51 to 52 Counseling

In Psalm 51 David cried out to God - begging for God's mercy - begging for God to blot out his transgressions - begging for a clean heart and a right spirit, and even begging that the bones that God had broken would rejoice. David was a broken man - laid bare and crying out before God. And 4 days after I'd crushed my bride and broken her heart - I found myself instinctively praying the same exact things.

So I searched, I found the passage - I read it - and I read it again, scarcely able to comprehend how precisely this Psalm expressed my heart at that moment. Through tears my eyes moved back up the page and I saw that it was a Psalm of David - but then I saw this note - that he'd written Psalm 51 after his affair with Bathsheba... I that's when I knew - for the first time - that my heart was responding as a man after God's own heart. I knew that for the first time I was truly contrite and filled with remorse over my sin. I was the man of Psalm 51, but I didn't necessarily want to stay that man. And that's where 52 comes in.

David wrote Psalm 51 - and he also wrote psalm 52. Now Psalm 52 is not chronologically next in David's life after Psalm 51, but for some divinely ordained reason, it directly follows it. And the conclusion of Psalm 52 is where I want to be. It is where I want to dwell. In Psalm 52 two men are presented - the first, the evil man, in my eyes this man clearly represents my addiction, he is boastful, destructive, deceitful, loves evil more than good, and most definitively, he is a liar. But psalm 52 says that God will break this man down forever.

Contrasted with this evil man exists the trusting man. The man who has gone through the pain, the man who has faced the broken bones, the man who has been purged and washed. And this man - in psalm 52:8-9, this man is like a luxurious olive tree in the house of God,

I am unique and unlike most therapists. I work both as a therapist and as an airline pilot. This means I live day to day life in the real world dealing with he same kind of pressures that everyone has. I also have two kids and a wonderful and supportive wife which allows me to maintain a perspective where I can hear my clients well and come alongside them as an empathetic support and strengthener.