I visit my therapist every week on the same day at the same time.
Except for this week.
My counselor is in high demand with a waiting list, and I forgot to book my usual time slot for this week—back in July. Lindsey emailed me last week: “I have an opening next week on [a different day]. Do you want it?”
I’m not sure why I get to jump the list. I joke with Lindsey that I must be a fascinating enigma or maybe I’ve achieved the therapy equivalent of frequent flier status. Regardless, I’m thankful I got to go into the office today. Per usual, I wiggled under the necessary discomfort I’ve learned to embrace. That pressure has benevolently broken dams in my life. In just the past six months, I’ve experienced huge breakthroughs in my relationships with my faith and ministry, my family and friends, my dreams and habits.
Jesus has tilled the soil of my soul, uprooted some weeds, and planted new bushes that are already starting to yield sweet fruit and nourishing vegetables. I’ve grown more in my faith in a counselors office and in the woods in between those sessions this past year than I have through church services. That’s not a knock on my pastors. It’s just that therapy has proven a force multiplier to the truths I’m absorbing from a church stage and my Bible study group.
The end of my sessions usually creates the most awkward 60 seconds of my week. Going home with unfinished business is probably the closest I’ll ever be to what new parents say they feel when they leave the hospital with their newborn. “That’s it!? We just go home now? We’re just on our own?”
When I stepped out of Lindsey’s office into the waiting room today, though, my shoulders instantly and instinctively relaxed. My little sister was waiting at the check-in counter, awaiting her turn with our shared counselor. Such a sweet surprise! I wrapped my arms around her. I hope my eyes were as kind to her as hers were to me.
We both know why the other is there. We’ve inadvertently taught each other so much in the past few years, as we compare notes and ask questions. Empathy and affirmation swirl in the air between us along with references to podcasts and audiobooks and the Enneagram. As we’ve excavated around our traumas and adaptations, we’ve cried a lot in a windowless room—and laughed knowingly together where mosquitos interrupt our lunches.
I stepped outside to find her Subaru parked next to my MINI. I would’ve done the same, had her appointment preceded mine. Sharing a white line tells the other, “I’m with you.” Those three words communicate further affirmations:
- You’re doing it!
- Keep going!
- You’re not alone.
- I see you.
- I love you.
- I’m glad God put you in my life.
I’m episodically a great big brother. I’m good for the parts that look magnanimous on social media. I hope I’m getting better at the spaces in between. Today, I got a lump in my throat when I saw that blue Forester next to my black Countryman. In the two feet between our closed doors, I saw the distance I’ve been shrinking, the space I’ve been occupying, the land I’ve been conquering. I thought of the vulnerable conversations I’ve shared with my sister, my counselor, and Jesus—and how intertwined they all have become.
My sister is one of the reasons I finally got professional help and the only reason I found Lindsey. Because of the permission therapy brings, I’ve had more cathartic solitude than ever. In the creek or on the mountain alone, I’m now able to process life more promptly and thoroughly. I’ve probably cried in the woods more this year than across my previous 42 years combined. That release has been good for my soul.
An Old Testament prophet claimed that God wants to remove our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. He wants to make us more human, more in touch with how love and grace feel both to give and receive. He is revealing that intent and process at my counselor’s office. He is using hours in my sister’s passenger seat and at cafe tables to show me his heart—the prototype. He’s proving his adjacency on dusty trails, in cold streams, and on precipices overlooking summer lightning storms. And even in a tall station wagon parked next to mine outside a nondescript office building.
