Should Love Really Cover Over a Multitude of Sins?
It’s a familiar phrase: love covers over a multitude of sins (1 Pet. 4:8). But how does it sit with the biblical counseling community? Continue Reading →
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Author: Steve Midgley
Parenting Fearful Children
Children are unusually prone to fear. From a fear of the dark to night terrors; from separation anxiety to monsters under the bed, our children fear many things. And this has been an unusually fearful year. Children have watched their parents don masks to guard against an invisible threat, open doors with elbows, and wash hands over and over again. They have seen people giving others a wide berth and recoiling when someone gets too close. Now at one level, our children’s fearfulness makes sense. Being small is scary. When most everything is bigger than you, a little apprehension seems wise. But what if things are not quite as they seem? What if some childhood fear is driven, not by feeling too small, but by feeling too big? Continue Reading →
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Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word
Sorry, so the song tells us, seems to be the hardest word. And sometimes, I suppose, it is. But it’s not as if the word itself is hard to say. When we turn a corner and bump into someone, “sorry” can be out of our mouths almost instantly. The struggle comes when “I’m sorry” needs to communicate something more significant than a social faux pas. In those times, it can sometimes seem as if “sorry” needs to be physically dragged out of us. Continue Reading →
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Is There Something Grandiose About OCD?
In the mindset of OCD sufferers, there is a grandiosity that connects with the very essence of sin—our deep-seated desire to be God. The serpent’s lure was to persuade Adam and Eve that God was holding out on them; that God kept the fruit from them because He knew that if they took it, they would be like Him—and that’s what He didn’t want (Gen. 3:5). And, after the fruit is eaten, God confirms that Adam and Eve have, in some sense, become like God (Gen. 3:22). Yet, this new status isn’t releasing but ruinous, for they step into a role that was never intended to belong to them. The experience of OCD involves a distorted belief in your own potency; a belief that you wield extraordinary power and can exert absolute control. No wonder OCD brings such anxiety—it imagines a reach we were never intended to have. The belief that we possess such capacity is simply terrifying. Continue Reading →
Read MoreEmotions–The Language of the Heart
Author and counselor Ed Welch describes emotion as “the language of the heart.” You can see his point. Whenever we share our deepest longings or admit our darkest fears, we speak emotionally. Or at least we should. It is difficult to connect with, or even understand, someone who only communicates in cognitive terms. We struggle to see what really matters to them. Emotions reveal us—they lay bare the passions of our hearts, and they connect us with others. Continue Reading →
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