On My Way

 I've been on this journey for a while now. And now, I'm one course away from finishing this program. I'm within sight of beginning a career in counselling. 

After I get my credentials from the soon-to-be-opened College of Counselling Therapists of PEI (CCT-PEI), I will be able to call myself a Counselling Therapist. Until then, I will be finishing my studies, applying to obtain my credentials, and searching for an appropriate office from where to provide services.

I feel as though I have started the last leg of my graduate studies journey, and at some point, that last leg becomes the first leg of my second career. 

I have no rose-coloured glasses here. I know it will be difficult. I know I will struggle at first. Most new business owners do. However, I have my training, I have a few people who want me to contact them in the fall of this year (after I get my credentials) and who will be happy to come and see me as paying clients. And I have word of mouth, which in this province is a powerful thing, for good or ... not. 

Plus, I also have the support of family, friends, colleagues, professors, and the most amazing supervisor. That means that if I have a question about anything to do with the counselling business OR about getting myself unstuck as a therapist, I have someone to mentor me. 

Thinking back to when I first started this blog, little did I know then where that journey would lead me. Random events converged to funnel me in to a decision that I initially made as a back-up plan in case I got fired. (At the time Stephen Harper was the prime minister and public servants were in his cross-hairs!) That back-up plan quickly became my ultimate goal, something I lined up for me to walk into after I retired. 

I retired near the end of September 2020, after the pandemic had ravaged the world and we were heading into the second wave. However, since the Emergency Measures Organization had identified counselling as an essential service, I was able to do my practicum at a local church (thanks to Grace Baptist and Pastor Jeff Eastwood and the elders' board!) for the past 7.5 months. The day after tomorrow, I will see my last client as a student.

It all seems so surreal to me. The idea that in six months, I will likely have my own practice and be seeing clients there ... boggles my mind. Six months! 

I have very little idea what lies ahead. The stepping stones of this journey lead to the other side, but what that shore will look like is a mystery to me. All I know is that this is what I was meant to do, what I was made to do. 

And I will relish every moment. Even if I get my feet wet. :D

 

Testimony with a twist

It's an age-old question.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Well, if I knew the answer to that, I might be rich thousands of times over because that's how many tragedies happen to good people - every day.  We want it all to make sense.  We want it all to mean something.  We want someone to blame.

But the truth is, whether it's beyond our control or not, these things do happen.  The innocent suffer.  Babies die - by accident and sometimes, as hard as it is to imagine - by mistakes (fatal ones) made by relatives or friends - relatives or friends with varying motivations. Hard as it is to accept, the ones who DO die may just be the lucky ones.  Many children are wounded so badly inside their spirits that even as adults, they might never recover from the perfectionism or emotionlessness of their parents.

And the agony is still just as real for the relatives and friends who are to "blame" as it is for the ones who aren't.  Pain is pain.

Tragedies happen.  Floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, car crashes.  It doesn't mean that God isn't good.  They just happen.  They happen to bad people AND to good people.  It doesn't make the pain of loss any less real - no matter who you are or what you believe.

People fail financially.  Abysmally.  They don't mean to - but it happens.  Things get out of control.  Debts rise.  People - smart people, people of faith - buy into the idea that in order to make money you have to spend money.  The turn-around will happen, the break-even will occur and then everything else will be gravy.  

But it doesn't happen - for one reason or another (does it matter whose fault it is?)  And they have a choice: mortgage their children's future, or declare bankruptcy.

It's a tough decision.  We chose bankruptcy.  

We know the embarrassment and shame of failure.  

We also know the horrible feeling of trusting we were in a safe place with our brothers and sisters in the Lord - only to be judged and ostracized by some of the very people who only a few weeks previous were singing in complete abandon beside us.  The judgment came from a place of faulty belief: the belief that Christians should never fail financially.  (Oh yeah, like we really set out to do that.  NOT!)  In fact - it's the "flip side" of the prosperity gospel, the 'name it and claim it' doctrine (also known as the 'blab it and grab it' idea).  The basic belief is that God wants His people to prosper just because they're His.  The prosperity people take it to the extreme: diamond rings, fancy cars, 7-figure bank accounts.  But the idea has trickled down to those who would deny subscribing to that belief - because I've heard it said that it's a "poor testimony" to fail financially. To me it's the same belief - just a matter of degree.  

