Once More Into the Breach

Well, I did it.  After taking a year off from the CCEF program, I signed up today for “Counseling Problems and Procedures” taught by Ed Welch.   Including my undergraduate and seminary days, this will be the eighth course I’ve taken in psychology and counseling.  I really enjoy counseling.  And I think I’m pretty good at it.  Several people seem to have been helped by meeting with me.  And yet I get very few opportunities to do it.  Many days I sit here wasting my life away playing online chess thinking, “Man, I wish someone would call me for counseling.”  But few people call me.  I worry about this.  Why don’t they call?  Various possible explanations trouble my mind:

 

1) I’m a big jerk.

2) My pulpit presence is forceful and people fear I’ll be like that one-on-one.

3) Poor hygiene.

 

But maybe it’s something else.  I’m currently reading a book by Richard Eyer on pastoral care.  He’s thinking about things like hospital visitation, but I think this quote still applies,

 

“The need for pastoral care parallels the need for community. …In a society that values autonomy as the highest good and the right to privacy as the greatest asset, even to ask for companionship at the time of one’s helplessness and loss of control over life is sometimes unthinkable.”

 

People just don’t ask their pastors for help much anymore.  It’s a courageous counter-cultural step to do so and few take that step.  Which is a bummer for both of us because as William Hulme wrote “the antidote to the minister’s despair is his involvement in the lives of his people.”

Lamentation of a Novice Counselor

Since I began this blog to increase awareness of my counseling minstry, I have had a few opportunities for more formal counseling.  Man, it’s hard.  It’s easy to sit and listen to someone over a beer, but put me in an office chair with a notepad in hand and I get all self-conscious.  In the first appointment I tried to take some notes, but thinking about what I needed to record for later made it harder to listen in the present.  I found myself thinking “must… maintain… concentration” and I couldn’t just lose myself in the story of the other.  So in the second appointment I jettisoned the notepad and the chair and sat on a couch.  The conversation went well and I think I was helpful to the counselee, but when they came back for another appointment, I couldn’t remember hardly anything of what we talked about the last time.  Sigh.

Coming Soon

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