Using Our Spiritual Resources
Gary Gulbranson
Spiritual resources for counseling, though not automatically effective, are, when used with wisdom, supernaturally effective.
—Gary Gulbranson For over a year I counseled a woman whose problems stemmed primarily from abuse. Throughout her life she had been physically and emotionally mistreated by various men, including her husband. In order to find personal healing and wholeness in her marriage, she desperately needed the spiritual resource of biblical truth. In our early sessions, however, I knew I couldn't simply read the blueprint for wedded peace in Ephesians 5, not because I doubted the validity of that passage in her difficult situation but because she would not understand those verses as God intends. For her the term submit had been perverted into be abused. Still, I had to offer her spiritual resources. The question was how. Like a surgeon at a state-of-the-art hospital who employs the best technology can offer, a Christian counselor has powerful resources—spiritual resources—to draw on, but they are not automatically helpful. They can even be counterproductive. Over the years, I've learned that a counselor must employ spiritual resources with skill, sensitivity, and wisdom. Here is what I have discovered about their proper and beneficial use. Use Prayer Intentionally
More than any other activity, prayer represents the spiritual side of counseling. Our prayers show we do not ultimately rely on our education, skills, or methods but on God's Spirit to work in this situation. Prayer is a confession of weakness that allows God's power to prevail. Yet prayer can be unspiritual, even a counseling cop-out. A counselor may simply use prayer to produce an emotional catharsis. Or as a convenient way to bring ritual closure to a session—indeed ...
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