08/22/2019
Alas, after 14 years of faithful ministry impact at Soul Care Christian Counseling, our dear colleague Kathy Clarke is retiring. Here Kathy shares some important convictions that can only be gained with biblical discernment and the weight of experience and wisdom that only comes with decades well stewarded:
Seven Convictions That Have Informed My Counseling: Reflections as I Retire
I’m retiring this summer from my counseling practice at Soul Care, and with this new chapter in life has come a chance to celebrate the grace of God and the patience that my clients have shown me. It’s also a time to reflect back upon some of the convictions that God has used to guide my counseling ministry.
Conviction #1: I am not the point. God is. My entire reason for being is to be involved in His purposes, not to involve Him in mine.
Believing this has tied me into the “Larger Story” of what God is doing on this earth. But the question that this presupposes is - What is God’s purpose? I remember the point in my life when I finally realized that God was doing something big in this world, and that what He was up to was all that mattered. At that time I felt that the “something big” was building his church. Just as in the Old Testament He said, “I will make of you a great nation,” and in the pages of the Bible we can watch Him work progressively to do just that, so now, in the New Testament era, Jesus says, “I will build my church.” Twenty years ago, making God the point meant for me to become directly involved in church planting, especially where the church didn’t already exist, to be involved in missions in unreached areas of the world and to aid in the cause of seeing Jesus do what He has said He will do - plant His church. And, while I still deeply affirm church planting as fundamental, after counseling individuals and couples for the past 25 years, I can also see that God is fundamentally interested in showing forth His image through us, human beings. “Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.” Genesis 1:26. Image bearing is, in many ways, just as fundamental to God’s purposes as the task of church planting. Image bearing is primarily what we humans have to offer a world which is starved for glimpses of an invisible God. It involves a deep recognition of who God is (in order to reflect Him) and of who He has made us to be (male or female, artistic or sportive, or any innumerable other attributes that God endows upon the peak of His creation). As I’ve counseled, I’ve tried to minister out of a conviction that the person sitting in front of me is alive first and foremost to express to others and to God the unique image of God that he or she can express. I’ve hoped to call forth that image bearer, freed up to move into his or her world. And as that image bearer goes about living his or her life, then I know that the promise of Jesus, “I will build my church,” will ultimately be fulfilled.
Conviction #2: People are not neuter. They bear the image as either male or female. We serve God first and foremost by offering our gender.
”God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Genesis 1:27.
It is amazing to me how I could live so long and be exposed to so much biblical teaching and yet come so lately to this conviction. For many years I think, perhaps for self-protective reasons, I bought into the pietistic notion that men and woman are first and foremost souls without gender and that bodies are only the vehicles that move these souls from place to place. Before my studies in Biblical counseling, I never could quite fully appreciate the notion that even the soul has the mark of masculinity or femininity upon it. Holding that belief had served a function. It has kept me, a single woman for most of my life, from feeling the painful longings of being a woman made for relationship with a man and kept me from longing to be a mother to children that I would perhaps never bear to a man I loved. It had also kept me from resting and receiving what was offered to me from a male-dominated world.
As I’ve counseled these past years, I’ve asked God to help me see people freed up according to their gender to reflect God in the particular way which is unique to their s*x. I’ve longed to be used first of all as a woman when I counseled. I’ve wanted to be inviting and receptive. Nurturing would be a word that I would like to think of in relation to my mentoring of people. And, occasionally, with God’s help, my feminine candor would come out at appropriate times to invite response in others. And, as I’ve reflected upon the image of God-feminine, I’ve longed to be able to aid my primarily female clients to fully accept their own gender and to offer who they truly are with greater and greater freedom.
Conviction #3: People at their core, apart from the grace of God, are committed to running their own lives without a radical dependence upon God. Even Christians often reject God in the depths of their hearts.
“For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks. . .” Romans 1:21.
At my core, I’ve found a deep-seated commitment to run my own life. This comes out of a feeling that God just isn’t as good as He needs to be, and that I can do a better job of managing my life than He can. This is my raised fist against God. I find, to my horror, that trying to serve God with this in place is very much like the older brother in the story of the prodigal son. Service can come more out of a sense of Christian duty than out of a joyous participation in His concerns.
As I’ve counseled more than 700 clients over the years, I’ve recognized that I needed to look for the raised fist in their hearts as I sat and had meaningful conversations with them. I needed to assume that they too believed at some core level that God is not good. Even the ones who looked good on the surface had, at their depths, this commitment to “go their own way.” Helping them to recognize it did more to put them in touch with the Father than any encouragement to continue on the path of pharisaical service.
Conviction #4: People are thirsty. They need satisfaction at a level that nothing in the visible realm on this earth can meet. They need resources from God that even He will not fully supply this side of heaven.
