In this episode IBCD Board Member David Wojnicki interviews Dr. Charles Hodges and Dr. Jim Newheiser about medical issues and biblical counseling.
Key Links
- Listen to this episode: 004 Interview with Charles Hodges & Jim Newheiser
- Subscribe to the CDC Podcast
- Good Mood Bad Mood: Help and Hope for Depression and Bipolar Disorder by Charles Hodges (book)
- Spring Seminar 2016, Medical Issues & Biblical Counseling (audios)
- Spring Seminar 2013, Moods and Medicine (audios)
- The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield (book)
- Christ & Your Problems by Jay Adams (book)
- Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior by Jeffery M. Schwartz (book)
- ScienceDaily.org
David Wojnicki:
Tonight this is a discussion, so while there are some questions, some topics that we want to cover for both of you I’ve got maybe some directed questions but then either can jump in at any time. You can phone a friend if you want for an answer. I do want to start with this question for you Dr. Hodges, and it pertains to for biblical counselors, those who are engaged in doing biblical counseling, what type of medical information do you see as being important, as relevant for biblical counselors to be aware of as they’re engaging a counsel lead. I’ll start there. Is it important for there to be aware of some medical issues and if so?
Charles Hodges:
I always like what Doc Smith used to say, he would tell us that the best source for medical information about a counselee is the counselee. What you’re really interested in when you’re engaging with someone who is struggling with a disease probably isn’t so much what they have as what they think they have. You really want to know what they think they have. That requires you to listen. You gather the information from them. I remember in medical school they always told us that you are interested in what the cause, the course, the cure, and what the conclusion was. Those four “Cs, the cause the course, the cure and the conclusion. If you can get that from the counselee themselves, that’s a real leg up.
Then what you want to know from there is how they believe that is that going to affect their life. Is it going to affect the way they work, is it going to affect the way they play? Is it going to affect their ability to raise children, is it going to affect their ability to occupy the role of a husband or a wife? Is it going to affect their Christian service? Those are all things you want to know from them. Best source.
When I teach about this I don’t encourage people to send off for medical records unless they can read them. That’s not a reflection on Dr.’s handwriting. Anyway if you’re a nurse, if you’re a nurse practitioner, a physician, then maybe a medical record might be useful to you. I can tell you I never send for them myself. It might be useful to you. If you don’t have a strong medical background then the information you see in those records may or may not be very helpful to you. What we want to make certain of as we counsel adults and or children is whether or not they might have a medical problem that would impact their thinking, their behavior, their emotions.
You want to have a good relationship with a physician in your community and or you would want to use the counselee’s physician, one or the other. What I generally do for people who come in and are depressed is if they haven’t seen a doctor in the last year, if they haven’t had any lab work done in the last year, or close, then I am going to send them to their doctor with the intent of asking that physician to examine them carefully, take a good history, do appropriate lab work and send them back to me and tell me whether or not there is anything medically wrong with them.
I generally encourage the counselee to tell the physician that they’re really not there to get medicine. I’ve practiced medicine now for forty years, I can tell you that if a person shows up in a doctor’s office and says that they’re anxious or that they’re sad either one, before they can get out the door, most people will write a script for them. I’m not here to get a script, what I’m really here to find out is am I sick? Is there something about me that is wrong? I would say that those are the important things to try to find out. It’s important if you have a Christian physician in your church to maybe try to utilize him or her in order to help you with that and to develop a good relationship with them.
David Wojnicki:
Building off of that, what are the potential dangers for a biblical counselor if they don’t consider some of those things, if they don’t take into account potential medical history or the things going on. I’ll open that up to either of you. Are there potential dangers by not asking those questions, by not making those referrals or getting some of that information?
Charles Hodges:
I think as long as you inform the counselee on no uncertain terms when they come to counseling that you’re not there to practice medicine that you are there to do biblical counseling, that you are not a medical professional and you are not going to engage in changing or recommending or doing anything about their healthcare, and that you seek to find the solutions to their problems inside of scripture, you have that all printed up in a nice form and have the sign it, then you greatly reduce your risk of being sued.
If you do try to engage and mettle, and I would say mettle in medicine, if you leave the high exalted position that you have as biblical counselor to get down there and work in medicine, you start running risk. As soon as you start giving people medical advice and you haven’t been to medical school, you are incurring risk. I don’t do that myself. I am a licensed physician in the state of Indiana, and in Pennsylvania and soon to be in Oregon and when I do biblical counseling, I do not give people medical advice.
