Counselors

Yuta Sakamoto was exhausted from selling home-improvement projects, including the boss’s demand that he help clean up at renovation sites on weekends. One day, he mustered his courage and announced he wanted to quit. But his boss warned him he would be ruining his future, and Sakamoto shrank back.

Then a friend proposed a solution. Sakamoto didn’t have to confront the boss again—he could hire someone to do it for him. After sending $200 and his case details to a quitting agency, he was finally a free man.

“I would have been mentally broken if I had continued,” says 24-year-old Sakamoto, who found a new job as a salesman at a printing firm.

A labor shortage in Japan means underpaid or overworked employees have other options nowadays. The problem: this famously polite country has a lot of people who hate confrontation. Some worry they’ll cause a disruption by leaving, or they dread the idea of co-workers gossiping about what just transpired in the boss’s office.

Enter a company called Exit. Toshiyuki Niino co-founded it to help people quit after experiencing his own difficulties in leaving jobs. “Americans may be surprised, but I was too shy or too scared to say what I think,” says Niino, 34. “Japanese are not educated to debate and express opinions.” Exit now handles more than 10,000 cases a year in which its staff quits on behalf of clients.

Possible Preaching Angles:

There are several approaches you might take with this story: 1) Fear and Courage – Learning how to overcome fear with faith and courage (2 Tim. 1:7); 2) Work Ethic – Finding a career that fits with our skills and well-being (Col. 3:23); Wisdom and Guidance – Sakamoto’s friend suggesting the use of a quitting agency illustrates seeking counsel from others when making decisions (Prov. 11:14).

A Glamour magazinevideo asked a number of girls and women on advice they would want from an older person in their life. Here are some of the questions these young women asked:

How do you become who you are today?

What should I not stress about at 14-years-old?

What is the best way to make a decision?

Looking back on your life what did you find most valuable?

What do you do when you realize that your dreams are not actually going to happen?

How do you manage having kids, being married, and having a career?

What is the secret to living a happy life?

Is having children really worth it?

(What are the) secrets to a long and happy marriage?

You can watch the entire 2:30 minute video here.

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is important for mature women to be accessible to answer questions and serve as role models to the young women in our churches. “Older women, likewise, are to be …. teachers of good. In this way they can train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, managers of their households, kind, and submissive to their own husbands …” (Titus 2:3-5).

In his book Bad Religion, Ross Douthat argues that as families have weakened and true friendships have waned, we have tried to fill the vacuum by relying on professional caregivers. Obviously, many of these professionals truly care about their clients, but this trend also indicates a deeper problem. Douthat writes:

As [the philosopher] Ronald Dworkin pointed out … the United States has witnessed a hundredfold increase in the number of professional caregivers since 1950. As of 2023, our society boasts 71,700 clinical psychologists, 728,000 clinical social workers, 388,200 mental health counselors, 71,200 marriage and family therapists, 34,200 life coaches—and hundreds of thousands of nonclinical social workers and substance abuse counselors as well. "Most of these professionals spend their days helping people cope with everyday life problems," Dworkin writes, "not true mental illness." This means that "under our very noses a revolution has occurred in the personal dimension of life, such that millions of Americans must now pay professionals to listen to their everyday life problems."

Douthat concludes: "The result is a nation where gurus and therapists have filled the roles once occupied by spouses and friends."

I have heard often that it is safer to accept counsel than to give it. It can even happen that each one's opinion is good, but to be unwilling to listen to others, when reason or occasion demands, betokens pride and wilfulness.

At a recent meeting, our leader suggested, "None of us is as smart as all of us." Words to live by, I think.

If you were to have psychotherapy, after a brief while you would feel terrific because everything that's negative about you gets transferred over to the therapist. At the end of a session, a good psychotherapist is feeling terrible, and the patient is feeling great because through the process of discussion, everything negative about you has been moved over to the psychiatrist.

Jesus is the ultimate counselor, the ultimate psychotherapist who takes upon himself everything that's dirty, ugly, or rotten--everything that has you down on yourself. He takes it upon himself. He makes it his own. That's the good news of the gospel. You can have the childlike freedom that comes with deliverance from all that is negative and dark. You are able to live life passionately. intensely, and with great excitement.

"Criticism," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, "should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring--a south wind, not an east wind."