Why “Cold Water Counseling”?
I don’t remember when the idea first came to me. It was certainly years ago, well before I had made the first move toward a private practice in biblical counseling. Or perhaps it was my first move as I thought about counseling as a vehicle for and practice of biblical truth. “Cold Water” bubbled up as a metaphor to describe the delivery and impact of truth. Matthew 10:42 stood out first, “And whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.” Water offered by cupfuls sounded exactly like what I was made to do. Comforting, merciful, and personal was the way I understood biblical or Christian counseling, but also relationships in general. I don’t like conflict, but I delight in opportunities to move toward the wounded and thirsty, bringing truth and grace to comfort a troubled heart. With the image of the cup, the first of three principles for my nascent practice was clarified: Cold Water Counseling would offer God’s peace, hope, and presence to those struggling with anxiety and fear, grief and loneliness, depression and hopelessness, and the general stresses of life and change.
But as I reckoned with other implications of the nature of the cold water of truth, God soon led me to the well in John 4. While patient and gentle with the Samaritan woman he met there, I couldn’t classify Christ's interaction with her as non-confrontational. He brought truth to her in a quantity more difficult for her to swallow easily. Perhaps it affected her as much as if he’d poured a bucketful of that cool well water over her head: startling initially, but ultimately refreshing and life-giving in the way it awakens and prompts to clearer thinking or action. “The water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” John 4:14. The water I offer is not my own but God’s. It is his cup of comfort, and his bucket or well of clarity. Cold Water Counseling would offer God’s truth, life, and light to those in struggling with darkness, lies, and false sources of life.
A final idea came from the remembrance and promise of Isaiah 43. “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.” This recounting of Israel’s miraculous passages through the Red Sea and the Jordan brought to mind God’s sovereign and merciful determination to be and to go with his people, bringing them through waters of death into new life by his own power, love, and purpose. I also see here God’s appeal to trust him in the very face of impossible circumstances, thereby distrusting one’s own perception by leaning on his understanding, on his word of mercy, and on his call to follow him, through pain and suffering, through heartache and shame, even through waters of loss and death. Cold Water Counseling would commend humility, repentance, and faith in God as an alternative and the only remedy to a self-centered life of sin, pride, selfishness, stubbornness, despair, shame, unbelief, and the destruction which surely follows.
With these clarifying statements of purpose and principle, the idea of Cold Water Counseling became a way-point, land on the far horizon, that began to orient me and my future. I found myself becoming caught up in something larger than myself, but which was also of me, bringing definition to who I am and what I believe I am called to. Summarizing, I came to this distillation of Cold Water's mission and my calling: By the will of God and for the glory of God, Cold Water Counseling offers the living water of the presence, truth, and grace of God to those who thirst for comfort, clarity, and connection. Proverbs 25:25 offered another telling which has become the “banner verse” for this effort: Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.
In your prayers, please pray for me to be a faithful steward of the many graces given me. Above all, pray for truth to be spoken and lived in love.
To God be all glory.
Thank you!