It’s really kind of a unique position to be in. I’m a Dr. somebody walks in starts talking about how they feel, what does my brain do? It shifts gears down to do what it does five days a week for the last forty years but I attempt to restrain myself and make sure that those kind of people that have medical issues get back to their doctor. As long as you make it very plain that you’re doing biblical counseling, then you do it, then your risk is probably not very great depending on what state and the laws of the state that you’re in. I know in Indiana you’re in pretty good in pretty condition when you do that.
David Wojnicki:
Have either of you in your experience with biblical counseling gone down the road with somebody where you’ve been pointing them to the scriptures, working with them and somewhere down the road what you discovered is that there is an underlying medical issue that you weren’t aware of that the person had that they were struggling with maybe? We’ll talk about this a little bit later but as it pertains to their diet or an actual disease that they have. Have either of you experienced that, saw that we have a physical problem here that needs to be dealt with before we can begin addressing where they’re even at spiritually.
Charles Hodges:
Yeah, that’s not an uncommon thing. I think probably the most common one that I run into as a physician is with sleep deprivation. I could probably look out across this crowd and say, “How many of you slept eight hours last night raise your hands.” Anybody out there? One, two, a couple back up there. Good for you. Most Americans are sleeping six hours or under right now and that is by definition sleep deprivation. I think that’s a reasonable thing to inquire about and would come to your attention. If they can’t resolve it by turning the television off and going to bed a little earlier then you would want to move them on to a doctor.
Jim Newheiser:
We’ve seen cases before where a doctor would later say, “Well this person’s thyroid level is off.” That would be a factor. I think sleep has also been huge, where people go nuts when they’ve been sleeping almost none. A couple things I would add, one would be these are influences, they’re not determinative. Just like you’d want to know about a person’s life history, something happened to them, they were abused as a child, that’s relevant but it doesn’t turn them into something. Someone may have something going on physically or even with their brain that that’s an influence and you want to be aware if you can become aware. Sometimes you’re trying to help people and you’re getting nowhere and you might want to send them to a doctor because maybe there’s something going on here, I can’t figure out, some influence I’m not aware of.
I think it was Ed Walsh the first time I heard this said, “There may be a physical problem, there’s always a spiritual problem.” We can always address the spiritual problem. A person has dementia, Alzheimer’s, other things that are brain issues, still need spiritual help if they’re capable of interacting with you. We always can address that. When you’re trying to address the evident spiritual problems and you sense you’re dead stuck, sometimes you’ll wonder, “Could something be happening physically that’s preventing this person from thinking clearly?” For example, lack of sleep, have a doctor, investigate that.
The majority of the people who come to us for biblical counseling and I’ll be interested in Dr. Hodges estimate on that, but I think the great majority who come, the issues are primarily spiritual. We all have physical influences too but in terms of the physical being a major influence I would think it would be a small number of cases that wonder into a biblical counseling center it’s really the big problem.
Charles Hodges:
I would agree with that. I would say the vast majority of them will be people that have spiritual and emotional struggles that haven’t responded to the kind of care they can get in the community. That’s always a big issue about whether people are taking medicine or not, I always smile and say, “Most of them already are when they get to my office.” Very few counselees come to the office who are not taking medicine at the time. Generally, why they are there is because it really didn’t work very well for them.
David Wojnicki:
I want to turn and look at some of that is often very significant issue that people come to biblical counselors for and that is depression or at least their understanding of it. I’ve heard both of you speak at different times on lingering sadness, and loss and depression and I want to ask a few questions about that. As biblical counselors we face that a lot. People trying to understand. They’ll come and they’ll say, “I’m depressed” so let’s talk about that for a minute maybe with a working definition if you will of depression, lingering sadness. How is a biblical counselor to distinguish these things? Help us understand just that issue of depression to begin with.
Charles Hodges:
I think today’s sadness, depression has come to replace sadness in our society. As one author said, “Nobody says they’re sad anymore, we all say, I’m depressed.” The definition of depression is pretty widely understood in the diagnostic statistic manual of mental disorders in its fifth revision. It includes things like inability to sleep, eating too much or too little, loss of interest in anything that you enjoyed before, a sad mood, a sense of shame and guilt at times. At times a fixation on wanting to harm yourself or wanting to die. All those things grouped together and I think you have to have five out of twelve or something like that. Then you have to have had it for two weeks. That is the societal definition of depression.
