When curing an ailment isn’t easy
Modern medicine can heal a lot of physical ailments. And counseling can help a lot of emotional and spiritual problems. But what can we do when a psychological or developmental problem can’t be narrowed down to a simple physical or mental problems to be fixed?
In the latest Been Thinking About column, Mart De Haan writes about the challenge of caring for a friend suffering from serious mental and emotional problems. In this case, there wasn’t an obvious medical cure, and traditional Christian responses to illness–prayer, counseling, and encouragement to “think right”–weren’t producing a positive change either. De Haan talks about difficult cases like this, about our unfortunate tendency to apply overly simple solutions to complex problems, and about the need to be flexible in our response to spiritual and physical ailments.
