I am aware today of the strange connections in my life...patterns and rhythms, here to there and back again. There was a student in the Fall that I wrote about here that got my semester off to a really shaky start. She set the tone for what I thought was going to be a terrible time, but what actually turned out to be a time of great learning. A turning point really, as I look back. part of what set some of the things in motion that are happening even now. Funny how circumstances become God's vehicles of grace in this way. This student has, by her request become my client. I had to think about it a bit. The history and all. But it has turned out to be a very good thing. She makes a great deal of sense to me. I find I spend most of our sessions simply asking her questions. Questions she says that are very hard and that no one has ever asked her before. I have no doubt that this is true, as they are not the kind of questions you are asked unless you submit yourself to a process like therapy, or spiritual direction. I had a particular sense of the way to start with these questions simply because of our history. It gave us kind of leg up in a way, we got a running start on therapy.
I've also mentioned in a couple places my very interesting Easter last year. I baptized my first baby on Easter Sunday, and a wonderful thing it was. But before I could even get my alb off and join the celebration, I was being paged to the ER. One of my clients was in crisis. I spent much of Easter afternoon with her and coping with the situation. She has spent the last year working hard on her healing and I saw her today. From all her hard work has come a depth of spiritual life that she did not have before. Our sessions are just as likely to include references to Thomas Merton as they are to Prozac, to her yoga and meditation practice as they are to her struggles with her reovery.
Clearly this is all about grace and God working in the midst of life's pain and confusion. It is all pretty much a mystery to me sometimes how it all works out. And I am fine with that. I don't need to know. I am just so incredibly grateful to be able to participate, even as an innocent bystander as these miracles happen in my presence.
3 comments:
You are hardly a bystander in this...you are at times (I imagine) the vesssel through which God is choosing to express grace...as others are to you...blessings on this Holy Week and Easter.
There always seems to me something almost trinitarian about the 3 way work of client, therapist and God - each crucial to the process of change. Too complex a theology to develop here - maybe it is simpler this weekend to rejoice that you have witnessed deaths and resurrections in others - a hope for us each to claim for ourselves.
She became your client? Wow. That is just simply amazing. I love seeing (hearing--no, I guess seeing in a way :-) God at work like that. I say again: Wow.
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