OVERCOMING TRAUMA: Starting to Heal Means Starting to Feel

What is your role as a field minister? And kind of just share a little bit about your background that has uniquely prepared you for situations just like that one.

Really what I see my role as, as being a person that comes in from the outside who is just there to listen and comfort.

Obviously, having some counseling experience, I was practiced as a counselor for 20 years.

I'm still licensed as a counselor, counseled a lot of missionaries over the years in West Africa where my wife and I used to be based.

But you can really sum it up as being present with people and their pain.

in the face of people who have suffered indescribable tragedies, tragedies that I cannot begin to understand the depth of.

The Bible talks about weeping with those who weep, and I think sometimes that's all we can do is come alongside believers and say, listen, we're here.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's it, we're here.

One of the other parts of your ministry, though, is also training pastors to come into those situations with a few more tools in their toolbox to help their congregations, to help people who are being impacted by persecution.

Talk a little bit about that side of your work.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, it's interesting because what keeps me up at night, it's numbers that keep me up at night.

And you look at just how deficient a lot of these countries are in terms of people who have been trained to help.

When you look at most of West Africa, when you look at the Sahel of West Africa, you're talking about a ratio of about one trained counselor for every two to three hundred thousand citizens.

Right.

Now, you contrast that with America where the number is one for every 300.

Wow.

So there's not a lot of people there.

And so what happens is Christians are attacked.

They're attacked by jihadists.

And there's nobody there who really knows how best to help them.

And so a couple of years ago, I began an initiative with a local church in West Africa to really train up pastors because there was no seminary, no Bible school that was training them as pastoral counselors.

And so we began an initiative where we just trained them, trained them really in the ministry of presence because sometimes pastors mean well.

They want to do what's best.