The Divine Design: God's Plan for Restoration in a Community Setting

When we began working as licensed counselors in the field of mental health, we encountered some of the most devastating problems of horrific proportions endured by human beings: childhood sexual abuse, human trafficking, and ritualistic abuse. The main purpose of this book is not about how to recover from severe childhood abuse and trauma, although it is a byproduct. This is a book about community. Community is the soil in which the landscape for healing is created. While trauma recovery is our passion, it is what God used to help us discover His passion: true fellowship among brethren committed to living life together through the community experience. We didn't know it at the time but He put us together with His lost sheep, people with backgrounds and problems that couldn't be helped in the way of traditional counseling. He used our passion to draw us all into His life-saving redemptive plan. This thing we call community is God's divine design. After fifteen years of community life together we are convinced that God intended community for all His people in order to save us from ourselves and mold us into His likeness. No other design but the intensity of community life together can accomplish this. We have used the life of a sunflower to frame our book. A sunflower head is made up of 1,000 to 2,000 individual flowers that are joined at the base. We are connected to Yeshua who uses us to touch many other lives with the Gospel. We must submit ourselves to the main stem and Jesus multiplies the seeds. The sunflower symbolizes our concept of God's Divine Design in community.