work happening in the Christian counseling office.  He in no way intends to give us every technique we need.  That would rip us off from the relationship.  Instead, we get to walk with Him, hear Him, let Him lead and teach us — like a good father would!

In the context of that relationship, and the relationship-of-the-heart we offer one another, there will necessarily be healing and restoration taking place.  But it’s always, always, in that context.  That’s the way the Kingdom works.  It is a partnership — us with God and (because of His generosity), us with one another.  Understanding human nature, its corruption and disconnection, processes of restoring it back to health and wholeness, and techniques that lead to that — these are important, and crucial, in my opinion, for the Christian therapist to understand and implement in constantly growing clarity and skill.  But they are not a replacement for that really scary invitation to walk with the Lord Jesus, move with the Spirit of God, and know the heart of the Father.

I’ve got a few more months of grad school to complete.  There’s more to learn — more books to read, people to glean wisdom from, notes to take, documents and articles and ideas to work through.  I suspect there always will be — and I certainly hope that to be the case.  I’m sure I’ll be moving more piles around and trying to organize all the information.  But the important thing is not on the theory.  It’s not on the principles.  It’s not the formulaic approach to life.  The treasure is God, relationship with Him, and our hearts restored to the capacity to enjoy Him.  Forever.  To the extent that we can live in and offer that, whatever our profession, then we are learning to live well and easy in the Kingdom come.  Most of my core training in the Kindom comes from learning to hear the voice of the Lord God, to submit to Him, to allow Him to work in me, to join Him from the heart, and to be transformed.  Only from that Center will any of the rest find its rightful place.