I can tell you that in research that most of the people that make the diagnosis of depression don’t bother using the diagnostic statistic manual of mental disorders criteria. Probably less than half of the people who are diagnosing people with depression or writing prescriptions don’t even use the criteria. What’s beyond that, they’re only right about 60% of the time which is a little bit better than flipping a coin but not much.
When I look at depression I see who have what I have read to be their normal sadness or disordered sadness. A good book about it is the loss of sadness by Jerome Wakefield and Allen Horwitz. The loss of Sadness by Jerome Wakefield and Allen Horwitz. It’s about a three hundred fifty page book. It’s the kind of book you want to have a cup of coffee and a good night’s sleep before you wade into. It has lots of good research and very good observations. These people are not in the biblical counseling movement, they’re secular people. What they say has happened in this country in the last thirty years is we’ve converted normal sadness into depressive disorder.
Normal sadness is what happens when we lose things. You can lose a job, you can lose a child, you can lose status at work, you can lose money, you can lose a house, any significant loss will result in anyone normally being sad. That sadness will persist. The size of the sadness will be gauged on how big the loss is. It will last, generally until a person gets back what they lost, or they accommodate to it. One of those three things. Wakefield and Horwitz in their book say that sadness is an essential part of our being. They would say that it is biologically designed which is evolutionist. I believe that we were created with the ability to be sad, in 1 Corinthians 7, and Paul talks about it, he talks about how Godly sorrow leads to repentance, but the sorrow of the world leads to death. It’s either normal sadness where you can identify with the counselee what it is they lost. I can tell you, most of them can tell you. 90% of people in one study could tell you what they lost. That would be for normal sadness.
You have another group, smaller, maybe 10% of people who simply can’t tell you why they are sad. We have for generations, called the disordered sad. Prior to 1980, if you were going to make a diagnosis of depression, it was disordered sadness. If somebody could tell me why they were sad I would not give them a diagnosis of depression. When I graduated from medical school which was a long time ago. If they couldn’t tell you why they were sad, those were the people that ended up with the label. I don’t know if I got to answer your question or not.
David Wojnicki:
It’s a multi-faceted issue. I’d like to take it from someone who comes in let’s talk about a disordered sadness, someone who’s experience loss for instance.
Charles Hodges:
That’s normal sadness. Disorder is no loss.
David Wojnicki:
Okay.
Charles Hodges:
That’s the most important differential that any counselor can make. Can you find what they lost? If you can find what they lost and what they want to get back then you’re moving over in the aisle of the heart world where we have great scripture that makes great application to the problem.
David Wojnicki:
Yeah.
Charles Hodges:
That’s the differentiation you want to make.
David Wojnicki:
Let’s talk about that for a minute. Probably for a lot of people they don’t necessarily know that when they come in. Let’s talk about counseling someone that’s experiencing normal sadness. They’ve lost something, how would you counsel them to not allow that to spiral if you will? What would be the thing that somebody should start with an individual like that in?
Charles Hodges:
Meet a new goal in life, you know. People who have normal sadness who have an identifiable loss and are pining away for it, they need to develop a 2 Corinthians 5:9 goal in life, “Therefore also we have as our ambition whether at home or [inaudible 00:18:02] let it be pleasing to him.” I want to glorify God with my life more than I want to breath has to become how they seek to live. As opposed to I want to get back what it is that I lost. That’s pretty much where it starts. It starts with moving them toward Mathew 22:37-39, where it says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your could and all your mind then love your neighbor.” I tell them that they have to be willing to say I want to glorify God with my life more than I want to breath which means more than I want whatever I lost back.
It’s like I want to love God more than I want to be skinny. I want to love God more than I want to be smart or rich or have my job. Then they have to love him more than they love those things. Then it comes down to moving them to Jesus in John 14 where he says, “It’s God who decides what it is looks like loving him.” He said, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he’s the one who love me.” We move to the fact that God has imperatives for us. Generally speaking, folks who are struggling with sadness, a lot of times along the way they have dropped off on meeting those important imperatives at least in my experience in counseling. The gracious thing that we can do it point them back to the things that they have dropped off of.
