a longing for complete: separating life and counseling

“How do you separate your life from all of the problems that you hear and see day in and day out?”

As a counselor, I’ve been asked this question several times by many good hearted people who happen to be expecting an answer quite different than my reality. This question implies that I do separate it, that I have some super power to segregate my thoughts, my feelings, and my life from that of my clients.

Sure…there are days when I am not engulfed in the struggles of depression, attachment disorder, hording, or addiction. However, since beginning my job as a counselor, it’s been hard not to wake up in the middle of the night thinking about each of the families that I work with. I’ll just be getting to sleep, when I’ll loose my superpower to segregate and at an instant think of how I can help someone…how I can completely fix their problems and issues and save my clients from.

One of the most common reasons for someone deciding to become a counselor is just that: longing for change or better put, to see someone’s life go from completely messed up to completely healed. The sad part is that as I wrote that last sentence, it sounds a little unrealistic that my job will ever be “complete”. That is, people have stories that do not always end with a clear benediction, or do not always have an ending that makes sense. Our stories are a lot messier than that.

So what happens we begin to realize the incompleteness of our stories? For me, I tend to run to things in life that I can complete: paperwork, a cup of coffee, a hulu show, or a few weeks ago—hanging a picture frame. Since our move to North Carolina, I have slowly begun to hang things on the walls of our new apartment. After I spent thirty minutes trying to screw some sort of hanging contraption to the wall, making a gapping hole by accident and storming off into another room, it finally hit me: I just wanted to have control of my environment and have something to show for my hard work…something to complete. That’s the biggest struggle I have as a counselor: that pretty much all of my work will never be complete…and I am left with a desire to see the finish.

The truth of the Gospel is the answer to my longing for complete: That I will fail over and over again, but God will still completely love me. He has sent Christ to completely pay for my sins, by completely defeating Satan’s power, and completely rising from the dead to cover me with His grace.

The longing for completeness is in everyone’s heart and in everyone’s story…and it will never be fulfilled by our attempts at controlling our environment or finishing a project. Ironically, I think God longs for us to run into the mess, where we are completely out of control and have to trust in our Him, who has designed us with longings greater than our understanding.

So in short, I can’t answer your question the way that you want me too. It’s just a whole lot messier than that.

our fear of failure: why risk rejection?

Sitting across from people during counseling sessions, I have had the sacred opportunity to listen and give dignity to several stories that are sometimes heavy, and filled with shame. With others, I’ve had the joy of celebrating victories and growth as clients move into new chapters of their lives. Part of what I have learned from these stories is that although each is told by a unique author with a unique plot, the themes of the chapters are similar to stories from other people.

Of the men I have done counseling with, I have seen several guys that struggle with sexual addictions, gender identity issues, and relationship problems in general. Part of becoming a counselor is developing a sense of categories for the struggles that exist in the stories that clients tell. One night I had three sessions in the clinic where I saw men with three very different stories, but heard the same thread throughout each of hours that I spent counseling. Being able to recognize this thread and the categories is crucial to the counseling process, so that when I hear a client’s story, I have the opportunity of speaking to the reality of that thread. One of the categories that I have seen frequently in my clients, and in myself, has been the fear of failure that drives so many of the decisions that we make.

By fear of failure

a photograph, a cup of coffee: moments of grace

Most of my life I have struggled with God’s grace without even knowing what His grace was. Now, at twenty-three, I’ve known what grace is for a few years. I have studied it, written songs about it, tried to soak my heart in it through journaling, had many cups of coffee talking with others about it, and yet it is something I still can’t quite grasp in full. Why God has exchanged my sin for His righteousness is still the biggest mystery to me (even though I know the answer is “Jesus”). It doesn’t really matter how much coffee I drink, I won’t be able to stay up late enough to grasp, in full, His grace.

I wish I could take a picture of grace, stare at it for hours, and be captured eternally by its beauty. I had a dream a several months ago that still is fresh on my mind. I dreamed that I was in a field buried in between several beautiful fall-covered mountains. The sun was shinning, the wind was blowing, and the leaves of the trees blew a warm, yet cool air on my face. In the field with me was a beautiful red-headed little girl whom I was watching after for her parents. In awe of all around me, I tried to take a picture with my camera to capture the moment’s grace so I could remember in full what I had seen. After many attempts at taking the perfect picture, I began to get frustrated and discontent with the camera’s inability to capture and remember the breeze, sunshine, and mountains. Picture after picture, I began to feel a weight being placed on my heart; I felt imprisoned, weak, and incapable of moving. As I took my eyes away from the lens of my camera to look up, I could not see the little red-headed girl. In the open field, all I saw were the mountains, but they no longer were beautiful. I had lost the girl, lost the beauty, and lost hope for the photograph. I stood there imprisoned, longing to run and look for the girl, but unable to do anything at all.

