Mastering Pastoral Counseling

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I find it is not only possible but imperative, especially in short-term counseling, that we start solving problems in the very first session.
—Jim Smith

Short-term counseling may be short, but it's not necessarily simple.

Jenny's daughter was getting married, and Jenny wasn't happy. Of course, Jenny recognized that her daughter Lynn, who was in her late twenties, was old enough to make her own decisions. Jenny also knew that Lynn was marrying a Christian young man with a good career. But Jenny still wasn't happy.

For one thing, Lynn had announced that the wedding would take place in just two months. That gave Jenny hardly any time to plan. She had always dreamed of Lynn's wedding as the event that would make everyone forget Prince Charles and Lady Di—a thousand guests, a lavish reception at the finest country club in Dallas. But with the event only two months away, there was no time to plan the wedding of Jenny's dreams. The dream was scaled down to a backyard wedding with 300 guests.

Moreover, Lynn's fiancé was not exactly everything Jenny had hoped for in a son-in-law. Before becoming a Christian, he had been involved with drugs and a wild lifestyle with the wrong kind of people. Though he had straightened out in recent years, he was a young man with an unsavory past, whereas Jenny's daughter, Lynn, had been raised in a sheltered, white-bread, suburban environment.

When Jenny came, she was grieving her dream. "If Lynn would only wait a few more months," she told me, "it could be such a beautiful wedding. But she says she doesn't want a big wedding. She just wants to be married to Scott. Why are young people always in such a hurry? They have so many years to spend together, but they have to get married in a rush."

"Parenting ...

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