How Did Psychology Help My Faith?

When I am sick, I seek a doctor. When I am sick at heart, I seek psychological help. When I doubt God, I seek mature Christian brothers. I gave thanks to God for each of these experts. Yet we sometimes feel that it is better for a Christian to help me in each case. Did God mandate that? Did God prohibit getting pagan help? How did psychology help my faith? Lots of ways. Let’s look at one.

How to Understand My Hidden Self

Only God knows us perfectly How does he get us to know something deeper? When I was young, my parents favored me as I was the best student and most obedient.

When I quit my successful army career to move abroad to poor Communist China in 1991, my parents rejected me. At the same time, I discovered that God wanted me to use my heart and not just be a computer. They had trained me to ignore all my emotions, and so felt, I was leaving their path.

Within a few years it was apparent that my parents had other favorite children. They favored the two that had no faith at that time.

I knew I should not hold my hate or it could become bitterness. I had seen how bitterness harmed my Mom.   My parents never came to visit me even when I married a Chinese Christian in China. They really hated my decision to move to China for God.

So I decided to understand them and not hate them for being against my life choices. Later, I got married and suddenly both my parents got sick and died.

Years later, I was disturbed to see my children did not like my parents who they had never met.  I was perplexed. See also Psychology is Turning Back to God.

Psychology Helped My Faith and Family

I went to a psychologist seminar. They asked us to write a letter that we would dream of our parents writing us. I casually thought. And when I put my pencil to the paper, I began to cry and even ball in that room full of people.  I had started to write: “Jim, you did good.”

My parents hurt me deeply when they rejected me for moving to China. I had hated them without knowing it for 25 years. Those psychologists were not Christian and did not know me, yet their work led them to have me write that letter that changed my life. Does God like psychology?

My children all love God and glorify Him in their lives because, out of Christian love, we learned psychology to help them day by day to clear the dirt from their hearts. If we just told our sad children to believe God, and closed our ears to the wealth of psychology, would they not hate us and God?

God knows me better than any psychologist, but he uses Psychology to help me see myself.  Surely God was happy when I discovered this secret in my heart. May we not reject any legal profession just because it is not Christian.