After I woke up, I wondered why I had that dream. After journaling for a while, my conclusion was this: Instead of grace being like a photograph to hold onto, it is a moment that wasn’t intended to be captured. I spend all of my time trying to take the perfect picture, or trying to be perfect, that I miss the point of grace. Grace is grace because it’s not something I have accomplished. Grace is not as cheap as I thought it was. I don’t think I am actually supposed to “grasp” grace, but rather receive it, love it, experience it, and give it to others.

Receiving grace: I have always had an extremely hard time receiving grace from God. Deep in my veins, my blood pumps with legalism that has caused years of guilt and shame. After years of judging many people, the condemnation overflowed onto myself like a title wave of physical and emotional abuse. Most of my days prior to becoming a Christian, I felt like I was in a pitch-dark cave of guilt. Each time I would condemn myself, I was metaphorically striking a match to see where I was going. Every time the match lit up, all I saw was further darkness. Receiving grace is so hard for me. Grace intersected my life, when I realized that God wasn’t worried about my sin, as much as he was worried about me. The year I became a Christian, I read Hebrews 8:12 for the first time: “For I will forgive their wickedness, and remember their sin no more.” I’ll never forget a friend explaining to me “not only does God forgive you and not ‘remember’ your sins, Joel. God also seems you as righteous.” To know that I was a sinner before I became a Christian enslaved me to the law. To know that I am a sinner after becoming a Christian, and knowing that the God of the universe looks at me with compassion, breaks the shackles that I once locked up. Grace was no longer something that had to take a picture of to make it last longer.

Loving grace: I am starting to love grace more. In the past, I hated grace because it wasn’t something that I could do (or grasp). Now, even though I hate being helpless, I also love it when I reach the end of myself and am forced to commune with God. Learning to be a counselor, I am starting to fall more in love with grace. The more brokenness I begin to see in the counseling clinic, the more I know that apart from his grace I can be of no help. In the past I struggled with an addiction to pornography. Many nights, addicted, I would begin filling my loneliness with a one-sided relationship with pornography. I longed to be loved and desired, but it didn’t matter how long I indulged my eyes with lust, the women I lusted after never loved or desired me. It was those nights of enslaving myself to the prison of sin that I would reach my end, helpless over my addiction, shaking with anxiety and guilt. It wasn’t till in the middle of my engagement to my now wife that I stopped to think about what I was really feeling in the midst of the darkness. Sure I was guilty of sin, but underneath was a man longing to be loved and desired. Underlying my sin was a beautiful need: Grace. I needed to know that I was loved and desired by God. Despite my sin, God was crazy about me and I needed to love the grace offered in the gift of the Gospel.

“Even from my sins,” wrote St. Augustine, “God has drawn good.” Learning to love grace is kind of like learning how to be grateful for my sin. I think that grace reaches its fullness in my own heart, when I can become thankful for my own sins. Though I mess up and make mistakes, knowing that God is sovereign and doesn’t make mistakes gives me so much freedom. Ultimately, through learning to be a counselor, I have begun to see that sometimes sin has become the initial movement toward resting in God’s love. One of my first clients had a struggle with pornography. This struggle brought him into the clinic in hopes of defeating his addiction. In time, God used his initial sin struggle to begin to see many of the underlying areas of his life that has now led him to a field of freedom. He has absolutely fallen in love with God’s grace, which has empowered him to become a man who risks in relationships and be vulnerable.

