How many pastoral counselors does it take to change a light bulb?
Only one, but the light bulb really has to want to change.
Okay, it's an old joke. But how many pastoral counselors does it take to illumine the subject of counseling in the church context? Four, if they are as experienced as the group LEADERSHIP gathered to discuss the common dangers, frustrations, and joys of counseling as pastors. The four, who gathered from two coasts, four states, and three counseling roles, are:
-Edward Danks, pastor of Noroton Presbyterian Church in Darien, Connecticut;
-Gary Gulbranson, pastor of Glen Ellyn (Illinois) Bible Church;
-Archibald Hart, dean of the School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California;
-Wayne Willis, director of pastoral care for Alliant Health System in Louisville, Kentucky.
LEADERSHIP senior associate editor Jim Berkley moderated the discussion.
Leadership: What are the most common issues people are bringing you these days?
Edward Danks: My most frequent counseling concern is highly skilled, driven-and unemployed-men. Being without work devastates them. The prevalence of two other problems has surprised me. One is cancer. It's epidemic. When someone experiences that, you know you're in for a two- to three-year struggle, and you wonder just how many more of these can you carry. The other problem is apprehension, guilt, frustration over the care of elderly parents.
Archibald Hart: There's a marked increase in anxiety, panic disorders, depression. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that in any given month, 15 percent of the population suffers from substance abuse or mental disorders. A large percentage of those people must be in the church.
Gary Gulbranson: I've noticed the media influence what I see in my counseling. If the media highlight eating and nutritional disorders, all of a sudden I see eating and nutritional disorders. If the attention has been on sexual abuse of children, I begin to see people coming who believe that has happened to them. People are trying to find an explanation for the problems they're experiencing.
Wayne Willis: As chaplain in a medical center, I've seen a radical change in the atmosphere of hospitals. They've become fiercely competitive, and in the process, some of the superachievers in the hospitals find that in their excelling, they've lost their souls. That comes out physically in such ways as perforating a gut, getting ulcers, blowing out a heart, having a stroke, attempting suicide. I sometimes counsel these men, struck down in their climb to the top. They raise the question: What's it all about?
Leadership: Is yours mostly crisis counseling?
Willis: Sometimes pastors say to me, "I wouldn't like your job. I want to grow old with the same group of people, and all you have is short-term crisis intervention." That's a misperception. I've got the best of both worlds. I've got plenty of crisis intervention, but I also have a steady "congregation" of 2,800 hospital employees. I've worked with some for fourteen years, and perhaps 60 percent of my congregation isn't active in a church. When they inevitably come to a passage point in life, often they think, Hey, I can talk to the chaplain.
Leadership: As pastoral counselors, not simply secular counselors, what is your role with people?
Willis: One is the priestly role, through which people get absolution. They confess their sins, and the sins are acknowledged and forgiven.
Leadership: What do you mean by absolution?
Willis: I make a distinction between rational guilt and irrational guilt. Much guilt should be experienced to the full, because we've sinned and we need to face up to it. But there's also irrational guilt, which people assume out of neurotic reasons.
So when I speak of absolution, I think of people who have done wrong and need to confess it. And when they confess, they don't get from us, "Hey, that's okay. Everybody makes mistakes," but rather, "Yes, you've done wrong." Then they can receive God's forgiveness and move on from there. Secular counselors may not be as effective in giving that kind of help.
Years ago I married a couple, and some time later the man became involved in a love affair. My work with his wife, then, was mainly hearing her guilt and grief at the marriage having gone sour.
Knowing his wife had come to me already, the husband asked to take me to lunch. He talked about his affair. He came to me, realizing I disapproved of the affair. I didn't play the neutral-psychotherapist role of "Well, you must have had good reasons." I don't know how much I contributed to the eventual happy resolution of the story, but I did recognize how necessary it was for him to pour out himself to someone in all honesty. He knew he needed to make some changes, and my presence said as much to him. That was absolution.
Hart: There can be a fundamental role conflict between the priestly function and the counseling function of a pastor. When you take upon yourself counseling functions, you take on all the responsibilities counseling professionals also bear. That role, legally, is distinct from the priestly function. Someone may come to you and confess something, and you may not report it as a pastor, but in a counseling role, you will be mandated to.
Leadership: How do you distinguish situations of confession and those of counseling?
