How do you faithfully navigate suffering When you don’t have a language for lament? When so few people around you know how to enter in and walk with you in your pain, anger, hurt, questions, & fears. When the flowers are no longer there, or others have gotten on with their lives, and you are left wondering how you are going to take the next step?

We long for a space to be held for us where we can safely walk through

our current desolation, place our hurts into larger hands, and

become anchored into a larger hope.

We can take hope knowing that God takes our pain seriously. He enters into it, and offers himself in the midst of it, and shows us his faithful love through his own suffering on our behalf. Having walked my own 15 year journey of illness, disability, brokenness, & loss, I have been enriched, counseled, & loved through my own suffering and have walked with many others through theirs.

My Approach & Invitation

My name is Liz and I am a certified rehabilitation counselor and associate registered professional clinical counselor. I offer a space within my practice for those of Christian faith to enter in and through their suffering to anchor it  within in the larger story of brokenness, hope, and restoration that are the grand narrative of the Scriptures.

I seek to serve the whole person, thus keeping the integrity of spirit, body, mind, & soul together as I walk alongside others, seeking to integrate the best of psychotherapeutic care and Christian counseling & soul care in my practice. I have found in my own experience that apart from those who have suffered themselves and integrated it well into their lives, there is a pervasive unease with suffering in our culture at large, as well as an unrealistic optimism with suffering that pervades the US church- something clinician and pastor Chuck deGroat calls a “band-aid theology.” Both of these neglect the range of full emotion, suffering, & anguish you may be experiencing. Further more, we often lack a theology of the cross, of suffering, which we are presented with in Jesus and throughout the Scriptures.

Bringing the wisdom I have gained:

• Engaging with spiritual crisis, anger, doubt, and fear.

• Seeing our suffering through a Christian understanding of suffering & hope

• Responding to our circumstances with compassion & wisdom

• Entering lament & grief ( Job, the Psalms, the Prophets, Jesus, & the Apostles

• Viewing our illnesses or disabilities from a faith lens

• Praying our fears and doubt

• Gospel-centered identity work: Living our lives and identities as “His beloved”

• Living and offering our brokenness for a broken world

To learn more about what counseling would look like together

You can also access resources I have found helpful in navigating illness, loss, grief, & suffering by clicking here.

“If we are absolutely grounded in the absolute love of God that protects us from nothing even as it sustains us in all things, then we can face all things with courage and tenderness and touch the hurting places in others and in ourselves with love.”

— James Finely

So What Exactly is Christian Soul Care?

I look to David Benner, depth psychologist and longtime teacher in Christian Soul Care. for wisdom and insight into the historical & current practice of Christian Soul Care. According to Benner, in his seminal Book Care of Souls, Revisioning Christian Nurture & Counsel

“Caring for souls is caring for people in ways that not only acknowledge them as persons but also engage and address them in the deepest and most profoundly human aspects of their lives. This is the reason for the priority of the spiritual and psychological aspects o f the person’s inner world in soul care.” (p. 23)

There are 4 elements in the care of souls:

• Healing— helping others overcome some impairment and move towards wholeness

• Sustaining—acts of caring designed to help a hurting person endure and transcend” a challenging situation

• Reconciling—efforts to re-establish broken relationships

• Guiding—helping people make wise choices and thereby grow in spiritual maturity

The spiritual context in which Christian soul care is offered: *

• begins with a response of the call of Spirit to spirit

• is rooted in commitment to Jesus & a transformational approach to life

• is nurtured by the means of grace

• involves a deep knowing of Jesus and through him, the Father & Spirit

• requires deep knowing of oneself

• leads to realization of the unique self whom God ordained we should be

• is uniquely developed in the context of suffering

• is manifest by sharing of the goodness of God’s love with others and in care for his creation

• expresses that goodness in celebration with Christian community

  * (p.95)