Denver airport.

I have a love-hate relationship with layovers. Love them in this part of the country because it helps ensure that my travel plans stay on track (since, you know, it could be eighty degrees outside at 8am and blizzarding at 10am…even in June). Hate them because I’m sitting in Denver bored out of my skull, wishing this flight to Knoxville would hurry up and arrive.

I’ve worked on this post in bits and pieces all week long, but I haven’t had time to officially post it because of the chaos that comes when I try to get out of town for a week at Liberty. I’m heading back to Virginia for my last week-long intensive. It’s my last regular academic course.

All I lack to graduate after next week is 800 hours of a counseling internship. I don’t know where I’m going to do that internship yet, but I have a couple of interviews set up in the next few weeks, and hopefully, I will have my own set of clients by the end of July.

It’s crazy to me that I’m almost done with my Master’s degree. I’m almost a well-trained, capable counselor. And not one ounce of me feels like that statement is at all true.

As I’ve been looking for internship opportunities and trying to figure out how to squeeze 800 hours into my regular work weeks for the next 8 months, different supervisors have continually asked the question “What exactly is your heart for counseling? What do you see as your role?”

And I’ve been stuck thinking about it.

It seems to me that there is a lot of misconception surrounding brokenness and woundedness within Christian circles. It’s not whole. It’s not right. It doesn’t represent a completely restored mind. It’s a flaw.

And brokenness is all of those things.

But I think for the longest time, I really believed that woundedness and hurt and some of the more difficult emotional battles people face needed correction a lot like sin in my own life.

It just seems easier (and common) to equate healing with repentance.

And sometimes those things are the same.

But a lot of times, it’s not that neat.

The goal of both repentance and healing is restoration – to change the direction a person is currently walking in. But repentance is an about-face, a point in which a person stops and changes directions abruptly. And healing ends in a different direction…but it gets there one degree of change at a time. It’s not abrupt. It’s a process. And that is okay.

I don’t really know what kind of counselor I’ll be at this point. But I know that I want to walk people through that process. I want to be a voice that helps them understand that change may not be abrupt and may not look like overwhelming victory…but one small degree of change at a time can result in an entirely new direction for their lives, and I want to be a part of walking them through those changes, regardless of how small or tedious they may be.

My flight is getting ready to leave. I’ll likely have time to blog some this week because being at Liberty affords me some quiet evenings alone in the dorm. And, of course, I’m going to see my nephew for a few hours today. So I’m probably going to need to post some bragging pictures.