_ _ _ _ _ 101...

Purpose, Summary and Abstract:  As I already released an entry earlier this week, I feel this full-blown disclosure of my blog and identity is out of place without a formal Pastoral-Care and professional entry interview. Following the styling of several contexts, I will attempt to do this all in one shot. The following three contexts are applied. Therefore I may not have time for a post next week to catch up on other things such as my video messages.

1. There was a J E S U S 101 class at one of the churches I had attended in my past. Other churches often call this the A L P H A course, so there's that too. Since it seems a bit out of context to just jump straight to J E S U S 101 perhaps without more of a "proper introduction" [RW] or personal testimonial of myself here, I decided we should go with this format to tell you more of 'the person behind the story' in this post.

2. Using the idea of the above context, we will overview myself (_ _ _ _ _) both before I became a Christian and then summarize my journey as a Christian so we can confront the differences. I will now transition the analysis into step 3 to show you the mindset I am using to formulate this post.

3. At this stage of my life, not only have I received many sessions of psychtriatic care (if you've seen my "Why were you in the hospital?" post, psychotherapy and Christian psychotherapy as well as employment interviews and employment counselling. Since Dr. Mutter shares the same first initial as me, I will denote the interviewer as M. Using the theory from his class, I will become my own hypothetical interviewer as well as the interviewed, so K is the interviewed and M is the interviewer. However, M will also incorporate hypothetical hiring managers and other professionals tasked with asking questions integrated with my own expertise. 

BEGIN:

M: Tell me a little about yourself. Can you summarize your experiences before you engaged in 'organized Christianity' in a few sentences?

K: I grew up in a small town about fifteen to twenty kilometers from my current location, we moved to uptown Toronto for a year to try to make it easier to commute to relatives but "EVER SINCE" [D-CW] high-school I have been living in my current location in supportive housing for the financially challenged because it has be challenging to seek an alternative within the confines of my current context.

M: Interesting, so where do you see God in this journey? Tell me a little bit about your initial experiences of encountering Christ.

K: Since I was a little child, perhaps given the context that I had an absentee father, I've also tried to hold conversations with God and although I never limited myself to any particular "religion" or "faith association at first, I always believed God was there and aside from faith in this one regard which I now frame into a 1 Samuel 3 type context, I never really been given any reasons from a personal perspective to doubt God's existence even when faced with the adversity of being given a psychtriatic diagnoses that include what professionals consider to be a deluded psychology of "hearing voices". 

M: I see. So it sounds like to me, that perhaps people think you may have 'created this notion' of God out of an unhealthy nurturing of the absence of healthy affection and scaffolding from your biological father, please share some more thoughts on this.

K: Well just like Eli in the 1 Samuel 3 passage, it is always natural to doubt a child can actually connect with God in a mature and healthy manner from a psychological and psychriatic perspective despite Jesus himself discouraging grown adults from setting boundaries on children to seek him in passages such as Mark 10:14. They naturally assume without any guidance this can become dangerous and extremely unhealthy, such as what happened with Hitler deciding that Germans were the only "chosen people" and that the rest of the world ought to be wiped out.

M: No doubt. Did you keep this brand of your faith in God consistent till the time you first started attending church on a regular basis?

K: Yes, but I had a bout with depression in high school prior to doing so. When I was interviewed by the family physician who was attending to me at the time, he went by a basic diagnostic manual of psychosis before referring me to a professional psychiatrist. 

M: I see, tell me more about this, now that you've had a lot more experiences in the mental health system as both an inpatient and outpatient as well as psychotherapy as both a recipient and student yourself, what do you think was the primary reason your physician felt you needed a profession psychiatrist's evaluation at that period in highschool? 

K: In a nutshell, the reasoning is quite basic really, I associated my symptoms of depression, including vast amounts of physical pain that may be imaginary too much with the suffering of Jesus like I read in the bible when he was crucified. The basic DSM diagnosis was pretty clear cut to my physician at that point I suppose, despite the fact that he was a Christian himself. He likely just thought I didn't feel I was LIKE Jesus, but that I was indeed experiencing some form of psychosis that I WAS Jesus. 

