Safes For Every Situation

Gun Safes West Palm Beach

Land of the Cyclops

Few Sicilian towns claimed greater antiquity than Gela, where the center of the American assault was to fall. Founded on a limestone hillock by Greek colonists from Rhodes and Crete in 688 b.c., Gela had since endured the usual Mediterranean calamities, including betrayal, pillage, and, in 311 b.c., the butchery of five thousand citizens by a rival warlord. The ruins of sanctuaries and shrines dotted the modern town of 32,000, along with tombs ranging in vintage from Bronze Age to Hellenistic and Byzantine. The fecund “Geloan fields,” as Virgil called them in The Aeneid, grew oleanders, palms, and Saracen olives. Aeschylus, the father of Attic drama, had spent his last years in Gela writing about fate, revenge, and love gone bad in the Oresteia; legend held that the playwright had been killed here when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald skull.

Patton planned a different sort of airborne attack by his invasion vanguard. On the night of July 9–10, more than three thousand paratroopers in four battalions were to parachute onto several vital road junctions outside Gela to forestall Axis counterattacks against the 1st Division landing beaches. Leading this assault was the dashing Colonel James Maurice Gavin, who at thirty-six was on his way to becoming the Army’s youngest major general since the Civil War. Born in Brooklyn to Irish immigrants and orphaned as a child, Gavin had been raised hardscrabble by foster parents in the Pennsylvania coalfields. Leaving school after the eighth grade, he worked as a barber’s helper, shoe clerk, and filling station manager before joining the Army at seventeen. He wangled an appointment to West Point, where his cadetship was undistinguished. As a young officer he washed out of flight school; a superior’s evaluation as recently as 1941 concluded, “This officer does not seem peculiarly fitted to be a paratrooper.” Ascetic and fearless, with a “magnetism for attractive women,” Jim Gavin was in fact born to go to the sound of the guns. “He could jump higher, shout louder, spit farther, and fight harder than any man I ever saw,” one subordinate said.

His 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the 82nd Airborne Division, had staged in central Tunisia. Gavin harbored private misgivings about the Sicilian mission — “many lives will be lost in a few hours,” he wrote — and with good reason. The 82nd had received only roughly a third as much training time as some other U.S. divisions. The amateurish Allied parachute operations in North Africa had been marred by misfortune and miscalculation. No large-scale night combat jump had ever been attempted, and so many injuries had plagued the division in Tunisia — including fifty-three broken legs and ankles during a single daylight jump in early June — that training was curtailed. Much of the husky planning had been done by officers who had no airborne expertise and whose notions were suffused with fantasy. Transport pilots had little experience at night navigation, but to avoid flying over trigger-happy gunners in the Allied fleets, the planes, staying low to evade Axis radar, would have to make three dogleg turns over open water in the dark. Airborne units had yet to figure out how to drop a load heavier than three hundred pounds, much less a howitzer or a jeep. An experimental “para-mule” broke three legs; after putting the creature out of its misery, paratroopers used the carcass for bayonet practice. Still, the ranks “generally agreed that training proficiency had reached the stage where the mission was ‘in the bag,’” wrote one AAF officer, who later acknowledged “possible overoptimism.”

At about the time that Hewitt’s fleet neared Malta, Gavin and his men had clambered aboard 226 C-47 Dakotas near Kairouan. Faces blackened with burnt cork, each soldier wore a U.S. flag on the right sleeve and a white cloth knotted on the left as a nighttime recognition signal. Days earlier an 82nd Airborne platoon had circulated through the 1st Division to familiarize ground soldiers with the baggy trousers and loose smock worn by paratroopers. Parachutes occupied the C-47s’ seats; the sixteen troopers in each stick sat on the fuselage floor, practicing the invasion challenge and password: george/marshall. Dysentery tormented the regiment, and men struggled with their gear and Mae Wests to squat over honeypots placed around the aircraft bays. Medics distributed Benzedrine to the officers, morphine syrettes to everyone.

As the first planes began to taxi — churning up dust clouds so thick that some pilots had to take off by instrument — a weatherman appeared at Gavin’s aircraft to affirm Commander Steere’s prediction of lingering high winds aloft. “Colonel Gavin, is Colonel Gavin here? I was told to tell you that the wind is going to be thirty-five miles an hour, west to east,” he said. “They thought you’d want to know.” Fifteen was considered the maximum velocity for safe jumping. Another messenger staggered up with an enormous barracks bag stuffed with prisoner-of-war tags. “You’re supposed to put one on every prisoner you capture,” he told Gavin. An hour after takeoff, a staff officer heaved the bag into the sea.

