The Journey

I am writing this in my living room with the space heater on and my cat passed out by my feet. She is such a sucker for that heater. I don't think she would ever eat if I had it on all day.

Anyway, I went to an awesome church meeting last night that spurred on some great conversations about emotional health, counseling, and the church's role in all of that. My church has a staff member that helps with community outreach and member care, under the name of "community service and outreach" or CSO. CSO has quarterly topical meetings for anyone in the congregation to attend and learn more about issues that affect us and how we can better care for others. What was cool about last night's meeting too was that the panel of speakers they invited were all somehow affiliated with my school. They were all counselors and psychologists that offered ideas on when it is right to refer someone to counseling, how to de-mystify the counseling process, how do you know when depression is sin-related or something more, when is medication appropriate, and how do we as church members help the hurting both in our congregation and in our community. We probably had over 50 people there, which was really encouraging.

My main take away was to think about how I can be more vulnerable with others and model humility, so as to promote more authenticity in my relationships. This might mean, for example, looking for opportunities to share about my own experiences with counseling, and also about my own personal joys and sorrows, so as to help others to see that Christians suffer too. It is hard to get the balance down between healthy grieving over sin, while at the same time not telling yourself that you are a bad Christian and Christians "shouldn't" feel bad. Our new pastor has a counseling degree, and he has definitely done a great job of articulating and modeling this.

Anyway, I was sitting here this morning thinking about last night's talk and I thought of this interesting analogy. I really like the analogy about how all of life is on a journey. God is guiding us to an end point, heaven, but while on earth our journey takes several twists and turns. The counselor I've been to see talks a lot of about this, and we talk about how to manage each part of the journey. I decided that this is like taking a road trip, which I have much experience in doing. When on a road trip, sometimes you have to pull out the map. The map in life in this analogy the Word, but can also be a counselor, friend, pastor, etc pointing us to truth. Then we just have to keep driving, believing eventually our destination will come.

Right now, I feel like my journey is the equivalent of driving across Iowa to somewhere cool. You really want to get through Iowa. It's not exciting, as those of you who have been there know, but you have to get through it to get to the other side. While you're there, you get about 2 radio stations. There's not a lot of helpful places to stop. It's a lot of fields and silos. The destination of this part of my life's journey I am hoping I will be demonstrated by having a job and some clearer direction about how God is wanting me to use my counseling degree. But right now I am in Iowa. Until May probably.

Fortunately, though, I've got some good maps pulled out!!