Experiencing and Giving grace: In my first four months of marriage, I have had to ask my wife’s forgiveness probably more than a hundred times. Just like the super-spiritual saying “when two or more gather in His name, He will also be there”…well, when two or more sinners gather, there will be conflict. Dan Allendar said that we are all “sinned against sinners”. Just as must as we have been wounded, we have also wounded other people. Some of my favorite moments with my wife have come after fights; times after we have wounded each other. When we have both come to a point of helplessness and are able to feel the weight of our own sin toward each other, being able to give grace to one another and choose to sit in the chaos of our sin has moved us closer to one another. I think one of the reasons God allowed two sinners to be together was so that we would be able to love each other despite how sinful we truly are. Our covenant on our wedding day was not just with each other, but also with a God who loves us in this same way. For us, grace has been something that we have bumped into through our bumping into each other. In our sins against one another, they have cut to the core of who we are. The grace that we have given each other has had the power to wash out those wounds to provide healing.

Taken by Carrie Jo Pinckard

When I read a book chock full of good stuff, I have a really hard time getting through the book. A big (and self-righteous) part of me wants to retain all that is in the book, apply it to my life, and change me to be perfect Christian. The other (less obvious) part of me would love to simply grasp every morsel of truth in those books so that I don’t have to struggle. I think that’s probably why I have such a hard time with the ambivalence of grace. Because grace is to be bumped into and is found in moments, I hate that I can’t hold on to it because that means that if I can’t retain it, that I will have to rely on God and not myself. I’ve started to see class, books, sermons, and conversations a little different in light of grace. My growth as a Christian, as a counselor, as a person, etc… hasn’t come from my ability to retain all the lectures, points in books, conversations or sermons. My growth has come through those experiences of reading those books, having those conversations, and listening to those lectures or sermons. Being able to give grace to others and myself has brought significant freedom, which in time has caused me to love the Lord more. God has allowed me to experience his grace in moments; moments that remind me of the Gospel- My sin for His righteousness.

my sigma martin guitar: how did we become passionate people?

“Passion can be defined as the deep response of the soul to life: the freedom to rejoice and to weep. One of the most difficult commands to fulfill is to ‘weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice’ (Romans 12:15).”- Dan Allender:Wounded Heart

As I am learning to become a counselor, part of what I am praying for God to do in my heart is to make me more interested in another person’s story; that I would learn to ask better questions, and genuinely care about the answers that are spoken. It’s sad that care and interest doesn’t come natural to me, and that I care so much about what I am saying, but not about what someone is telling me.

I was sitting in the coffee shop this morning, curious as to how one of our “regulars” in the shop became passionate about what he does. I wondered “is there a story behind his interest in teaching music?” I then began to think of my passions, and wondered if there was a story behind any of the things that I love. As you could have probably guessed, I am passionate about a few things: music, coffee, and people. And though I can’t think of a story of how I became a “people person”, my other passion stories revolve around people…

I remember when my dad bought a Sigma Martin acoustic guitar when I was 8 or 9 years old. He was determined to learn how to play it after the music store guy promised that after a few lessons and some practice he would be the next Bob Dylan. After maybe one lesson, and learning how to play the classic “hot cross buns”, I don’t think I ever saw him play the guitar again. For this, I am thankful. For ten years, that guitar sat in our basement and when I was 18 years old [and still trying hard to impress the ladies], I decided it was my turn at the Sigma Martin, and thus embarked on my music journey. I dusted off the old guitar case and took it into my room. Sure, I sucked when I tried to learn “hot cross buns” as well, but for some reason I didn’t mind sucking. I wrote a couple of songs [two horrible songs..probably about girls and how I couldn't get one] before my freshman year of college, and playing guitar became one of my greatest passions. Each year, I have come to love the Sigma Martin more and more..and each year, I have come to love music more and more. I may never be the next Bob Dylan, but with each new song, I have the story of how I started, and I have the stories that I am writing.

So how do we become passionate? How do we care about something, or someone, so much that is becomes a passion?

I wonder if we become passionate when we begin to see someone else’s passion. I wonder if we love something, because we see someone else love something (reminds me of the Donald Miller quote below). Here’s to coffee shops and guitars!

“I never liked jazz music… because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that, I liked jazz music.
Sometimes you have to watch someone love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.”- Donald Miller: Blue Like Jazz

suffering

I thought it would be good to take a quick moment to add an addendum or quote to my theology bank of how people change. a quote from the Dan Allendar book, Wounded Heart:

“Real life requires death. Death involves the experience of suffering. Suffering is required for growth. Even the Son of God was required to suffer in order to enter the fulfillment of His maturity and mission:

In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, whould make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering…although he was a son, [Jesus] learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. (Hebrew 2:10; 5:8-9)

Suffering is equally necessary for us because it strips away the prescence that life is reasonable and good, a pretense that keeps us looking in all the wrong places for the satisfaction of our souls.”