Danks: Sometimes by the seat of your pants. I once had a situation where a high school girl was sexually involved with a teacher. Her father found out, and the young lady told me he was making plans to shoot the teacher. I placed a quick call to the police headquarters, and since I knew where the teacher lived and the father didn't, I rushed to the teacher's house and banged on his door. When he came out, I said, "I don't have time to explain, but So-and-so's father is on his way here with a gun. My advice to you is get out of here as fast as you can." He didn't even let me finish the sentence. He was gone!
I took a further step by going to the superintendent of schools. I broke confidentiality because I felt it needed to be done for the sake of the students in the school.
Leadership: Do you find people tend to shy away from you as pastor after they've revealed their struggles to you in counseling? Do they tend to disappear after you've taken them through deep waters?
Danks: Yes. From thirty years of experience, I know that if I do serious, lengthy counseling, almost without exception I will lose a church member when it's complete. That has nothing to do with the quality of my counseling. They may have resolved the problem, but still I hold privileged information that makes them uncomfortable.
If I simply calm them down, paint something of what's going to happen, and point them for help in the right direction, I'm okay. But if I, say, meet weekly with a husband and wife for six months, they'll just fade out of sight, usually without a word.
Hart: That is because your role concerning them changes. In church life, people need the pastoral role, and if you sacrifice that for the counseling role, they'll leave to find pastoring somewhere else.
Gulbranson: The people I counsel are fixtures in other parts of my life. We'll have lots of continuing connections. The smaller the church, the greater the possibilities for contact. That's a complication.
One man I counseled had to work through some difficult marriage problems and even became antagonistic to me in the process. But eventually he and his wife got their marriage back together. They are now friends of ours; we see each other socially and enjoy each other's company.
I knew the possibility of losing them. But I tried to let them know what they were going to feel toward me in other settings. I told them those feelings were okay. We talked about them as part of our process.
We may know more about a counselee than anyone else, including spouse or parents. That gives us great opportunity to affirm, to say, in effect, "Even though I know all this about you, you are still a part of us. We will not push you out the door."
Leadership: Does good preaching ever work as preventive counseling, lessening your case load, or does it just invite more counselees to your door?
Danks: Yes. (Laughter) Preaching can be therapeutic, such as when we preach on the necessity and the power to forgive. But caring, sensitive preaching can cause people to think, Here's a person who understands. I'd like to talk to that person.
Gulbranson: Preaching functions preventively if we can help people integrate into their lives what we say from the pulpit. To lay out the biblical truth and not help people make the jump to life creates more problems than it solves.
Leadership: Where's your responsibility as a counselor? Are you responsible for the counselee or to the counselee?
Gulbranson: It's both/and. I'm responsible for my counselees as an undershepherd of the church. And I'm responsible to that individual in handling confidential issues, giving due care, referring competently.
I'm also responsible to create an accountability structure to help the person actually deal with his or her problem. I'm not there as a sponge to soak up whatever the difficulty is and send the person on his way. I need to help create some sense of accountability to the ultimate Shepherd as well.
I worked with a couple dealing with marital infidelity on the husband's part. They're believers, and both wanted understanding. He wanted me to understand his pressures and his wife's responsibility for driving him to that point. She needed understanding and a way to vent anger. I needed to get both of them to recognize their individual responsibility, their responsibility to each other, and what their relationship with God is all about.
Willis: I make a little sharper distinction. I have two goals in the first session: To obtain their confidence, and to say in one way or another, "You are responsible for your behavior. You make yourself act and feel the way you do through the way you perceive things, your faith system. I'm going to try to be as responsive to you and as responsible toward you as I can, but you are responsible for you." I don't say these words, but this is the message I want to get across.
Hart: It's so easy to get caught up with counselees and to feel I can meet all their needs. I think a pastor has a responsibility to stay within the limits of his or her training and to communicate clearly what those boundaries are.
Leadership: What are those boundaries?
Hart: Not to counsel problems you're not skilled at counseling. Typically, not to delve into emotions or bring up early childhood experiences.
A pastor consulted with me recently. He was counseling with a woman and began to dig into her early childhood. He uncovered incestuous activity she had repressed, and having uncovered it, didn't know where to go with it. By then, the client had built a tremendous dependency on him, and he lacked the skills to deal with that. It became a serious crisis.
Leadership: What did he do?
Hart: He and the client made a transition to another counselor by first attending together. But that pastor should have realized the limits of his training much earlier. That's part of the responsibility of any pastor who counsels.
