frank.

"If a client of yours killed himself and someone else, could you still do what you do? Could you still care?"

Yeah, I think I could.

"But why? How could you?"

I don't know. I guess...I'd just...I'd keep going.

"No..no.. you need to be protected. You need to be kept away from all of this. You're too pure for this. Let me help you. Let me protect you."

He stared at me so deeply. With so much innocence, and so much pain. Our conversation came a couple of weeks into my first job out of college. I was working in a cesspool of a psychiatric facility--a swinging door for the state criminal psych ward. Frank had been assigned to my caseload, and, as I hadn't been hardened by the awful conditions of the facility, and draining rawness of the clients' stories, I cared enough to spend more time talking with my clients than they had ever gotten from a case manager, probably in any of their various hospitalizations and placements.

That special attention paid to Frank landed me in the precarious conversation above. The director of nursing called back to the case management office at around 9pm: "Frank is in the cafeteria threatening to hurt himself--he says he'll only talk with you." Thus, with little training, and minimal background in counseling psychology, I was sent to the cafeteria to talk with Frank.

He was pacing the room when I got there. The aids said he'd been holding them off with a chair, demanding to talk to me. I felt like a negotiator on one of those cop shows. An extremely under-qualified, and terrified negotiator.

I sensed that he wouldn't hurt me, though, and so I sat down with him, and we talked. He touched my arm as he told me, "I want to help you. You're too young, too pure, you care too much, to be ruined by this world. Let me be your psychiatrist. You can be my patient."

I suppose he could have been hiding a knife. In a second, he could have slit my throat, and it'd just be a crazy headline. I'd be the "someone else," in the scenario he'd been asking me about.

Weird, right? We live these lives so oblivious to the rawness of the worlds outside our own. Somewhere, right now, there's a girl just graduated, pulling a late night in a psychiatric facility, dealing with her very own Frank. Somewhere, there's a girl moving to a new town, meeting God for the very first time. Somewhere, she's wondering where this is all heading, how all of the crazy worlds in which she's lived will be tied together into one, huge and glorious, God-sized dream of redemption and grace.

Somewhere, she's reaching out for faith.