In pursuing the Licensed Professional Counseling (LPC) track at Richmont I am also pursuing my fourth career. For many years I was a church-planting pastor, then a Bible professor in French-speaking Africa and France, and then a middle-school Bible teacher. Although I loved teaching and preaching, I found that these ministries increasingly became pretexts for forming one-on-one mentoring relationships. Similarly, I began to feel increasingly inadequate in dealing with the complicated personal problems people were bringing to me. Combine these things with the true redemption and change I was seeing in my own life through counseling and I wanted to give back a little of what I had received.  

Everything seemed to come together at Richmont. My experiences as a mentor and my own experience of personal healing and restoration have given me a strong desire to help men who are struggling with depression, anxiety and sexual brokenness. I am excited about integrating my Biblical and theological training with the interpersonal and psychological skills I am learning at Richmont. I am particularly thrilled at the prospect of helping men experience healing by encountering God through such spiritual exercises as meditation and contemplative prayer.

Richmont may be the fourth graduate school experience I have had, but it is easily the best. The curriculum is both seriously academic and intensely practical. I feel that I am actually being given the opportunity to acquire skills specific to the profession I have chosen. At various times, I have been forced to apply the things I’m learning to my own life in a way that is stretching and sometimes painful. I am not the same person that I was when I started the program. Richmont also makes a serious effort at integration between faith and psychological theory, in that we are encouraged to think Biblically, but also creatively, a balance that is not easy to strike.  Finally, there is true, supportive community here.