I love and hate this quote.

First, I hate this quote simply because it says “suffering is necessary for growth”. I love this quote because I know that this must mean that we live is a world where we can grow.

how do people connect: a messy cup of coffee

When I think about opening a coffee shop, my biggest hope is that it would be an opportunity for people to connect. For the old couple to read the Sunday paper together, the indie kids to smoke their cigarettes, the businessman to go an extra block out of his way to be a “regular”, or even a grad student to be by himself and connect with the solitude and French press coffee.

My biggest struggle with a chain coffee shop is also its biggest “strength”: They are everywhere. They consider this the best marketing plan on the face of the planet, and rightly so. Chains, like Starbucks, make tons on money and makes coffee easily accessible to millions of people. But if I wanted to simply provide coffee in my coffee shop, I would be failing to accomplish my hope of connecting people [not to say that people can’t connect at a Starbucks]. So… how do people connect?

A book from one of my counseling class says, “Relationships are often cemented by moving or hazardous adventures.” I think what this means is that a way people connect is by doing stuff together (particularly moving or hazardous). The truth is that we get to know someone is that we go through things with him or her: We suffer through 10th grade chemistry, go to concerts in the middle of the week, sky dive without our parents permission, or drink coffee together. Relationships don’t always paint such a beautiful picture. Sometimes we fail our chemistry class, the speakers blow out at the concert, or our shoot doesn’t open. What I am getting at is that “going through stuff together” is what develops relationships. And yes relationships are messy, but there is intimacy in the messiness.

In class the other day, my professor said that “there is intimacy in the messiness; there is value to conflict, causing connectiveness.” If God created us for relationships, which I wholly believe, God had to figure out a way for us to be in relationship with one another. God choose to connect us with one another the same way that he chose to connect us with Himself: messiness.

Think of the Gospel and its messiness on so many different levels. For one, the Gospel is messy because of how ridiculously messy the cross is. Jesus took on the entirety of our sin and bore it alone on the cross…all of our shame, all of our messiness…He bled out on the cross. More specifically, the way that we connect with God is through a [messy] relationship with Christ. Though we deserved the messy death that Christ died, our relationship is pretty messy with Him (messy in a good way). Trying to explain the Gospel in itself even gets messy. But when understood, that messiness…the life that comes out of the Gospel’s messiness… brings us into a relationship with the living God. God created a way to be a just God and deal with injustice (our sin). But when picked apart, the messiness is absolutely beautiful. Through Christ’s death and resurrection, God connects with us; He loves us and creates a way for us to love Him back.

Okay…Okay… so how does all that connect with becoming a counselor to open up a coffee shop? Honestly, I think that in order to understand community, you must understand how people connect. We connect over coffee, not just for coffee. We connect over coffee filled with stories and life experiences bringing us into relationships. Relationships are not formed through one conversation, or cup of coffee, but many conversations and lots of coffee. With that said, in order to connect people together (particularly in a coffee shop), there needs to be more than coffee. There needs to also be a giving of yourself…thus beginning a messy relationship leading to connectiveness.

a story of freedom

Last night I was trying to remember ten things in my life that impacted me the most. I had a really hard time trying to think of even one thing. In my frustration, I wondered why I forget all the things I go through. Its as if sometimes I wonder if I have ever been through anything; if I have ever truly struggled, or been broken. As I become a counselor, and learn how to help broken people, I become more envious of the people coming into counseling, broken and in dire need of help. It’s a weird feeling really, because part of me knows that I have been through suffering, and am still suffering. On the other hand, I don’t want to go through any more trials than I have already been through. As I thought about it for a while, I did eventually begin to remember all the color from my life: almost dying in a skiing accident, the day when I stared at a painting for four hours, the afternoon when I understood God’s unconditional grace, the suicide note that got slipped under my door as an RA, getting sick after having a cigar and a good conversation with my dad, or even the night that God redeemed my relationship with Kate. I guess I wonder why I forget to live in light of these stories. Why do I forget as I live life with people not to go back to their stories? Why do I forget the Gospel daily? Maybe the reasons why I forget the stories are because I am supposed to forget them. Maybe I am supposed to fall down, skin my knees, and even bleed a little. My story is not completely redeemed, but one day it will be. For now, I am left with a sense of longing for redemption, longing for beauty, longing to live in light of these stories, and forced to continue to write and rewrite new stories.

