Faith and Doubt by John Ortberg

Author:John Ortberg
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Faith & Doubt

as good a listener as I have ever known. I was seeing many clients, but because Claire’s case was so severe, most of our time was spent talking about her.

I learned empathy from Dana. I had never seen anyone inter- nalize a client’s world like he did. I can still remember how he told me that twenty years earlier, when his wife died of cancer, he left his pictures of her in his office in their old places and did not speak of her death to his clients. He did not want his more fragile clients to have to feel a sense of change or loss in what was for some of them the only safe place in their lives. He did not want to add to their burdens.

He listened, with sad eyes, to Claire’s story. He was a believer in God and spoke of how he would pray for the clients who came to him. He cared. And through him, I cared better too. We devel- oped a plan to help her. It was very modest since I would be seeing her for only that one year of graduate school. One of our goals was simply that she be able to make it through the year without any suicidal gestures.

Claire and I finished our year together, and I moved to another rotation. She was assigned to another low-cost trainee. I do not know what happened to her. I would like to think that she gained confidence, found a reason to live, maybe even got married.

But I know what happened to Dana. One Saturday morning the police department responded to a note in their mail by rushing to Dana’s garage and forcing the door open and finding his body in the car, which had been running through the night. Dana had left the note in their mailbox late the night before. He wanted to make sure he was found over the weekend so that his clients could be notified about what had happened and not surprised by coming to the office and finding him absent.

I don’t know what inside Dana made him think that life wasn’t worth it, that God couldn’t change it. Maybe the pain of carrying so much sadness was more than he could bear. Maybe he tried too

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