I'm inclined to think that financial failure is not a poor testimony.  To be sure - it's not desirable.  But it's not a poor testimony - it's life.  

I think that it is something that God will use to help someone else who has to go through such a thing.  We understand the feelings of despair and of uselessness.  Only recently God set up a conversation with someone who was so incredibly crushed by this stigma associated with his own financial failure that he felt like - well, like dung. And through our experience he was able to see that life does go on. 

If we hadn't gone through that and been able to talk to this fellow, it's possible he could have even considered suicide.  That happens too - because of the condemnation doled out by those to whom money (i.e., having enough of it) is a sign of divine favour.  Poppycock! 


Oh, to be sure, financial tragedy like that hurts - believe me - in ways I can't fully describe.  And it matters not whether losing our shirt happens because of the greed of others or the inability to control the monster when it gets out of the bag.  But I think that when Jesus said that people would know us by our love for each other, perhaps He should have put a proviso in there - "...as long as they can pay their bills."  Hm? no??  Oh... 

If we have to be the means by which other people decide whether He is trustworthy - by our success at staying out of crushing debt or of nothing bad ever happening to us - then He's not much of a God is He?

If we believe that God has to rely solely on His people to uphold His reputation in the world as to whether He is good, then who do we believe is God after all - Him?  or us?

Bankrupt!

I was talking to a friend of mine today about how we know that God will provide for our needs ... but what exactly ARE our needs?

"Oh God, I really NEED a Porsche."

We might laugh at that kind of prayer. But it shows how deeply ingrained our western culture is and how it has seeped into the church.

What do we mean when we say that God will provide for our needs? Does it mean that we'll never, ever, not in a hundred years, go without? Is there room in our theology for a God who would allow a Christian to suffer want?

Is it ever God's will for a Christian to declare bankruptcy? There now, I've said it. The B word.

It's not something that is all that easy to do in Canada. In the States, declare bankruptcy and within six months you have at least some credit rating back. But in Canada, it's a very grueling process. You have to list all your assets and liabilities, then your bi-weekly (or monthly) income and expenses, itemize it, have a bankruptcy trustee go over each one and allow or disallow each one. The debts are forgiven in the sense that you don't ever have to pay the creditors back - at least not all of it. They are prohibited from calling you up to demand payment. That in itself is a great relief.

But for nine months, every expense is scrutinized, and every last cent that isn't spent on necessary (and approved) items is given to the bankruptcy trustee to be distributed to the creditors at the end of the nine months. If you've kept your nose clean, at the end of that period, the bankruptcy is "discharged" and you don't have to report to the trustee anymore. So that means there is a little more money at the end of the month.

However, that's not the end. Your credit rating is absolutely ruined. And it stays ruined for years. YEARS. Seven years, to be exact. And then you have to start from scratch.

The whole process is designed to make a person think very hard before committing to that kind of step. And it's also designed to teach people who have not managed their money well, HOW to follow a budget.

The mechanics aside - what is the will of God in this matter of a Christian declaring personal bankruptcy??

The truth is - I really don't know for sure. All I know is what we went through.

We had tried to operate a business. "Spend money to make money," we were told. So we got a fax machine, and spent money on faxes and on long-distance telephone calls to grow our contact network. We got lots of good contacts - but no sales. More and more money disappeared into the phone bill. We were spending some $700 a month in long-distance alone. This went on for quite a while. We borrowed to pay the bills, and we borrowed to pay the loans we got to pay the bills. The debt was crushing us. We felt like failures. We were stressed out all the time wondering where the next meal was coming from, or who would call us next asking for a payment.