One of the stories that I remember began on a Friday afternoon after a night of frustration and lack of peace. Kate and I had talked for the first time since we had broken up and my heart for her was strong and yet at the same time completely helpless, because I couldn’t do anything to make her love me. I got in the car that day after leaving the coffee shop off of Broad Street in downtown Rome. Jonah, an adventurous friend of mine, had told me he had taken the byway a few days before and that it was the end-all cure for a heart of unrest. As my tires hit the road I knew that it was where I was suppose to be…so I drove and finally reached the blue byway signs that Jonah had told me to follow through the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. As I reached the byway, I slowed the car to a smooth 45, set my cruise control and completely soaked in the miles of farmland, mountains, and an open road that supposedly led me back to where I started after a two-hour drive. Previously while I was at the coffee shop, I had written the word “Love” on my wrist with a black Sharpie to remind me of a passage I had just read from Paul’s letter to the Romans. I wanted to set my mind on what I was driving for: I was trying to find peace from God and to be comforted by His love show. It seemed like God had sovereignly placed me on the road as each transition between songs also marked the transition of the wind’s direction. I was free. Free from frustration, life, and confusion. Free to pull off my blue-signed marked path at any time. And I did. About an hour in to the drive I pulled off the road onto some gravel to what seemed to wind around the mountain for miles. I had only been on the gravel road a minute to drive to the top, as a red pick up truck was just getting its start on the one lane trail behind me. I reached the top and saw something I had scene a couple of years back with my friend Jeff. I don’t know how we ended up there, but it was at night and wasn’t as glorious as it was this time. The gravel road had led me for twenty minutes to a beautiful overlook of the drive that I had just taken to get there. The overlook opened up a gap between the hills and created a gorgeous valley with the sun shinning brightly and silently through the calmed wind. A few minutes later, the gravel under the tires of the red pick up casually broke the silence. I soaked the scenery in, that couldn’t really be caught with a camera if I had tried. I looked down at my wrist at my Sharpie tattoo, as man and woman in their late fifties stepped out of their truck. I smiled as the man without a shirt and beer belly greeted me and commented on the beautiful film that we were all watching unfold between the hills. Just then, the same air blew into our three sets of lungs.

To make conversation, I smiled back at them both, and took my glasses off. I noticed their torn clothing and the man’s Jeff Gordon hat covering his greasy hair and asked them where they had driven from to get to the overlook. They both turned and looked at each other and slightly laughed under their breath. As the man, Christian, pulled out an old digital camera to take a picture of the beauty, he told me that he and the woman, Sherrie has been living in the Pocket for the past few months. I remembered now that my friend Jeff and I had camped in the Pocket, a free camp ground on the side of a riverbed 50 minutes or so from campus. At this point I realized that living for three months in the Pocket didn’t mean that they were on an over night camping trip, but were homeless. Interested, I asked how had it been? Homelessness that is. Sherrie smiled and said that she and Christian has lost their jobs a while back and had been slowly running out of money when they found a place to park their camper and live for while. Sherrie and Christian both said they liked it and had felt very freed from the burdens that they has accumulated over the years. Now their only bill was the red pick up’s gas tank and the hot dogs for the campfire. I was in awe, kind of jealous actually, but more so interested in what their life was like. Christian was about to leave and walk back toward the truck when I realized why I was at the overlook: to experience freedom. I had stopped before going to the coffee shop and cashed a paycheck and felt God’s nudge pushing me to give some of the money that I would have just spent going out to eat. I asked Sherrie how she paid for gas. With her beautiful worn face she told me that Christian got work every now and then on construction sites, ten dollars here, twenty dollars there… “Can I give you some cash for your tank?” I asked. Christian stopped walking on the gravel toward the truck and in confusion asked why I would want to give them money for gas. I looked at them both as the wind blew the dust from the gravel across my bare feet. I smiled and looked down at my wrist. I told them that I thought I was supposed to be there to meet them both and that they had a lot more faith than I did. As I began to tell them about becoming a believer a few years back, Christian stopped me from sharing the Gospel I believed in and began to share it with me instead. Sherrie told me that she had just become a Christian a few weeks before, when she had felt God tugging on her heart to surrender to Him. When telling me their story, they both preached to me the freedom and love of God. Christian felt like God had been sovereign over his hardships and put him in his homelessness to impact and love people that most people didn’t love. They both could sense something or someone was heavy on my heart and asked if I wanted someone to talk to. Something was heavy and someone was on my heart. I thanked them and said that I was encouraged by what they said, but needed to get back on the road. They invited me down for some hot dogs, but I opted not to delay the ride back. As my tires hit the one lane gravel road going back down the hill, my eyes started to water and I realized that God was sovereign over my trip. I felt freedom and love. It was therapy and the therapy continued as the songs continued and the air outside hit my fingers. Love covers a multitude of sin and its ironic when you think you are about to share the Gospel with a homeless couple, when instead they share it with you. Christian and Sherrie were tools of the Lord’s freedom and love for His Children. I pulled back onto the main road and as I followed the blue signs back home it was like a freight train hit my heart. I didn’t know what it was, but God slowly began to take the thorn out of my flesh and give me confidence in His work in Kate’s heart. There was freedom in the unknown, but more freedom in surrendering to the will of God.