Copyright © 2007 Rick Atkinson from the book The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson Published by Henry Holt and Company; October 2007;$35.00US; 978-0-8050-6289-2

Rick Atkinson was a staff writer and senior editor at The Washington Post for more than twenty years. He is the bestselling author of An Army at Dawn, The Long Gray Line, In the Company of Soldiers, and Crusade. His many awards include Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and history. He lives in Washington, D.C.

About the Author

www.thedayofbattle.com.

An Interview with Larry Crabb

It could be argued that Larry Crabb is the best speaker and the best known figure in evangelical Christian counseling circles today. He has a worldwide following of counselors and pastors who have heard his lectures and read some of his books including Basic Principles of Biblical Counseling (1975), Effective Biblical Counseling: A Model for Helping Caring Christians Become Capable Counselors (1977), Understanding People (1987), Connecting (1997) and his latest, The Safest Place on Earth: Where People Connect and Are Changed Forever (1999). Dr. Crabb is disarmingly honest about his own struggles

and insecurities, his willingness to grow, and his courage to move beyond some of his earlier positions as his thinking matures. He has a deep commitment to Christ and a love for the church. Larry Crabb is a pioneer who is making a difference. ate career, I figured that being a Christian psychologist was no different from being a psychologist who happened to be a Christian. Lloyd Humphries, my quantitative psych professor, got up at the beginning of my first year in a five-year

grad school program and said, Whatever exists exists as a quantity and can be measured. Nothing that cannot be measured exists. I remember thinking, Well, now, wait a minutetheres some contradiction between that and the way I think as a Christian. And that single sentence from the professor led me to make a decision to give up Christianity. And I did. As best I could, for about two to three years. I thought, I will not buy Christianity simply because its my heritage. I decided I would not buy anything that I didnt deeply believe, but I started reading the writings.

Lets start with a brief history. How did you get into this field,

and whats happened to you over the years?

LC:If I ever publish an autobiography Ill call it Sovereign StumblingI stumbled, and God was sovereign. When I was in college, I   decided I would not buy anything that I didnt deeply believe, but I started reading the writings of Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis. They were the two mentors who brought me back to the faith. In my third year, I came back gung ho and decided if Christianity is true, its got to control everything. So then I became a total tyrant; I took on all my professors and all my friends and I even took on my church, because the

church, I decided, wasnt being very Christian. So that divided the church, in my third year of graduate school. I was a firebrand from the word go.

What did you do after you completed your Ph.D. at the University of Illinois?

LC:I taught there for two years in their psych department, and I was a staff psychologist for the counseling center. Then I had the opportunity to go to Florida, where I took over a counseling center

at a state university. Let me tell you a quick little story that was very instrumental in hindsight to the direction Ive taken. I did my first marriage seminar ever when I was the head of the counseling center at a state university, and the West Palm Beach Post ran a headline: Lone FAU psychologist believes men should be head of home. That was not well received. A woman who was part of the Council of the Status of Women on Campus, a very strong feminist, disguised herself as a client and came to see me to get the goods on me, to get me fired. She was going through a divorce. It was one of her own making, and she was happy about it, but she came in and pretended to be unhappy about it. She wanted me to tell her, Just shape up, and do whatever your husband tells you. I didnt take that approach, of course, and after about five sessions, she realized that maybe I wasnt this monster, and she opened up and told me the truth, that shed come as a spy. That made me think, Im going to be fighting battles that I dont want to fight in a secular environment, so I made the decision to leave the university and go into private practice. There were good folks at FAU and I wasnt fired, but

I went into private practice because I wanted freedom to think without having to be accountable to people with a totally different philosophical mindset from mine. I wanted the freedom to pursue what I felt was Christian counseling.

When did you start writing?

LC:When I left FAU to go into private practice, the pastor of my church said, I will raise money to support you in your financial anxiety when you quit your professorship and go into private practice if youll promise to write a book. In two weeks, he raised $15,000, handed me a check, and said, Write a book. So I wrote my first book, Basic Principles of Biblical Counseling. I was in private practice for 10 years, and thats where my convictions really grew that the community of

Gods people is the place where the deepest healing takes place. I came to the conclusion back in those days that the deepest healing has less to do with technical intervention and more to do with relational engagement. I decided that it needs to be in the community of Gods people and thats the church. I thought that if healing belongs in

church, then Id like to be involved in somehow strengthening churches. I was invited to do a chapel service at Grace Seminary in Indiana, (which Id never even heard of) and after the service, Chuck Smith, who became a very strong mentor of mine, said, You ought to come and start a counseling program. And thats how it happened.