Willis: Right out of seminary, it's seductive to have people come to you and divulge all sorts of private material. We gain access to people's most hidden thoughts, acts, fantasies. That's really stimulating stuff the first few times we have that happen to us. We can get seduced like voyeurs.
We have to draw some lines by asking ourselves, Am I serving my own selfish needs by listening to this? Or should I refer this?
Danks: One of my most liberating experiences was to realize it's not denying Christ's power to say, "I can't handle this." If Jesus Christ is truly Lord, he can work through the psychologist and the counselor and the therapist. It's not a denial of his lordship to refer; it's an affirmation of it. It was freeing to see I wasn't failing my Lord when I acknowledged my limits; I was honoring the Lord by sending people to proper resources.
Leadership: What have you learned about referrals?
Danks: I'm not particularly trained as a counselor. What I have is the accumulation of life experience, and the older I get, the more easily I am able to size up the situation and realize the implications. I also recognize my own limitations far more quickly. So I carefully select resources for referral in the broader community.
I meet with counselors individually, often for lunch, and I ask them pointed questions: What's your position on fidelity in marriage? Where are you as far as faith is concerned? I will not refer to a person who doesn't share those basic life convictions.
Hart: I agree. I'd advise never to make a referral to someone you haven't checked out personally. You could be doing more harm than good.
Leadership: What are some of the questions you'd ask if you were thinking of referring someone?
Hart: Primarily the counselor's values, belief system, and moral positions. Is there a good match?
Also, not every counselor is capable of dealing with all problems. They tend to specialize. Therefore, I want to match problem with specialty.
Leadership: Have people checked you out in such a manner?
Hart: All the time. Professionals welcome such arrangements. Pastors are significant referral sources since about 60 percent of people with marginal problems go first to a pastor.
Leadership: How tough can you be in counseling? How confrontational? What kind of leverage do you have?
Gulbranson: A good friend in the trucking business reminds me that you can't drive a twelve-ton truck over a ten-ton bridge. The existing bridge has to be able to support the load you're delivering. I'm sensitive to that with the people I see. I have to address my relationship with them, the history we share, and where we are headed in the future. I need to know if the bridge between us can handle whatever I'm about to deliver.
Leadership: What's an example of your having to gauge the weight limit?
Gulbranson: A number of women who come to our church have known the Lord for some time but are married to husbands who don't share their faith. When a crisis comes, that kind of husband can be very defensive about the role you play in the life of his wife. He's a little afraid of the kinds of things that might be raised in a counseling setting.
I recognize that I've already built a bridge to the wife, but I have to become his friend and let him know that he can share things in that setting, and they'll be handled properly. If I hammer on him relative to his problem, I will have delivered far too heavy a load for him.
Danks: When you're dealing with alcoholism or drug addictions, the confrontational approach is necessary. If you've ever participated in an intervention, that's about as direct as you can get. You give what is close to an ultimatum, and you practically demand a response. I've never been a part of a well-planned intervention where the person hasn't submitted himself or herself to the treatment center.
Hart: The older I get, the more convinced I am that I've got to be more direct and speak honestly. Otherwise, we can waste an awful lot of time.
Consider the area of personal morality. I have a client who is seeing me because a girlfriend no longer wants to be with him. Prior to this, they'd been sleeping together, but the moment he begins to lose her, he suddenly finds God again and swears commitment to him. I warned him that in the next two weeks or so, she'd probably come back.
"Then what are you going to do?" I asked him. I told him what I thought was the right behavior.
Lo and behold, she comes back two weeks later. The first night she's with him, they're back into their activities. The next morning when I see him and he tells his tale, I lay it out honestly: "Unless you're willing to follow the path we agreed to, there's no point in your coming to see me. Why pay me if you're not willing to take my advice?"
The bridge at that point is heavy enough; I've earned the right. But it's far too easy to avoid the issues. Then we aren't helpful.
Willis: We can't spend years um-hmmming our way through counseling. We must get to the root of a problem quickly. We need a directive approach that can work in three to six sessions.
Leadership: How do you maintain both a clear moral stance and a good counseling relationship?
Danks: It's a tension. How do you balance judgment and empathy? How can you welcome a person while at the same time not ignore sin?
