An Amazing Journey
“No matter where you are in your life, God is still working,” shares Joe, a client of Pathways Professional Counseling now for the past five years.
“My wife, Gail, died in October 2010. The first year was not bad. The second year though . . . was bad,” says Joe. Now in his seventies, living in pain he could no longer bear, he reached out to Pathways. Since that time, his life has been turned upside down in the best of ways.
Joe says, “I was sitting here in the sunroom, remembering Gail. I looked down at my signet ring, and I remembered something I had been so selfish about, that I never apologized to Gail about, and I sat there weeping. And then, it was almost like an audible voice I heard saying, Don’t you realize you’ve been doing me the same way all these years? I knew this was God speaking (to me) through the Holy Spirit.
“And that brought more tears. That was the beginning of realizing there was much more to it than just grieving over Gail.”
SEEKING HELP
Rod Campbell, Pathways counselor serving in central Alabama, says that Joe first came to him having great difficulty processing grief after the death of his wife. “As we began to talk, we discovered that Joe’s grief process was essentially blocked by a lifetime’s worth of struggle with loss, going back to early childhood.”
Joe learned about Pathways through the St. Clair County Baptist Association newsletter, but put off calling for months. Eventually though, he called, and things began to change. “When Rod saw me in January of 2013, I went with the attitude of, ‘I’m going to tell him everything.’And I did. So in that first meeting, I began dredging up almost 70 years of grief.”
Joe, through a broken voice, still moved at the love and understanding he began to experience that first day at counseling, says, “He listened. He listened with the compassion of Christ, and at the end, he shared scripture. I remember driving home and thinking, ‘There is hope.’”
Joe goes on to say, “After I told him (Rod) several weeks of what I call ‘spiritual upchuck’, he began to go through all of that in a session.” It was in those conversations that Rod began to speak of God’s grace over Joe’s life in ways he had never before considered, “I never thought that God’s grace really included ‘Joe’, and part of that was based on how I grew up. In going through that though, I realized that God’s grace did include Joe.”
A NEW PERSPECTIVE
He adds, “I had no idea what an amazing journey it was going to be and that walls would come down. It went far beyond whatever expectations I had . . . I have realized that there’s not going to be any progress unless you look the past eyeball to eyeball . . . It’s been an amazing journey for an old man. I’m not the man I was when my wife died.”
Rod would seem to echo those sentiments, “Through his time in the counseling process, Joe has experienced significant healing, growth, change, and freedom. He has worked very hard for his progress and has seen God do a great work in him.”
Joe says that the most meaningful aspect of his time in counseling was coming to understand God and himself in a better way. He began to see God in a deeper way, and himself as a child of God who was deeply loved. Despite the many trials and heartaches he has walked through, he says, “ . . . I realized God the Father, the Abba Father, was a father who loved me and wanted me to succeed and was going to help me succeed and would be with me.”
His prayer for anyone reading this, who may need help, is that they would be encouraged to take the next step. For anyone struggling to grieve or who may feel trapped by pains and attacks of the past, Joe encourages, “Find a counselor. There IS hope. And tell it all. Don’t keep any of it in . . . A licensed counselor must keep it confidential . . . There is hope; you don’t have to deal with it by yourself . . . The wounds are there. God’s allowed those wounds, but he’s also the healer of those wounds.”
Joe's story, and others' stories of life change through the work of Christ in their lives through ABCH and Pathways, may be found in our new Annual Report.