I also think that it’s important for them to know that in the middle of the struggle, as a believer that they are not on their own. Paul in Philippians 2, first he says we have to work out our very salvation with fear and trembling, which should scare the daylights out of all of us. The word, “we” have to work out ourselves, then he turns it around and says, “But it’s God who works in you both to will and to do his good pleasures, that no believer who’s ever in the middle of a loss or a struggle should ever assume that he’s alone.” In the same since as Paul said in Romans 8, “We are never, ever going to be abandoned.” That’s where it would start. It would start by trying to move them away from whatever it is that they’ve fixed their hearts on getting back to glorifying God.
Jim Newheiser:
Like J Adams when he originally wrote his little pamphlet on depression talked about spiraling out of depression as we obey the imperatives and do the right things which I completely affirm. For some people just getting them out, moving, doing, can be transformative. I also think as you touched upon, the indicatives of who God is and what he has done for us need to be emphasized. I just turn to my bible in Psalm 94, “If the Lord had not been my help, my could would have dwelt in the abode of silence. If I should say my foot has slipped, your loving kindness Oh Lord will hold me up. When my anxious thoughts multiply within my, your consolations delight my soul.” On it goes that there is this hope in who God is and it’s reflected beautifully in the Psalms and other places is that he has compassion for us. He meets us in our sadness. Other real believers have been here with us.
I love in Psalm 42 where he keeps coming back after his sad statements, the recollection of who God is and what he has done for us. The other thing that I would add too is whatever you think you have lost, God is better than that. It’s so easy to lose sight of. It’s like, “I can’t be happy unless I have this or that.” The positive put on side it’s that why do you spend your money for what is not bread and your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen to me and eat what is good. Isaiah 55. To really learn and understand who God is, what he is to us and not that there is a lack of the sadness which we should reflect because he has compassion, but that he is enough to make up that loss.
Like you were saying, the person who is depressed with an unidentifiable cause, the bible has powerful answers to the lies this person has been telling himself. That God is not there, that he can’t live without this or that or whoever it is and just reading the scriptures with them and pointing them to the Lord and who Christ is can be tremendously powerful and helpful as the spirit works.
David Wojnicki:
I love what both of you have said here and I hope it’s an encouragement to those that are listening here tonight is that when we have experienced loss, when there is significant pain that’s encountered that there is hope in the midst of it. Going to God’s word he provides for us. I think that’s significant to be reminded of. In the moment it can seem very real for an individual.
Jim Newheiser:
Where else can somebody can go and get this? It’s not just something he and I can do, it’s something everybody here can do when you have people around you who are sad to open the scriptures with them and read the word of God. It’s not you, it’s the spirit speaking through it’s word to bring the only lasting comfort that people who have suffered loss can actually have.
David Wojnicki:
Absolutely, yeah.
Charles Hodges:
I think one of the best places you can take people who have sustained loss, and it’s been a while, and usually it is by the time they get to see me. I always say if people’s lost a loved one yesterday, you should be someplace like Psalm 46:10. Usually it’s been six month since whatever happened to them. By the time they get to my office they’re usually looking for the door. They’d like to know how to find their way out. I think a really nice place to go is John 11, if you want to understand how God looks at suffering in the life of believers, go look at Lazarus.
It’s an easy short four point sermon, I won’t [inaudible 00:24:13] but the first point is that Jesus knew, he knew that Lazarus was dying. He sat down and didn’t go anywhere. We know that he cared about Lazarus because when he gets there and he sees Martha and Mary in the crowd weeping, what does he do? He weeps. That is strange when you think about it because what’s he going to do in five minutes? He’s going to raise Lazarus from the dead. Why are you weeping? The reason why he wept is because he cared about the suffering that Lazarus had gone through in dying and the struggles that Martha and Mary had had in the process. We know that he knew, we know that he cared.
We also know that he had a plan. He sat down and didn’t go. He delayed until Lazarus died, so this was very purposeful. We know that he knew he had a plan and he cared, then he acted. If you want to know how to help people who are struggling in life, that’s it. You need to know something about them, you need to have a plan to help them, you need to care about them, then you need to do for them. John 11, great chapter to go to. Take people to show them that Jesus cared about Lazarus and Martha and Mary and he cares about you and me.
David Wojnicki:
Yeah. That’s great, that’s good. Got to write that down. I’m preaching John 11 in a few weeks so this is great, I’ll just write that out.
Charles Hodges:
The most remarkable sentence about suffering and illness in the bible is in John 11 it’s when Jesus looks at the disciples and he says, “It’s time to go to Jerusalem”, and they don’t want to go and he says, “Lazarus is dead and I’m glad.” Just let that think just a second. “Lazarus is dead and I’m glad.” He’s glad for your sake because people are going to believe as a result. It’s like that’s an amazing statement.
