Over the past 40 years, I’ve served as a counselor in various settings, a school psychologist, a director of counseling, a counselor education professor, and, since my retirement from Texas A&M International University, a coach — sitting with people (including many veterans) in the hardest places of their lives.

In my academic and clinical career, I specialized in the meaning-centered approach of the late Dr. Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor. The focus of this framework is helping people find deep meaning and purpose despite intense suffering. If you’ve never read Frankl’s best-selling book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” I highly recommend it. You will be enlightened if you are a “seeker” and blessed if you are a “believer.”

I’ve spent decades doing crisis intervention and working with critical incident stress. People are having a hard time adjusting to contemporary society; men in particular are feeling the effects of a culture that has changed rapidly, and many of them didn’t go along with it. Through this work, I’ve discovered that merely being a professing Christian believer does not insulate a man from suffering a “midlife crisis” or a “spiritual crisis.”

Before entering the helping profession, I served as a Missile Launch Officer with ICBMs in the United States Air Force. I also served with tactical nuclear missiles in the United Kingdom when we initially deployed the Ground Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM). I know something about stress, anxiety, depression, and all of the other issues that come with a broken mind with an intact body. We each have our own experiences. I respect yours.

Along the way, I earned a master’s, specialist, and doctoral degrees. I earned post-doctoral credentials (Diplomate in Logotherapy) and spent decades researching how humans find meaning in suffering. I’ve taught it, published on it, and most importantly — lived it.

Most of this time, I was a “seeker.” I wasn’t sure where God was, whether Jesus was real, or whether anything I was building actually meant something. My searching wasn’t a detour. It was what God was uniquely qualifying me to do. I know what stress, anxiety, and depression can do to a man — the depths of dysfunction — walking in the shadow of the valley of death. But just as there are times when we spend time in the mud puddles of life, there are also times when we climb the mountain peaks and see the beauty that is in front of us. I never saw that beauty so clearly — despite my suffering — until Christ showed up in my life.

Today, my faith in Jesus Christ is not the footnote to my work — it’s the foundation of it. I’m not interested in easy answers or canned programs that I used and abused in the past. I’m no longer interested in psychiatric labels that try to define a man who is suffering a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. I don’t believe that a man who is wondering, “Is this all there is?” needs a pill from a psychiatrist when the true “medicine chest” is within himself. For believers, that’s the Holy Spirit.

As a coach, I am interested in walking alongside the man who knows something is missing and is finally ready to find out what it is. If that’s you, maybe we should talk.