No later than 20 minutes after posting my last blog entry did I meet with a new client who recently had a below the knee amputation. About 10 minutes into our discussion she explained that she had been battling with pretty severe depression, and before I had time to take notes in her file, her life unraveled in front of me like a big ball of yarn: two abusive husbands, both deceased; significant strains in her relationships with her children; medical issues that have confined her to her home; and to top it all off, the responsibility of adjusting to her new body. As with all of my clients, I offered her a Kleenex – all of my clients say they don’t want one by the way, only to grab one a few minutes later. It’s amazing how quickly the human psyche will stop holding itself up once someone starts listening to your problems.
The underlying issue was guilt – guilt over her past marriages, guilt over her ex husbands’ deaths, guilt over her children, guilt over not being good enough for abusive husband #1 to treat her with respect, guilt over not being good enough for abusive husband #2 to stop drinking. Coupled with the overwhelming sense of guilt was her massive sense of personal responsibility for everyone but herself – here she was, alone, wondering what she could have done better to keep her husband from abusing her – if only she had “been better” or could have “changed him.” She described her life as being at the bottom of a pit, with nowhere to go, constantly feeling like waves were knocking her underwater.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked. (I'm pretty sure my heart skipped a beat.)
“Absolutely – I pray to God all the time for him to take me home.”
I just finished reading The Christian Atheist: Believing in God but Living As If He Doesn’t Exist by Craig Groeschel. The book is an amazing read and I highly recommend it, but one quote in particular reached out and smacked me on the face:
“If you’re not dead, you’re not done. God still has something important for you to do.”
That quote alone was worth the cost of the book. I have been known from time to time to wonder what one earth I’m here for – my musings usually come in the form of me whining in prayer, “What about me, God?!” The message is simple: hope. There is hope for our lives even when things don’t make sense, and especially when we’re stuck in a pit that continues to drag us down.
Then I did the unthinkable: I shared the quote with her. I actually did more than that – I gave her two other gems to hold onto until we meet again. The first was that we are made in God’s image – and the second, stolen from a friend’s blog, is that God’s opinion is the only one that matters. So no, she was never “good enough” for her first husband, and his family constantly judged her for leaving him – but despite all of that there is someone who created her, who loves her and has a purpose for her, who wants only the best for her: God.
This is just one piece of the puzzle, and we have a lot of work to do together to get her back to where she wants to be, but I’m hopeful that she can rely on those truths as we piece her life back together. As for me, I’ll be calling on God more often to supply me the strength and courage to help those I serve and thank him for the gift of the work I do.
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