Christian Counseling Today Vol. 21, Iss. 2

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christian counseling today Vol. 21 no. 2 75
to relinquish our own egotistical,
misguided need to fix, preach or heal.
Such times with people will grow
our humility as finite lovers of God,
acknowledging that we find much of the
human mind a fallen and mysterious
place… including our own. A simple
verse or admonition or instruction for
greater faith will not cure mental illness.
If it was that easy, none of us would
struggle with lust or gossip or anger or
addiction or obesity because we would
simply add an extra dose of faith and be
fine ourselves. We are not.
One of the lessons I have learned as
a psychologist is that God brings people
into our offices, schools, churches, and
personal lives in order to call us into
their world where He has much to teach
us. As a student of the traumatized, I
can attest to that. I have changed. I see
and know God in ways that would never
have been possible had He not called me
to enter into a place that was foreign to
me and one in which I was ill-equipped
to respond. Some of that change has
come through listening, empathizing,
entering in, and sitting with—not with
answers and fixes, but presence, dignity
and care.
Is that not God’s call to His people?
He left honor, dignity and the central
place of power to enter into the lives of
the vulnerable, suffering, marginalized
and tormented. If we, as His people, live
in this way, will the world not want to
know Him? And as so typical of God, if
this is our response as His church—and
the world sees and is hungry for what
they see—then it will be the broken,
the confused, the inarticulate, and the
disregarded who will have led us all to
Him. ✠
Diane Langberg,
Ph.D., chairs AACC’s
Executive Board and is
a licensed psychologist
with Diane Langberg &
Associates in Jenkintown,
Pennsylvania. She is also the author of
Counseling Survivors of Sexual Abuse and On
the Threshold of Hope.
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“We have for once learned to
see the great events of world
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perspective of the outcast,
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