David Wojnicki:
Yeah. Powerful. Because the topic of this weekend is the medical issues, I want to ask something that’s somewhat anecdotal, somewhat objective, but I think it will help people as far as the issue of depression. In your experience when people have come and they’ve been struggling with depression, how many of those, how many of those situations, how many of those cases would you say, “You know what, medical intervention was necessary”? I know it’s somewhat subjective, I know it’s anecdotal, but just from experience, for those that have come to you as a biblical counselor, what kind of percentage would you say actually needed medical intervention.
Charles Hodges:
I can remember one in maybe a bunch of years and it was recently. The guy was manic. He needed healthcare. It’s actually the other way around. Where I’m at, we rarely see people who haven’t already run a gamut. They have seen the doctor they have been through one, two, or three different kinds of medication and are perhaps on the path at the time they come. From an anecdotal view point I can’t give you a good number.
I can tell you data wise what the numbers really are. I think this is out of the National Institution of Mental Health, if you look at all people who see a doctor for depression and take medicine, this was in the Journal of the American Medical Association 2010, the studies that looked at whether or not the medicine was effective or not, whether it actually did anything or not, showed that for 87% of the people who were taking the medication in these large number of studies, that they got no more benefit out of medication then did someone who took a placebo. That was 87%, that’s for people who are mildly depressed, moderately depressed, and even severely depressed.
It wasn’t until you got to the last 12%, which are very severely depressed, not severely depressed, but very severely depressed people that the medicine seemed to be able to move a Hamilton Depression rating skill enough points, which was two, in order to make it statistically significant. The difference in the medication is not great. The guy who ran the national Institute of Mental Health, he said that 80% of the people who get a label of depression, 80%, in the short run would do just as well as if they talked to anyone who knew what they were talking about. If you just go talk to someone who had some skill in talking to people who were depressed, that they would do just as well as people who took medicine in the short run. In the long run, they’ll do better. The reason why they’ll do better was they went and talked to somebody and maybe they figured out what in the world it was that was their problem in life and they resolved it. That’s secular information. This is not biblical counseling talking about it.
David Wojnicki:
Let me even build off of that. If somebody then is listening tonight or somebody’s going to listen to this later and maybe they have been on medication, and they’re listening and their thinking, “Is this really helping me or not? Should I just go off of it?” What would you say to somebody that?
Charles Hodges:
Nothing. Taking medication is a Romans 14 issue. Romans 14 is the old argument between vegetarians and meat eaters. Imagine that. They were having an argument back then about it and it was in a church. Imagine that. An argument in a church. What Paul’s response to the question of whether or not it was right to eat meat offered to idols or if you were more righteous if you just ate vegetables was, “A pox on both your houses”, they were judging each other. Paul roundly [inaudible 00:30:54] them for being judgmental towards each other and says it doesn’t make any difference. You’re no better if you eat vegetables, you’re no better if you eat meat.
From that we generate the doctrine of Christian liberty which means that if the bible doesn’t specifically say something about whatever choice it is that you are considering making, then you have the privilege, not the right, you have the privilege to make your own choice within the confines of the rest of all of scripture. Christian liberty is not license, it’s not license to sin. Whatever you’re going to do in the future has to be inside those confines. I would tell you that medicine isn’t talked about much in scripture and therefore it becomes a Romans 14 issue.
As I teach people to do counseling, one of the important things that I tell them is that I discourage anybody who is a biblical counselor from telling people to reduce doses or to stop medication. When you do that you wonder out into practicing medicine and put yourself at great risk one, and two, most of these medicines have withdrawal effects and if they stop them suddenly, they will have adverse withdrawal effects and think that they have a medical illness that requires them to take medicine for the rest of their lives when what they’re really having is the same thing that happens if you stop drinking six cups of coffee a day. Significant withdrawal symptoms.
No, nobody who is listening to this podcast to take anything that I’ve said to one, think that we’re encouraging them to stop their medicine that their physician is giving them, anybody who believes that they want to change their medicine should go talk to their physician the prescribes it. I don’t change medications for counselees who come in for counseling at our counseling center. I send them back to the doctor who prescribed it.
