Getting things in persepctive

Sometimes we need to get a health checkup, sometimes I just need to get things into perspective. Somehow we need good friends around us, sometimes I need someone I trust to challenge my thinking just to make sure I'm still on the straight and narrow.

Yesterday I had a long session reading over and helping a student working on a paper about cognitive-behavioural therapy and pain management. It's strange how much you can pick up. I realized during our session a certain amount of my teaching involves the cognitive aspects of the psychotherapy inducting the student into a different way of thinking or learning to think differently so editing becomes possible and also working with the behavioural reducing stress.

So many of my telephone calls to me are from people trying to get things into right perspective, and sometimes I have to challenge but most of the time its simply encouraging them to recognize what they already know. One aspect of cognitive therapy is an action plan, seeking confirm that actions will be taken to prevent, modify or change things. When it comes to faith and spirituality action is required but its not about action, rather active passivity. What do I mean by this? I think it is a active seeking after God, in being open to the activity of God rather than a self-centred crying out.

One of the articles I found in the paper we worked on this afternoon examined different pain management interventions and compared them. Somehow there was little difference between the different techniques and methodologies and even compared with the control group. But significantly there were wide variations between individuals in each group. It seems to suggest that methods are not important rather the individual themselves determined a receptivity to a method.

I suspect that for whether a church or an individual, spiritual growth is determinant on the attitude and willingness of the individual or church to grow rather than any specific methods. I recall the Hawthorne experiement in the early days of time and motion studies on production lines. They noticed that productivity inevitably dropped, but always went up when there was a change in patterns before dropping again. Do you want to change?