I'd say 50 percent or more of the couples coming to me to be married are living together already. How should I respond: "Go someplace else to get married" or "Sit down, and let's talk about it"? And if I'm open to marrying them, does that mean I condone their morality? I don't find an easy answer.
In almost every situation, my one prayer is for discernment: Is this the watershed issue where you say, "This far, and no farther"? Or can we work something out? At times I have compromised where other people's conduct is concerned-such as setting aside the fact a couple is living together in order to try to win them to Christ.
Hart: As a pastor, you're going to be misquoted by some of those people: "Oh, I've shared that with him, and he said it was okay." You didn't say that, but it may get reported that way.
Many people go to a pastor with their wrongdoings, hoping the pastor will say they're okay and alleviate their guilt. With a secular counselor, that dynamic isn't as prominent. But the pastor who appears to be compromising Christian values could very well be working against the welfare of that individual.
Gulbranson: I had a couple that had been living together for a year come to see me. They were related to someone in the church, and they asked if I would be involved in their marriage. I asked why they wanted to be married in the church, and they replied, "We want God's blessing on our life together."
I said, "If God's blessing is the key issue, then let's address how God offers it and how you've approached it to this point." As it turned out, that couple did come into a personal relationship with Christ and were able to start their marriage at that level. In situations like this, we can care for the people while still addressing the sin.
Leadership: Can you counsel somebody you don't like?
Hart: I think so. But every time I sit with someone I don't like, it becomes an issue for my own personal growth. You see, if I don't like that person, there's something at fault within me. I could be projecting onto them all sorts of issues that don't really belong.
Interestingly, the clients I disliked the most to begin with often have turned out to be the ones I've appreciated the most toward the end of counseling. I think I work harder at the counseling process with those individuals. When I like someone, I may not work as hard.
Leadership: How do you prepare for counseling the unlikable?
Danks: First, I fight like crazy the tendency to avoid them. Second, I make it a specific and sincere matter of prayer that my uneasiness with them won't be communicated. Third, I try to find something about them that we have in common. Maybe they root for the Dodgers, too, or like Woody Allen movies. Usually I can find something in them I like.
Gulbranson: Matthew 25 rings in my ears at times like that: "If you've done it unto the least of these, you've done it unto me." Then I realize I'm responding to the Lord Jesus in this situation.
Hart: But the reality is that inevitably there's someone you can't work with. When that's the case, you have to acknowledge it and find someone else to help.
Leadership: How do you determine the line between someone you'd prefer not to associate with and someone you shouldn't take on?
Hart: When I'm so struggling within myself about that person that it becomes detrimental to his or her care, I need to rethink my continuing in that counseling relationship. When there's more therapy going on for me than for that individual, I'm not serving his or her best interests.
Willis: A good tip-off is when you dread their coming in, and the dread doesn't go away.
Leadership: How do you tell someone you don't think you can work together?
Danks: I apply the concept of professional limitations: "Things have arisen in this counseling situation that are beyond my ability to help. For your welfare, I think the best thing is for you to see So-and-so." That throws the blame on me rather than them, so it doesn't add to their guilt.
Leadership: How about people you really like-are you on dangerous ground when you look forward to somebody coming in?
Hart: Absolutely. If I dislike a person or if I'm overly enamored of a person-they're both danger signals.
Leadership: Everyone would agree that sexual attraction is a danger signal. But how about people you simply find enjoyable, interesting, stimulating. Is that still a problem?
Hart: Sometimes when I'm dealing with a complex problem and feel I'm gaining on it-say, a severe depression that is getting resolved-there is an enjoyment factor involved. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a personal liking of someone, what we call a "positive counter-transference."
When that's the case, I need to ask myself, Why am I so enamored? The more I like that person, the greater is the gap between my service to that individual and my service to the other person I don't like so much.
Leadership: I imagine you have counseling cases where the people seem to be getting nowhere. In what kinds of cases is that common?
Willis: Sociopaths-the hardcore con artists and manipulators whose consciences just seem not to have developed. I can't say such people are hopeless, but your odds of being able to help them are way off the sheet.
Hart: Personality disorders and psychotic disorders present problems that pastors probably shouldn't try to handle, other than in a supportive role. I'm thinking of such things as full-blown paranoid schizophrenia-blatant craziness. Persons like these are hallucinating; they're out of touch with reality.
