The Shepherd’s Staff is a 501c3 non-profit organization. This sets us apart from many other counseling groups in that we are not sustained by a parent company, state funded organization or grants. All the administrative, marketing and financial responsibilities are met by our group of therapists, with a board of directors who meet quarterly to...
Category: Depression/Anxiety
Play Therapy – What is it?
So what exactly is play therapy? How is a child sitting with a trained therapist and engaging in play a helpful resource? Landreth and Bratton summarize it well: “Because children’s language development lags behind their cognitive development, they communicate their awareness of what is happening in their world through their play. In play therapy toys are viewed...
Boredom – The Roots and Remedy
“I’m bored…” The phrase nearly every parent hears throughout the summer, and it seems that it does not matter how many activities, camps, groups or events your child is signed up for – the issue of boredom is constantly lurking around the corner of the next hour. Inevitably, it happens around day two of summer....
What a Shame
Have you ever stopped and considered how much shame is in your life? I’m not talking about guilt, which is feeling bad when you do something wrong. I’m talking about shame. Shame means that you feel wrong. The things you do, say, and feel are just wrong. Do you ever have a voice pop up...
Dying To Live
Sunday was the final round of the Masters golf tournament, and it was an especially good day because I got to see it again with my father. Watching that particular tournament on television was something I always used to love as a kid. Not only did it make for some good quality time with my...
You Can't Fight on all Fronts
If you ever saw the classic 1987 movie ‘The Princess Bride’, you probably remember Vizzini as the short Sicilian man whose plots to kidnap the princess were disrupted by the ‘inconceivable’. In his last scene, as he engages the Man in Black in a battle of wits, he tells Wesley that he fell victim to a classic...
Timing
I am reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. I am going beyond the text by watching old videos online, including a joint discussion with Jobs and Bill Gates of Microsoft that took place in 2007 where they talk about the history of the personal computer and what Jobs called Post-PC devices. I love reading about...
Learning to Love
I often contemplate love. I know how important it is because it’s all over Scripture. It’s in every movie, and on the pages of every book. Somehow in a world that is unsure about this whole “God thing,” love prevails as an essential theme of the human race. Even when we are our culture forbids...
A Country Boy Can Survive….But Can He Grow?
I grew up country, in the hills of Arkansas to be exact. This is a fact most people might not notice about me at first. At some point I laid down my thick southern drawl; but I still wear the boots, get my hands greasy under the hood of a car, use duct tape to...
Oh, Good Grief!
Oh, Good Grief! “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.” –C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves Have you ever lost something? Or someone? I don’t mean like losing your keys, or getting separated from your mother in the department store… I mean truly losing...