How long were you at Grace?

LC:I was at Grace for seven years. I was very committed to strengthening church leadership, strengthening churches, but I wasnt at all opposed to professional therapists. I didnt want to wage a campaign against that at all. My experience has been that when I speak in favor of the church as a healing community, a caring community, what is often heard , Just give them Bible verses. You have homosexual struggles? Well, dont do itheres a verse rather than Well, let me get to know you; let me get to talk with you; let me get myself involved with you as a person. I left kind of a narrow view of church-centered counseling, a kind of bash-em-over-the-head-with-the- Bible sort of thing and went to Colorado Christian University in Morrison, Colorado. I went with a real desire to broaden my opportunities to think about what Christian counseling could be.

Tell me about your transition from having an Institute of Biblical Counseling to the Institute of Biblical Community?

LC:Mostly because of a comment that Regent College professor Jim Houston made at Biola. James Houston is one of my heroes. We were speaking together and he said, If the church is going to experience a second reformation, this one dealing with sanctification as the first dealt with justification, then well need to look at how the doctrine of the Trinity has implications for human community. I began to ponder what the Trinity and community have to do with counseling. I think Houston was saying the final reality in the universe is not the Bible; the final reality is community…relationship. When Jesus said, I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one (John 17:22), hes saying that when people learn to enter into the kind of community that God has enjoyed in the Trinity, and when they have the old_resources that they do because of the gospel, then what needs to happen to people happens in community. When I began to understand that, I thought, Ill develop my Institute to focus on the old_resources that are inherent in the community. I want that to be more the focal point of the word counseling. So thats why I chose to shift it over to community.

Some people wonder where larry Crabb stands in terms of the whole field of counseling. Is he for it or against it?

LC:Wherever hurting people are helped, its with the old_resources that God provides. If that happens in a church, then Im thrilled; if it happens in a therapists office, then Im thrilled. Wherever there are human beings who care about other people and are willing to sit down, take the time to involve themselves in others lives, to be helpful

with whatever the struggles might be, then Im thrilled. So therefore, Im wildly enthusiastic; Im wildly supportive of any godly man or woman, whether pastor or therapist, who is doing good. Im not drawing lines in the sand that say if youre a counselor, thats bad, go to the

church. Thats not my view at all. Having said that, I think one of the most important questions that counselors have to ask is, When good things happen in counseling, why are they good? I know this is a huge issue thats been in the field of therapy for years. I think it is pretty well substantiated that specific techniques that grow out of specific theoretical positions are not nearly as important as the kind of person who provides a certain kind of relationship. If thats the case, that has enormous implications, because it says that psychotherapy in counseling is less a matter of technical expertise and more a matter of relating a certain way. You cant reduce therapy to a series of techniques; its something about who the therapist is, whether he or she

in fact cares, is involved, or knows how to listen. And while skills can be taught, improvement only takes place when the counselor communicates to the counselee that he or she genuinely cares. The reality is, Is the energy of Christ within you pouring out into the other person with the

wisdom the Bible provides, with the wisdom of experience, with the wisdom of whatever the Spirit provides? Im arguing that professional therapists need to see that the setting is going to be powerful to the degree that they provide a meaningful relationship. I think theres a handicap for the therapist when its an hour-long relationship which says, We start at 10, weve got to stop at 11; give me the $100; I cant talk to you once I leave the office. I would like to see the value that takes place in the professional hour understood as something

that really could be in large measure reproduced in other relational settings; maybe the church, maybe small groups, maybe at lunches between Christian friends. Id love to see the word elder defined as business person to shepherd you. And if these kinds of things happened, then I think wed see a tremendous increase in mental health.

Tell me about your writing in this area.

