One skill that is important for pastors and counselors to develop is the ability to bring together the complicated pieces of a person’s life and identify an important theme that helps simplify the chaos. Otherwise, your care for the person can be like a packed sermon that has so much information and so many points that they will retain none of it. Clarity might come from a word that the person mentions in passing, and then mentions again. “Weary,” for example. It functions as a description as well as a summary, and it can be the theme you use to find portals into Scripture.
Clarity could also come from a one-sentence summary. “Here is a question that Jesus keeps asking of you: ‘Who do you say that I am?’” (Mark 16:15). Or it could be as simple as “You are angry.” Scripture itself works to simplify the many words that God speaks, such as “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3). One sentence will not bring every data point together, but it will identify the critical ones.
I knew a seventy-year-old
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