For example, an engineer came to see me because he believes he's always being watched. He works for a government research agency, so there is some FBI surveillance, but here is a man who goes into a supermarket, sees the camera up in the corner, and is sure it's an FBI agent. He goes to make a Xerox copy in the store, and somebody takes the copy away to the back room, where he's convinced the FBI is waiting to make a copy of it. Outwardly he appears normal, but listen to him spin the web of conspiracy, and you know it is blatant paranoia.
A doctor can fix that in a matter of days with appropriate medication. So, it's utterly impractical for a pastor to get caught up in counseling someone like that.
Willis: Manic-depressive psychosis is another intractable problem for pastoral counselors. In the manic state, these people are out of control. You practically have to scrape them off the ceiling. They're full of projects; they're going to fix the world.
Gulbranson: This sounds like a typical seminary grad. (Laughter)
Hart: Let me give you an example. A woman comes out of depression in the hospital and goes home. But as she drives home, she becomes manic. She determines that all the street signs are pointing the wrong way, so she spends the whole day going from corner to corner physically turning the signs around. And then her mood crashes again, and she becomes depressed.
People like this really shouldn't be in most pastors' counseling schedules. The reason is simply to conserve one's energy and resources. The pastor, being a free counselor, is often overutilized and abused by these people. Pastors shouldn't feel guilty about not being able to help these people.
Danks: One of the first questions I ask is, "When was the last time you had a complete physical?" For many, it's been years. If so, I'll say, "Let's get you to the doctor to see what he can find." The physical side of emotional problems is coming out more and more.
Leadership: For the church, is counseling and therapy an end in itself? Or is it a means to a greater institutional end?
Hart: Counseling is not the end, but church life and the spiritual walk had better make a difference or else they're of no value. Preaching and teaching that don't show how the resources of the gospel meet the needs of the human condition are just instruction for instruction's sake.
Danks: The word for salvation means health and wholeness. That's the very dynamic of our message-to bring about this wholeness.
Leadership: A number of pastors resist counseling because, as one said, "It always deals in the backcourt and rarely makes its way into the forecourt." Is the goal merely healing, or is the church supposed to make people productive, fully devoted Christians who are reproducing themselves in others?
Willis: I don't like the either/or part of the question. Which do we do-get people whole or get people reaching out to others? Isn't reaching out part of wholeness? We stop short if we just get people's self-esteem pumped up. That's only half of the task.
Hart: I question whether it's sound psychology to address self-esteem by trying to make people feel better. I don't know anyone who has moved to better self-esteem without a challenge.
Gulbranson: I see the end as a right relationship with God, which includes being in right relationship with myself and others, according to Jesus' statement in Matthew 22. That's the goal not only in the lives of individuals, but also for the congregation.
Willis: I think the end is agape, and I consider justice as agape distributed. Love gets distributed in seeing that other people get treated fairly.
Leadership: People bring heavy emotional loads to you. How do you keep their problems from overwhelming you?
Danks: Our society today is impersonal. Life is so cheap that we talk casually about someone being "blown away." In such a world, we need people who, as a part of their responsibility in life, will carry the burdens and wounds of other people and be outraged by them.
If that's part of what it means to be a pastor, then so be it. That's the cost. We need more people like that. In Isaiah 53 we hear of the Lamb who "bore our griefs and carries our sorrows." If we're going to walk in the way of Christ, that's a part of it.
So the answer for me is not to walk away and forget. The answer for me is to help carry some of the burden.
But I also have the other side. I visit not only the oncology ward but also the maternity ward. I get strokes a therapist never gets. The balance keeps me sane.
Hart: I'd take issue with this notion of burden bearing. Pastors can become surrogate messiahs from a faulty understanding of sympathy. Feeling people's pain is not the only way to help them. Often pastors feel guilty if they walk away from a problem and don't feel appropriately miserable. That's neurotic.
Danks: But if you've lost a child, you will never minister the same way to someone who's lost a child, because you've been there. I lost an 18-year-old son, and I can no longer approach it in a detached, "professional" manner. If a family has lost a child, I know what they're going through.
Hart: But your sympathy is not helpful to a person. What's helpful is empathy, which focuses on understanding. Sympathy focuses on the feeling of pain. If having experienced the pain helps you be a better listener, it's helpful. But if it simply makes you feel their pain more, then it's not helpful.
When I'm hurting, the last thing I want is the additional burden of feeling that my hurt is now also hurting someone else.