The next day I took Kate with me on the byway and told her to let the byway show her freedom, as I had experienced it. When we exited on the gravel road that led to the overlook, I began to tell her the story of Christian and Sherrie. We sat and looked over the valley and mountains and then walked on a beaten path to a rock with the same view. We sat and talked there for hours. It was like falling in love all over again. And it really didn’t make sense to anyone else why I would take Kate up there, or better yet why she would even go with me in the first place. But there was color in the story, and though it seemed gray to others, it made complete sense in our heads. So we sat there and probably confused things more. But it was freeing and I thought that it could be the beginning of getting back together. The day was awesome, confusing, and free.

Looking back at the drive and where I am now in my relationship with Kate, I think that day was the beginning of God redeeming my relationship with her. I am not sure, but I hope it was. The truth though is that each story that I began to tell led to another story that wasn’t quite redeemed. The story of the drive led to the day after, and the day after led to the day after that. It’s one story that reminded me of this story to begin with. This story wasn’t about God introducing me to Christian and Sherrie, but rather it was an introduction to a preface of another story that God was waiting to redeem. See, this story preceded four months more of unrest of mine and Kate’s relationship. That is how stories work; they are rabbit trails trying to get back to a climax, or redemption, or an overlook of freedom.

how do people change: redemption in the midst of brokenness

Last night I sat in a coffee shop and asked the question, “how do people change?” I only asked a few people how they thought people would change, and they all had different responses. I’m sure that if I continued to ask this question, I would continue to get an array of answers. And to be honest, I think I have adjusted and will continue to adjust my response to that question as I grow into a counselor. I used to think that it was easy for people to change. I always treated change as something that was simply a choice. If a person really wanted to change he could just stop abusing drugs, withhold his violent anger from his four-year-old daughter, or quit watching porn online till five in the morning. One thing I have learned is that change is a lot deeper than how someone stops doing one thing and then begins acting differently. I think before we change, we must also uncover the layer beneath the surface of how people get into trouble in the first place. With that said, I will try to explain where I stand currently on the questions of “how do people get into trouble?” and follow it with “how do people change?”.

How do people get into trouble?

When it comes to trying to understand how people get into trouble, the answer is complex. However, instead of trying to cover all of the different facets of what causes problems, I want to suggest an over arching theme of the problems: broken relationships in broken community. RTS’s counseling program has the motto “its relationships that get us into trouble, and it is in relationships that we are healed”. Not to steal from RTS, even though I am sold on their vision, but relationships really do cause problems. However, it is not just relationships that cause problems, its brokenness within those relationships that are expressed in a broken community.

I used to think that I wasn’t sinful. I also used to think that I could keep myself from sinning, or if for some reason I did fall into sin, I could pay for it myself. Looking back at the point in my life where I actually believed that I wasn’t sinful, I see now that my belief that I wasn’t sinful was actually sin in itself. I think that the reason why we say “relationships are what get you into trouble” is because very sinful people develop relationships. The honest truth is that we have broken every commandment that God gave us. Even if we haven’t sinned externally, we have sinned in our hearts. Not only have we all sinned, but we have also all been sinned against. If you have ever been prideful (which you have), if you have ever lusted (which you have), if you have ever hated someone (which you have), if you have ever judged someone (which you have), you have sinned against someone else. If you have sinned against someone else, you have also been sinned against. We have abused other people and other people have abused us.

