An account of a “helping incident” in which you were the person who provided the help. Include the nature and extent of the request, your assessment of the issue(s), problem(s), situation(s). Describe how you came to be involved and what you did. Give a brief, evaluative commentary on what you did and how you believe you were able to help. If you have had prior and recent CPE, please attach a copy of a recent verbatim as your ‘helping incident’ and add to the verbatim your own notes on how and what you learned from sharing this verbatim with your supervisor and/or peers. If you have had CPE, but it was more than two years ago, include a recent account of a helping incident, written up in a verbatim format. If possible, include feedback from current pastoral colleagues and/or administrative supervisor.
Having served for seven years as a part-time pastor and pastoral staff in youth, college, and young adult ministry contexts, I have helped and counseled many people. One of such incidents was my helping a woman suffering from schizophrenia in her late twenties to reimagine her mental image of God, which was too demanding and even condemning at times. She joined the Bible study group which I was leading, comprising people in their twenties and thirties. At first, she seemed very independent, not needing any help, nor wanting it from anybody else but from herself. However, as I got to know her, I was able to notice that she was afraid of becoming someone in need of others’ help. For this reason, she showed an excellent work ethic in everything she did, also reflected in her participation in our Bible study group. She was trying to do her best in examining each biblical text which we studied together. At the same time, she felt uncomfortable in receiving someone’s feedback or suggestion on her reading of the Bible, precisely because she felt obliged to become an independent person, even in reading the Bible. In the same vein, she did not want any help from God either, but tried to present herself before God as someone presentable in God’s eyes (while it was not in God’s but in her own eyes). Completely mistaken in her understanding of God’s grace, she held an almost Pelagian, legalistic view of God’s grace, perhaps in the spirit of the saying, ‘heaven helps those who help themselves,’ believing that she needed to do her best in keeping all God’s commandments, without any help on the part of God.
In the light of the foregoing, it was natural that she did not want any help from me either, at least not in the beginning. Even so, as I made effort at building a trusting relationship with her, she began to confide in me some of her problems with her God. One night, after the Bible study session was over, I was driving her home and she began to tell me how her God sometimes demanded things too burdensome of her. She even told me that when she talked back to God that she could not bear such burdensome demand, she heard harsh voices of God condemning her in return, which I supposed to be owing to her schizophrenia, at least in part. While no specialist in psychiatry or clinical psychology, I was still able to sense that her schizophrenia and her mental image of God had worsening effects on each other, for her mental image of God did not help her with anything but kept demanding and demanding. In fact, such guess was not an uneducated one, for I studied as part of my doctoral studies how people’s mental images of God tend to have significant impact upon their lives and vice versa, drawing upon contemporary psychoanalytic theories of religion. My doctoral dissertation explores how people’s mental images of God have a wide range of impact on their personal as well as public lives, and vice versa. Taking a cue from my research, I suspected that her mental image of God would be like a very demanding teacher or parent who offers little help to the student or the child (in this case herself), let alone showing any grace, and I was right. She did have a grave misunderstanding of God, who in her mind might very well force her to do something over and above her abilities and push her to be someone beyond her breaking point. To my surprise, she did not argue with such a God of her mental world. Rather, she simply accepted such a God and suffered with all the consequences of believing such a God, secretly convincing herself that her enduring such a God is what the Bible calls faithful obedience to God, which was in fact not any such thing at all.
In response, I showed her how generous, merciful, loving and gracious our God in the Bible is, using verses such as Exodus 34:6-7 (“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”) and Romans 8:38-39 (“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”) After that conversation, she came over to me several more times for conversations about God, and whenever she asked me about who God is, I assured her that our God is nothing like what she had conjured up in her own mind, strict and harsh, but infinitely merciful and always loving. Doubtless my conversations with her did not completely do away with her schizophrenia. It would be unreasonable for me to think that one’s mental health issue would be resolved just by having a couple of conversations about God. Still, she did thank me for telling her that God was not what she imagined it to be, telling me that her anxiety over her relationship with God had been alleviated so much. As a result, now she can ask for help from others more freely, and she has become less strict toward herself. She is still on medication for treating her schizophrenia, but this time her God is helping her instead of threatening her. I am so grateful that I was able to help her in a meaningful way, and I hope to continue to help others as a spiritual care provider in the setting of professional healthcare chaplaincy.