In desperation, we went to the Orderly Payment of Debt (OPD) office. They looked at the debt load and (bless them, they didn't laugh) told us that if we went for OPD, we would be mortgaging our children's future for the next 30 years. They advised us to declare personal bankruptcy.

That period of time was the most wrenching of our lives up until that point. We were dealing with the possibility of being stigmatized by the very people who claimed to care about and love us - as long as we measured up to their expectations, we found out. The internal struggle, the pain of daily wondering when it would all fall apart around our ears - early on in the mortgage with no assets to call our own - we agonized about this decision.

And that's when we got a first-hand dose of "Christian love and concern." When I mentioned to one person that we were having significant financial problems and we didn't know what to do, she said, "Well, THAT's not speaking in faith...."

OUCH. And then she started telling me that she knew how I felt, how she and her husband were struggling to have enough money at the end of the month, and how God always made sure that they were able to pay the bills, yada, yada, yada.... She just didn't understand that it wasn't like someone could write us a check for a thousand dollars and fix everything. We needed over fifty times that amount just to make things manageable.

Another lady called me on the phone every day. She assured me that she and her husband were praying for us, that they were believing for a miracle. "Did you get your miracle yet?" was her first question, every time.

Finally, we knew it was time to declare bankruptcy when we sat across from a loans officer at a finance company to take out our second loan to buy groceries.

So, that week we decided to go to the trustee and declare bankruptcy. Although the initial setup was a difficult experience to say the least, the trustee looked at us at the end of the meeting, and said, "None of your creditors is allowed to demand payment of this debt ... ever again." For me it was like a two-ton weight fell off my shoulders.

And the next day the phone rang. It was this lady again. "Did you get your miracle?" she asked. "Yes," I said. She was excited and wanted to hear all about it. "God used us declaring bankruptcy to erase all of our debt," I told her. She stammered, cleared her throat, and made some excuse to hang up.

She never called again.

OUCH again.

We learned not to let anyone know about our predicament unless we had to. It was our experience that nobody wanted to hear anything about financial difficulty in the life of a Christian unless it was already resolved. It was a taboo subject, and fodder for criticism and judgment from many in the church. It went against some people's theology, a theology started by Wall Street and legitimized in the Christian community by such charismatic folks as Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts, and Robert Schuller.

I'll tell you what I think. I think that God can use ANYTHING for His purposes. I think that in some cases (not all) it IS God's will for a Christian to declare personal bankruptcy. It's not something a Christian would enter into willy-nilly. Going that route is not without a whole lot of heart-rending soul-searching and prayer.

I also think that Christians need to cultivate a response to the shocking news that someone has failed financially (or for that matter, morally), a response that isn't based on snap judgments, but on a desire to understand. Not a desire to understand the mechanics of the failure or to comprehend whose fault it was, but to really hear the heartache and the shame that is behind such an admission... and to focus on THAT rather than whether it's right or wrong.

God taught us so very much through the bankruptcy. He showed us just how powerless we were to get out of this mess on our own, and that was an object lesson to us of the spiritual predicament that ALL of us are in - unable in our wildest dreams to have a relationship with a holy God based on our own merits. When our debts were forgiven, we got a true picture of forgiveness - we never had to wonder whether this company or that company would come after us for payment. We knew they never would. "Just as if we'd never owed," was the perfect illustration of the Christian concept of Justification by Faith.

We did learn how to live within our means. Cutting up the credit cards, living on cash only, was a huge adjustment but we learned how to do it. It made life so much easier after we were discharged from the bankruptcy and nobody would give us any credit for years afterward. And we resolved never to get into a debt we couldn't pay back - ever again.

And there were so many experiences where God really came through for us and met our everyday needs through the kindness and the generosity of His people - for not ALL people in the church judged us. Some of them actually loved us... and showed us they loved us. God Himself worked a couple of really amazing miracles of provision along the way.

I think I'll save those miracles for another post.