ADVICE FOR THE NEW YEAR [Sun, 1-2-22]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

“You failed me,” the young man said, rather petulantly, as he got up and headed for the door of my office.

I wasn’t totally surprised. I was usually a failure as a counselor, but most folks were too polite to tell me so. Besides, I had never met him before he showed up, unannounced, and said he wanted to talk about his problems. He was perceptive, though. It took him only thirty minutes to figure out that I wasn’t giving him any help with those problems, although he hadn’t said exactly what they were.

So I asked. “Why is that, do you think? That I failed you?”

He looked dumbstruck, like the answer was more than obvious.

“Why,” he said, “you’re a preacher. I thought you would give me a Bible verse to repeat, something like that, and all you do is sit there and ask questions.” He left.

In his defense, it’s a bit confusing to know what to expect when the counselor is a preacher. In my defense, if a person wants help and doesn’t tell you what the problem is, about the only way to keep the conversation going is to ask questions.

If I had it to do over, I would have given him the verse from Genesis where Noah says, “Quit whining and start bailing.” That’s good advice for most situations.

Since I spent a lot of my ministry on or near university campuses, I listened to a lot of young people wonder about decisions—major, romance, abortion, romance, professions, romance, gender, romance. That was back when I thought I knew how to be a counselor.

One girl was trying to decide between two guys. I’ll call them Larry and Bob. I did what I had learned in a class, had her list all the qualities she liked and did not like about each one. When we were done, she sighed and said, “Well, the answer is clear, isn’t it?” Yes, it was. Larry was a total loser, while Bob had every quality a parent could hope for in their daughter’s intended. I was pleased. My learning had paid off.

She was almost radiant as she smiled and said, “Yes, it has to be Larry.” She left.

The heart wants what the heart wants, regardless of what the lists or the counselor says.

When I ended my campus ministry days, and was appointed to serve a congregation, I realized that my counseling would not be so much about what partner to select as whether to get divorced from that bad choice.

So I went to a marriage counseling center, where they not only did actual counseling but offered classes for people who had to do it on an amateur basis—preachers, social workers, bar tenders, hair dressers, although I don’t recall any bar tenders or hair dressers in the classes, more’s the pity.

I started with a lot of enthusiasm. After all, isn’t saving a marriage, or at least making it better, an admirable goal? Turns out that when a couple finally got around to consulting me, one of them had already made a decision and was just waiting for the other to catch up. That was sad work. All my nodding and questioning and list-making didn’t mean much.

 

One couple, though, still thanks me from time to time for “saving our marriage.” It’s sort of embarrassing, for all I did was listen to her cry while he was off living with another woman. I was fairly straight forward, though, in talking her out of having a revenge affair. That probably helped.

All the mental health people say this pandemic has been really hard on us emotionally. It’s even worse because the counselors are so overwhelmed that it’s hard to get an appointment. So, until you can talk to someone who knows what they’re doing, I’ll give you the quote from Noah up above to keep repeating.

 

John Robert McFarland