We live in broken communities, because we live with broken people (including ourselves). The reason why we can’t stop abusing drugs, abusing our children, or abusing ourselves with pornography is because we live in a fallen world and are depraved. Like Adam and Eve, we long for the apple and do not long for God. While we desire to do change, we more so desire to not change. Paul feels the weight of this battle between flesh and the spirit when he cries out in Romans “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep doing (Romans 7:18-20).” We “get into trouble” because sin is all that we know. The reason why sin is what gets us into trouble in the context of communities, such as friends or family, is the way that we deal with our sin within those communities.

I think that a broken community has a few key faults: an absence of freedom, grace, and unconditional love. Broken community is restrictive and closed off. I say “absence of freedom” because problems arise within communities when there is no freedom to talk openly about sin, when there is no one in your life that you can be real with. A closed community is one that doesn’t speak to feelings and essentially does not deal with sin. I think that the saddest problems the majority of families face (even Christian families) is that we do not speak to the struggles of the individuals within community. We are afraid of knowing and speaking to other’s sins, and we are terrified of having our own sin exposed and spoken to. We are ambivalent in that we long and desire to be known, but we also long and desire to not be known.

A broken community also has an absence of grace. When sin does come to the surface of the table, it is handled without grace and is seen as a bloodstain on a community t-shirt. A classic example of this is the teenage daughter who “stains” the family by having premarital sex and getting pregnant. Instead of approaching their pregnant daughter with grace, mom and dad approach her sin with condemnation and bring guilt upon the sinner. This absence of grace has flooded our broken communities of friends, our broken families, and unfortunately, even our more than broken churches. Does a sinner need to repent? Yes. But behind the sin is a deeper longing, and this deeper longing (such as intimacy, or relationship) should be handled with grace.
Lastly, a broken community does not love unconditionally. Unconditional or selfless love is done in action along side of freedom and grace. If we are open about sin with each other and are given grace despite our sinfulness, love will become the centerpiece of the community. The problem in broken communities is that everyone is approaching community to receive love, not to give it. If everyone is only at the table to receive love, who is there to provide it? To sum up, a broken community is depravity without redemption.

How do people change?

If problems arise because of faulty community, then change should take place in good community. If bad community is the absence of freedom, grace, and selfless love, then good community encompasses three counter points: a community that exposes sin, shows undeserving grace, and loves selflessly. This morning, I had coffee with Michael, a friend I have come to know and love since I moved to Orlando. Michael and I spent two hours talking about our sin and struggles that we have faced over the past couple of months. By the end of the conversation I felt like our community with each other had moved forward. Good community is about having someone to be real and honest with. Good community is one where people truly know the heart of the other person, even if it is full of sin. While we shouldn’t always talk about negative things in community, I would rather a friend struggling with depression come to me and talk about his depression, rather than smile through the pain. One of my favorite quotes from class this semester has been “Jesus Christ did not die on the cross so that we could pretend to be ‘happy’.” We have the freedom to talk about sin openly and we were created to do this. Good community receives that sin with grace.

My roommate, Josh, told me that grace is “undeserved favor”. When an exposed sinner is received with favor, instead of condemnation, something deep in their hearts should take place. I think of the ex-convict, Jean Valjean, in Les Misérables, who changed his ways after stealing from the Bishop Myriel, after Myriel showed him undeserving favor by not turning him in to the police: “It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!” Instead of condemning Jean Valjean and seeing his “stains”, Myriel looks at him with compassions, which in time would expose the deeper longings of his heart.

Lastly, good community is about people caring for each other more than themselves. Selfless love clothes freedom and grace. Unless there is love, there is no grace and there is freedom, for they cannot act apart from love. In counseling, I would refer to this as rapport, or a built relationship. Apart from a relationship full of selfless love, another person will not have the freedom to remove the layers of fog covering his sin. Finally, the “favor” in “undeserved favor” is love, and love is what enables someone to show grace.

How does this integrate with Scripture?