This thirst is something that needs to be felt to be appreciated. It must be recognized in order to drive one to meet it. When Jesus called to the crowd on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink,” He did so globally, yet only those who felt the desire, only those who were really thirsty came to Jesus. Thirst in this metaphor could mean many things, but I wish to define it primarily as longings.
Feeling our longings is painful, especially if they will not be fully met in this life. I believe that the most fully alive Person who ever lived, Jesus Christ, truly felt his longings. He was a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” To the degree that we are like Him, we will be people who feel pain.
We will feel the pain of longing for home when we are not yet there. We will grieve over the temporariness of our dwellings on this earth, the transitory nature of our relationships here, and the pain of endless goodbyes. Death will strike us as wrong and out of sync with the higher eternal life set in our hearts. Love will be tainted with selfishness, and people will let us down. No human love will satisfy completely the deep thirst for connectedness that we feel at the core of our beings. Admitting this will bring us tremendous pain and grief. Numbing it will kill our need for God.
In counseling others, I’ve sometimes dared (not nearly enough) to be used of God to stir up the longings that have lain dormant in my clients’ hearts for a long time. In so doing, I realized that this would bring intense confusion to the person, but such pain would be the forerunner to a desperation that could only find its relief in Jesus Christ.
Conviction #5: Life is found only in Jesus Christ. Any substitute for Him being life will be an idol. And the false “life” that an idol offers is a weak substitute for what Christ is willing to give.
“And this is life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” John 17:3
That’s what Jesus tells us, and He cannot lie. To look elsewhere for life is to ultimately choose death. Idols cut us off from the good that God longs to give us. “Those who cling to worthless idols, refuse the love that could be theirs.” Jonah 2:8.
As I live my life, whether as a counselor or not, I am of the conviction that to the degree that I am seeking Jesus Christ, I will be tasting life. Yet, even as I write this, I am aware that I am sometimes prone to set up idols in the high places of my heart. I need to turn from these again and again and go back to the living God. This is on-going repentance.
As I’ve counseled others or even held meaningful conversations with friends, I’ve known that they too have idols in their hearts. They too will often settle for less than they were made for, less than life. I have sincerely tried to sensitively lead them to recognize how they consistently go to these other gods instead of the true source, Jesus Christ. Most people who seek counseling, if they have good hearts, have recognized at some level that all of their attempts to find life in the past apart from Christ have failed. They have had to admit that at some deep level they were bound in unhealthy ways to every idol to which they have turned. Freedom is not available apart from a relationship with Christ.
Conviction #6: People can best find God in the midst of their problems, not apart from them. God has provided the context of pain and suffering in this life to facilitate our exercising faith in Him.
It isn’t hard to figure out that if God is all-powerful, all-knowing and completely loving, and yet He allows suffering, then it must be because suffering provides a context for growth that nothing else can give. It is impossible to conceive of a completely good God for whom every option is a possibility choosing not to end people’s pain, unless that experience is desired by Him for higher reasons. We must ask ourselves what He intends to accomplish in the midst of our suffering. We will only ask this question if we are more committed to knowing Him than to seeking relief.
I believe that God is in the process of drawing forth faith in His creatures. Faith can only flourish in the crucible of pain and in the tension of desire. David, the man after God’s own heart, knew this. He writes, “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I may learn your statutes.” Psalm 119:71. As a counselor, I sometimes needed to point out the pain and the tension that a person had felt in hopes that I might get him or her to a place of being able to exercise true biblical faith. I have sometimes had to fight people who were merely looking for solutions to their presenting problems. Reframing the problem in terms of the counselee’s lack of trust in God was essential to leading my client to think in biblical ways.
Conviction #7: Good counseling comes more from a heart that is loving and wise than from any content learned. Getting this kind of heart takes involvement from the living God. He alone can produce love and other fruits of the spirit (character qualities) in a person.
The implication of this conviction should be a life of prayer. I have to admit that I’m convicted over this conviction. While I’ve made it a practice to always pray, asking for God’s help with every client, I have certainly needed a deeper walk with God as I’ve delved into the muddy waters of people’s lives.
I, like the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son, have been too often living in the Father’s house without really knowing the Father. I have too often tried to serve Him without asking for His help and without receiving from Him all that He has for me in each and every situation, including my counseling sessions. Jesus told us, “Apart from Me, you can do nothing.” John 15:5b. I can only rely on the grace of God to take my small and often unfaithful ministry and bless it over and above my own feeble contributions.
Finally, it is with deep gratitude to my clients that I say, “Thank you for all that you taught me as you’ve all journeyed in my presence towards your God. I have learned so much more from you than I have ever been able to give back. I enter my retirement with a full heart.”