M: I see, I see... Well you've written quite a bit here in this blog space of yours. Albeit this is just a summary and only "surface level" information where you try to keep a lot of more sensitive information from under the public's view. However, other than the seemingly funny title that both your first name and Jesus' has 5 letters in it, I see no concrete evidence from your journal like entries here that would suggest from a psychology perspective that you actually do hold the belief you are Jesus 1.0, as in the original version. As a Christian I can ask you a simple question to help you clarify this, do you have sin in your life?

K: Yes, even as a Christian after I started attending church in the middle of high school, I don't claim to have lived a sinless life as Christ did, there are many things I've thought of and done that I don't think abide very well with my identification of being a "Christ-ian" which a friend of mind hinted to me once during my Ryerson years that I believe she was saying it means "little Christ" as a more rigid Greek or Aramaic translation. 

M: I see, let's revisit this relationship you had with your father a little bit, as you yourself have learned in Harris' course this semester, our relationship with our parents can often affect how we relate to our God, other than we've already established that your dictator mother may have instilled too much of a graceless image of God in your life, tell me more about your thoughts on your mother, father-son relationship in that regard.

K: Well my mother and father never got along. Mom felt like she made a mistake just out of pity to carry on with the decision to stay dating and into marriage. Unfortunately just like Leah and Jacob, my father perhaps never felt truly "loved and accepted" by mom. It was more like mom was just an ends to a means for him sex wise perhaps at the time. Wouldn't be the first time throughout my life time to date that I've seen men who hold this unspiritual notion that holds too tightly to the ideology of 1 Cor 7:2–4 but fail to contextualize the role of a life partner into other scripture like Ephesians and the rest of the bible as a whole. Over the years of being a Christian, I eventually began to see the proverbial value of women, i.e. Proverbs 28–Proverbs 31. So while I certainly believe 1 Cor 7:2-4 is of critical importance, I have arrived at a spot in my life where I am now able to show love so unconditionally to both women and men alike that at times I feel like I need to beat women off (or back slightly from my personal space) with a metaphorical stick haha....

M: Wow, that is certainly a big transition for sure. It also sounds like the absence of your father in your life up until his actual physical death which I have on record happened around the summer of 2011 before your grandmother passed away in 2012 does really tie in a lot to your reliance on the eternal relationship you have secured in your relationship with your deity. Let's revisit that in more detail in a future session. In interest of time, I hope it's ok we put that on the backburner for now as it is really heavy and we should really give it the time it deserves to explore in depth going forward. Is that ok?

K: Absolutely oK, no problem.

M: How about a brief summary of your professional experiences? You mentioned you have a previous degree with overlapping extra courses in both the Electrical and Computer engineering fields. Tell me what has your experience been so far with employment up until your recent return to seminary studies.

K: I have in the past been blessed to work for many industries and organizations, some with international recognition through various connections I had in my previous church community. Someone like my friend RA suggested this was the way to go usually in approaching the job market. But I guess in recent years because God needed me to take time off full-time work for various reasons to teach me more about life as my friend YL had put it during his time as my fellowship counsellor in undergrad, it was hard for me to dive into secular employment again during my time leading up to my return to doing my Masters at MDC.

M: I see, I see... interesting. Well we are definitely running out of time for today so perhaps we will have a part 2 of _ _ _ _ _ 101 at some point. Please summarize your thoughts up to your return to MDC to complete your Masters of Divinity, what were some of your pre-constructions, you've already served God in a voluntary capacity in many ministries in the past, why do you feel you needed to go the route of doing a Masters of Divinity, what were some of your initial goals behind this endeavor?

K: At first I was very hesitant because even up till my first semester at MDC I was still faced with the "alone" [unwed] context. While I know a lot of people do naturally meet someone when they are at seminary or bible college as per what I've seen others do or expressed as a natural process that happens as per the illustrations given by other Pastoral counsellors, I had many circumstances that prevented me from envisioning something like this for myself. And even as I began school this year, I had decided God was leading me to do a clean break away from my past Christian contexts all together. For some reason it was as if God was finally calling me away from my current home that I had established beyond just my immediate family. I had began the journey of learning the John 21 context in a long distance format. It might perhaps eventually bring resolution to my pre-MDC dilemma as well, but that's as you said, not something we're going to be able to cover in this single session.