LC:Connecting was really the first major statement of the direction that I see myself going for the rest of my professional life. The book that I just finished is called The Safest Place on Earth. When the Spirit is present in a community, it is safe in a way that most Christians, most people, have never experienced safety. After the horrible atrocity in Littleton with the two kids who killed 14 people, a

newspaper reported one of the young men who pulled the guns said, Im getting even with you for laughing at me. Of course this is sin, but sin is a whole lot more than just a choice to do something bad; its a whole complex of pain and struggle. Had this kid ever been safe enough to say, I hate myself. I hate life. No ones ever loved me. My soul was built for love and I never experienced it. Where is anyone able to say, I cant bear to tell you this, but I have homosexual desires, or Im into pornography. I think that Carl Jung was right when he said that when the church eliminated the confessional in the reformation, psychotherapy rose to fill the void. The confessional was a safe place. And I want to see the Christian community whether its the therapists office or the churchto be the safest place on earth, where I can be exactly who I am, with all of my craziness and neuroses and nonsense and fears and stupid things. In a safe community, I can say, I accept you immediately. I can say, I believe in you and all that you could become even when you told me that last night you went to a topless bar. I could still believe in that person because of the identity, which the gospel provides. I can see someone at his or her worst, can see the Spiritif the persons a believerstill working in the heart and see the

obstacles to the Spirit working. I can see the Spirit really at work to incite the holy appetites of the heart even though the appetites for sin may be at the moment stronger than ever. And I can pour out of me whatever is alive within my soul that the Spirit has put there and give that to the individual and say, I want to give you what the Lord has given me on your behalf. When we do that, we are in a safe community and I think thats where the reparative process takes place.

How does this apply to the individual counselor working in an office?

LC:I think it has profound implications. When you sit down with your client, recognize that you are engaging in an enterprise more profoundly spiritual than it is technical. Be less concerned with finding the right

DSM label, less obsessed with coming up with techniques that are supposed to fit this person. Be concerned with the fact that this persons life, beneath the struggles, beneath the eating disorder, beneath the sexual addiction, beneath the alcoholism, beneath the relational struggles, is an eternal soul, and this soul was built for relationship, and this soul cannot be healthy apart from relationship. And because this soul has a sin problem, this soul is committed to keeping itself independent of God and finding old_resources by which it can handle all of life without ever having to turn to God. Be aware that this approach is never going to work. Take the position that, Im dealing with an eternal soul who is scared to death, whos determined to make it on his or her own, and Im going to provide this person with the safest place on earth; Im going to provide this person with a place where the defenses are not necessary, where the soul can be fully exposed without rejection; where no matter how this person fails, theres still cause for celebration because forgiveness is real; where whatever the failure, theres still opportunity for the person to become mentally healthy and spiritually alive because of the power of the Spirit. When that therapist looks at the client as a person who bears the image of God and knows the Spirit of God as the one who does the work of spiritual formation, and that our role is rather modest in cooperating with the Spirit, then I think that therapist is going to be engaged in Christian counseling.

Larry, youve been impacted by some sufferingyou lost your brother, had a pretty serious illness yourselfhow has that impacted you?

LC:Those are two of the primary examples: My brother, Bill, died in a plane crash eight years ago, and I had cancer two years ago. Both of those events made me realize that in the core of my soul, theres a profound loneliness. When youre hurting as bad as I did over Bills death, and youre as scared as I was when I heard the word cancer thrown at me by the doctor [even though my wonderful wife, two sons, and very

close friends were incredibly involved with me in both tragedies], theres a part of the soul no other person can toucheven the best person in the world just cant touch a part of it. In the loneliness of that suffering, I became aware that God is not a doctor, but hes a person, and that I dont know him very well. Both of those events led me

to say that at the core of my soul, something is wrong and something is missing that psychology cant touch. Its got to be God. Then there was the incredible importance of community. I almost died twice within six hours. I remember being sick of tubes and of IVs and sick of calling a five minute walk down the hospital corridor my exercise for the day when Im a jogger. I wasnt depressed very much in the hospital, mostly because of my community, but one morning I was so depressed, so low. My surgeon was the first person to walk in. Shes a marvelous lady, a perky

woman. I began to cry and she stiffened up and said, Ill call somebody from psych right away. I said, Joyce, I am a psychologist. I really dont want a psychologist right now. I want my community of friends. I want to know that theres something going on inside of me that can

powerfully be touched by community. And thats what I learned from it. All of the visits in the hospital were wonderful, but one woman came in and I remember right away kind of sitting up and getting the typical hospital-patient mentality of Id better be on now for this visitor. You hear all these stories about visitors coming to the hospital to bless the patient, and they get more blessed by the patient, so I felt the pressure of doing that as well. She saw me sit up, and said, No, Larry, lie back and close your eyes. I said, Well, I wanted to chat with you. She responded, Oh, no. Im not here to have you chat. Im going to sing to you for an hour. She has a marvelous voiceshes a musicianand she put together a whole concert. She sang and read Scriptures. I felt very awkward, but after 10 minutes, I could almost cry, talking about that music. That woman poured Jesus into my soul. I thought, I feel safe, I feel nourished, I feel encouraged, I feel aliveI want to provide that for my clients. Im not sure that means Ive got to sing with them, because if I sang, it wouldnt nourish