David Wojnicki:
That’s good. Dr. Newheiser, somebody comes to you for counseling and you become aware that they are currently on medication, Dr. Hodges, you talked a little bit about that, but for you for IBCD, how do you handle that, do you even look to address that with them when they come in or is that just a data point for you?
Jim Newheiser:
Its’ a data point. On our intake form we have them list what medications they’re taking. It could be other medications also have side effects it could be effecting them. Those might be things you might send them back to their doctor about if you thought so. Sometimes you might ask, “Why are you taking that? What effect is it having?” I’m there to address the spiritual issues. Part of what is important for me is to know what I don’t know. What I do know reasonably well is the bible. I’m learning people and their spiritual problems. I don’t thoroughly understand those things. I agree with Dr. Hodges that if they want to take that medication, that’s their freedom. Sometimes in discussion, they’ll say, “I hate the side effects, do I need this?” I say you need to talk to your doctor about this that’s your decision.
You’ll have people say, “I think I should be on medication.” I might say, “That is completely your freedom and can ask your doctor for that and I’m willing to counsel you if you decide to get on the meds.” I will also tell you that there are enough spiritual issues here to work on that I’d be happy to work on those with you for a while before you try the meds, that’s up to you.
David Wojnicki:
I appreciate something that you had said earlier, as somebody’s coming to us we’re looking at what is the spiritual issue here that’s going on and not to ultimately get distracted by some of those things or try to enter in to some of those areas as a biblical counselor that we might not be equipped to handle. Pointing people back to their physician if they have questions about their side effects or those things, that’s very clarifying and helpful for me.
Jim Newheiser:
I have a question for Dr. Hodges.
David Wojnicki:
Yeah?
Jim Newheiser:
Somebody is on some of these meds, do some of these meds have such significant side effects that would make it more difficult to counsel people because they’re on that med?
Charles Hodges:
I don’t know about your experience but I haven’t seen that very much. I can remember at least two people that was true for. One was a lady who was on enough medicine that whenever she sat across from me in the counseling room she immediately fell asleep. That was a real impediment to counseling. I wrote her a nice note and I handed it to her and I said, “Go give that to your psychiatrist.” I said, she can’t stay awake could you adjust things here a bit? He did and that was just it.
Then I had a lady who couldn’t sit still because she was on amphetamines who her psychiatrist said she should not take. I smiled and said, I think you really ought to be following what your psychiatrist told you to do. Other than that, most people it really doesn’t change things all that much.
Jim Newheiser:
I generally found that to be true, although occasionally when somebody’s coming in, especially it seems like on a lot of different drugs or what appear to be heavy doses, I almost wonder, “What was this person like before this got into their system?”
Charles Hodges:
You know I encounter this as a physician, I have patients come in and they tell me that they’re depressed and the drill that I go through with them, which I think is an evidence based medical practice is, “All right, you are either mildly or moderately depressed, this has been going on for a good long time, currently the medical literature tells me that you can do one of two things. You can go talk to someone or you can take medicine. I’ll help you with either, but I really think you should consider talking to someone first.”
Actually the medicines change people’s personalities. There is really some great measure of question how well they work. Many studies show that maybe they work 25% of the time to get people to an actual remission. That’s really not very much. I can tell you from a physician’s view point, it changes the person’s personality. The question is do you really want to take this medicine that changes your personality or would you like to go talk to someone? What do you think most people choose? Most of them choose medicine. I do write them the prescription. I will.
It’s really funny, I have people say that they’ll listen to me talk and they’ll say that he tells people they shouldn’t take medicine and they should quit it and all this kind of stuff. I’m amazed because I write the prescriptions. If I do write a prescription for that person I will tell them, “I still want you to go talk to someone.” I’ll lean on them to go talk to a counselor of some sort. In my secular setting I have to be kind of tricky on how I do it but if I can get them to say they want to talk to a pastor or counselor, then bang, we’re off to the races. I’ll find them somebody that can help them in their counseling. If they also tell me that they’re poor and they can’t afford it I’ve got them. Our counseling center doesn’t charge anybody. It’s boom, they’re right in the door.
David Wojnicki:
There’s a lot more that we could discuss. Our time is coming to an end right now. Grateful for the insights and for the input. For those that will be around this weekend, tomorrow we’ll be sharing more as part of the spring seminar so would hope that others would take advantage of listening to those recordings when they come out because there is much more to be said on the topic. Want to thank you both so much for the giving of your time and being able to answer some of these questions this evening. Let’s show our appreciation and thanks for them.
