“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.

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