I have learned a lot about myself in the counseling program. One thing that I have learned is that I experience God the most in community. I think this is the way He has made me, as well as the way that He is. What I have tried to do in paragraphs above is give you an outside view of what a good community looks like. While I believe that good community is possible and that change should (but doesn’t always) take place in those communities, I think that the only perfect example of community is found in the Godhead, or the Trinity. The Trinity is God Himself pouring into Himself. The trinity is perfect and the only community that fully exposes the sins of the world, shows undeserving grace, and loves selflessly through the perfect and powerful death and resurrection of Jesus Christ on the cross.

The cross was not a quick fix to sin. If anything the cross is the perfect example of change happening after intense suffering, not only physically, but also spiritually. On the cross, God revealed his selfless love by graciously transferring all of our sin on to His righteous Son, while transferring all of His righteousness to us, undeserving sinners. Christ bore the complete weight of our sins, and thus was completely exposed and completely died. As we all know, the story doesn’t end there and three days later Christ rose from the dead changing the way God deals with sin. The point I am trying to make is that suffering (on the cross) and redemption (His resurrection), through this perfect community, brought about change. I think that change happens in the context of redeemed communities and redeemed relationships, particularly with God and His children. These relationships (or communities) are marked with freedom, with grace, and with love.

leaving room for cream and sugar

I like my cup of coffee black. I haven’t always liked it this way, but it didn’t take long for me to enjoy the fullness freshly roasted oil filled coffee beans from all over the world. There is something about drinking a cup of black coffee that makes me feel cleansed. Coffee somehow hits this spot within my soul, opens it up, and provides room for something else. These days, I drink/make coffee, to provide room for a conversation, a counseling theory, or some theological issue I struggle with.

One thing that I have learned since I started studying counseling is that everything is on a continuum. Whether it be politics (left or right), music tastes, how reformed your church is, infant baptism or believers baptism…or for this metaphor’s sake, black coffee or making room for cream and sugar. Often, my ideology is very similar to my style of drinking coffee. Black and white. I enjoy my black cup of coffee, and therefore fall to the far left side of the coffee/cream continuum. Deep within my soul I also long for things to be black and white, right or wrong, fact or fiction, all grace or all law, free or not free. Each side of the continuum tugs on my heart, leaving me tired, confused, and anxious to find out whether or not my black coffee will suffice. Is there such thing as a “right” or a “wrong” (Is there a ? Or should we leave room for the grey? This is where the cream comes in.

I think many times in my life I try too hard to figure things out, find absolute truth in every area. Don’t get me wrong, I think that there is absolute truth. Some of it I can know, and some of it I can’t know. With that said, maybe life [on earth] isn’t so black and white. I think that the continuum battle is worth fighting in. Not because we will leave the fight with a right or wrong, but hopefully we can rather walk away with a peace of knowing that we can’t understand everything. Hopefully we can walk away with a longing for Truth, who is the Redeemer. For now, I will drink my black coffee, and learn love the “regulars” that walk with the coffee shop who need a little room for cream.

first cup o joe

Several years ago I discovered that one of my favorite past times was people watching. In a small town south west of Atlanta, I frequented a small coffee bar and became a “regular” fairly quickly. I remember taking multiple afternoons away from everything to grab a cup of coffee and watch people as they came in and out of the coffee shop. Occasionally I would pull out a spiral notebook, which I would later call a journal, and began writing about the interactions that I saw. I cannot really come up with a lot of reasons for why I enjoyed doing this other than the fact that I love stories.

Eventually by the time I was a junior in high school the coffee shop owner, Bill, gave me a job as a barista to work on a couple of school nights and the weekends. The coffee shop became my outlet; a place I could come home to, and that I still go home to when I am spending a holiday weekend with my parents. If “home” is truly “where the heart is”, my heart was there. But what made my heart there were the stories. Meeting a new person at the coffee shop was like adding a new chapter to my own life. As Bill gave me more hours, and my lattes began tasting right, the stories of people began infiltrating my story.

I have found that I experience God the most in community. There truly is something that happens when two people begin to share stories, or better yet a conversation over coffee. Ever since the day I walked into the coffee shop, I have wanted to own one of my own. Whether it was the people, the art from the locals on the wall, or the open mic nights where I would hear Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin” three or four times, I am not sure. I just know that it is where my heart is. Because He is the God that is within us, He is also present in our communities and our stories.

As I embark on this journey to open up a coffee shop, I am currently going through the masters of counseling program at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. I am also working part-time at a coffee shop. The following stories will be from these experiences.