them. Then Jim Houston called me and in his Scottish accent, said,

Laddie, this is Jim Houston. Everyone up here is saying poor Larry, poor LarryI want you to know Im saying privileged Larry. Now I have to go. He hung up. It was a two-minute phone call. I laughed and was just filled with joy, because I thought, Im lying in the hospital with cancer surgery, and hes saying Im privileged! I think thats the dumbest thing Ive ever heardbut its true! I was touched by that. So I learned something about knowing God a little deeper, I think, and I learned something about the value of caring.

Why is it that every place I go, it seems as if I hear about Larry Crabb?

LC:Because peoples TVs are brokenI dont know. Nothing better to do with their lives. Im just stunned that anybody talks about me. I feel like the most immature Christian. Im aware of my immaturity, my insecurities, Im aware of my self-centeredness, Im aware of my coldness of heart. And the fact that people actually listen to me talkIm stunned by that. I think that some people have felt that when I teach and think and write and talk, that theres some level of transparency, that I dont pretend that Im farther along than I amlife is such a journey. My wife reminds me that life is a marathon. Ive

already come in last in the 100-yard dash, so I think I might as well get off the field. But this is a marathon, and maybe Gods faithfulness will get me through. I think its a matter of being very honest about where you are and admitting that theres no reality that the Spirit of God is not sufficient to deal with. So if people are talking about me, I think it has to do with people resonating with me and saying, Maybe I can stop pretending. Maybe I can admit that I get mad too. Maybe I can admit that Im pretty insecure and I dont think I have much to say. If Larrys able to admit that, maybe I can admit that too and find hope in Christ.

Whats in the future for Larry Crabb?

LC:I am just so committed to the notion of spiritual direction. Im not sure I like that phrase, but I do like the notion of sitting down with a human being who is struggling with whatever you call itpsychological disorder, marital difficulties, whatever the problem might beand finding some way to move into that persons life to direct them. I want to spend a lot of time talking to people about their lives; I want to train people in spiritual direction, people who want to recognize that maybe the real counseling enterprise has more to do with matters of the soul and spirit than anything else. I’d like to influence people to think like that. And I want to keep on writing I think God has given me a calling there.

I want to have more time to pray. In a way, Ive never prayed before in my life. Im almost 55, and I would say that compared to whats been happening in the last four or five months, Ive never really prayed before in my life. I mean, Ive prayed all my life, but in the last four or five months Ive come not to understand but to enter into a little bit of the reality of prayer. I think theres a power to knowing Christ well through prayer, and I want to spend the rest of my life exploring what it means to pray, to relate to the power of the Spirit, and to help other people do the same.

Whats the future of the whole field of Christian counseling?

LC:Im no friend to postmodernity but I think its an opportunity for the church. I believe that we can express that in a variety of ways. From modernity to postmodernity, one part of the shift is a movement away from saying, There are manageable principles that, when learned, can be imposed on people and make them different. Thats modernity.Web counselor plays a vital role for the welfare of society.

Postmodernity says, No. There is something more real about the intellect. They can leave absolutes behind and leave God out of the picture, but what theyre saying is that theres something within the human being that should not be imposed upon or controlled from without and reduced to an automatonwere not machines, were people. One of my real convictions is that God has used AACC to say, Lets make the word Christian a meaningful word in Christian counseling. It isnt just a nice little phrase you put in front of it because of religious reasons. Christian is a deciding word, it isnt just a nice thought. And the notion of spirituality and its relationship to mental health, the notion of the soul and what soul health looks likeI think those are going to be the topics that will legitimately and properly consume the field of Christian counseling in the future. And I think it should. I think were going to see it as less a scientifically driven profession and more as an opportunity for godly men and women to enter into peoples lives in meaningful, wonderful ways.

About the Author

eCounseling.com is the only online counseling help website that allows clients and counselors to connect online – with no software to download or cumbersome technology!  It seeks to be an excellent information resource for consumers, and to connect prospective counseling clients to counseling professionals 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. Its director is himself trained professional Dr. Anthony Centore.