Leadership: Does the Holy Spirit ever use a pastor's tears to be God's tears? An arm around the shoulder, our body posture, to be God's?
Gulbranson: At times, yes. But there are times to hold back tears. Right before my first sermon in my first pastorate, a young man left the service, went home, and took his own life. Going into that situation, I couldn't identify with all of the factors involved. There were people far more able to get close and offer the comfort of an arm around the shoulder.
The family needed from me a clear, steady voice. I felt the Spirit directing me to 2 Corinthians 1 and that time of despair in the apostle Paul's life-what works when life doesn't. They didn't need my tears. They needed a clear voice. I cried the next day.
Hart: I cry with some patients. When I comprehend the depth of someone's suffering-a mother whose daughter kills her father and then blows her own brains out, and the mother now is angry at the daughter and yet doesn't understand-I shed tears. Some whole sessions I cry. But at no point do I sense my crying is necessarily helpful.
Willis: Nurses traditionally have been taught to be unemotional, detached clinicians, like Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In the last twenty years, that has changed. Now nurses are given permission to feel. It's okay to shed a tear.
I know from my experience with grieved parents, there's nothing they mention more, even years later, than "that day in the room when the nurse had a tear in her eye." There's nothing more precious to them than that the person who took care of their child not only was professional and clinical, but also cared.
The image that's been helpful to me is a harpist. The fingers have to get callused, tough enough that they don't bleed every time you touch the strings. And yet they've got to stay tender enough to feel every nuance of the strings. So we're looking for balance: we care, but we don't go to pieces every time we get involved in heavy situations.
Gulbranson: I counseled a couple through a marriage difficulty for several months, and when it began to look as if the marriage would still fall apart, the wife said to me, "I feel so bad for you after you've put so much into this!"
"No. No," I said. "You've got that wrong. Don't feel sorry for me. We need to recognize the realities here." I don't want to foster a feeling that this is for me.
Leadership: Ed, you don't appear weighed down by heavy burdens, and yet you help bear them. How do you keep their weight from smothering you?
Danks: Every pastor needs a support group. I have two. One is all clergy, and the other is a wonderful group of ten men that I've been with every Thursday morning for ten years now. And my wife helps, too.
Nobody but the mortician sees more death than the pastor. And nobody but the doctor sees more illness than the pastor. Nobody but the lawyer or judge sees more domestic tragedy than the pastor. And on and on it goes. Yet the pastor has all of those at once.
We have to develop some system of transference, whether it's "casting all our care on the Lord, for he cares for us," or support groups or alternative activities.
Willis: We also need to take care of our bodies. Our bodies talk to our minds. A body says to the mind either, "Hey, life's pretty good down here. Thanks for taking care of me," or, "Have mercy! Get a little more fresh air, and quit sending down so much bad stuff." Part of unburdening is listening to our bodies and developing good habits like eating well, jogging, swimming . . .
Hart: Sleeping!
Willis: . . . walking in the woods. We can be doing everything else right, but if we're neglecting our bodies, they have a way of doing us in.
Hart: Training and expertise also help prevent burnout. A physician dealing with oncology is less prone to burnout than someone unskilled to deal with it. It is helplessness that produces burnout, not human pain.
Why do so many pastors hate counseling (96 percent in our studies)? I think it's because they don't feel adequate to the task.
Gulbranson: That makes sense. We need a balance between compassion and confidence.
I recognize how many times I've been through the death process with people. Because of the number of such cases, I feel somewhat competent to handle the issues. I still feel for the loved ones, but my confidence makes a big difference. I've been there before.
Hart: The clinical problem I'm most effective with is depression. Sometimes I wonder how I can sit all day with depressed people and enjoy it, but I do! The reason is, I know what I'm doing. I know there's light at the end of this tunnel. I'm not helpless in the face of great need.
Danks: Many of the people I run into live a two-dimensional life: what they think and what they can feel. The reality of the spiritual is tangential at best. It's not until they encounter a difficult experience their two-dimensional life cannot interpret that the gospel looms as a grand alternative to the tremendous void of emptiness.
Talk to two-dimensional persons about the living Christ, and they'll inform you that they're doing fine. Until they get that terrible shock-"Cancer!" or "You've lost your job"-they've had the inner personal human resources to handle whatever came along. But now there's a void, and into that void we can inject life's great reality: the presence of the Lord God.
I want to be ready at that moment.
Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
