What is a coach?

I can’t tell you why—I’m not sure myself—but I’ve been drawn as long as I can remember to the Model Prayer (sometimes called the Lord’s Prayer). This is the prayer that Jesus gave to his disciples when they asked him for a prayer, in light of John’s disciples having their own prayer. There were other model prayers extant in the time of Christ, prayers like the Shema Yisrael, but Jesus’ followers carried the sense that they were different from other religious folk, and so they desired their own prayer.

Maybe it’s because ‘Our Father which art in heaven…’ was the first prayer I really learned how to pray, and I prayed it in earnest as a child, and long into my adolescence—up into college—that I’m so drawn to the Model Prayer.

Maybe it’s because ‘hallowed be thy name’ is such a strange phrase, even stranger for a man to say. First off, I’m not sure I hallow anything at all, but to all-hail a name not even mentioned? Like, we’re introduced to this figure who is called our heavenly father and we’re supposed to hail which name of his exactly?

It’s like, hey, whatever your name is, we accept it. We pause in awe at it. That’s pretty weird. But the deeper weirdness is in the hallowing, the reckoning of something as ‘holy,’ as other, as one-of-a-kind, as different. We saw a meme of this, last year when the movie Wicked was released. In pressers, an interviewer said something like, ‘viewers are really holding space with that,’ and the lead actress had kind of an outsized response, kind of an awe. And we all laughed because it was all very silly, you know? ‘Holding space.’

But when someone really, really important shows up—I mean a Big Wig, you know?—we do that very thing. I worked a job where I had to prep a room and some materials for celebrities. Among many others, I met Oprah, Chopra, Costner, and Deadpool. I can’t tell you the lengths to which we went, all to anticipate each celeb’s every need. We truly prepared the way for these people, held the entire space suspended, paused in expectation of their arrival. These people were ‘different,’ special. They were to be given the white-glove treatment, and not one single misstep in their presence was permitted.

And the hush that would come over us when someone said, “Ryan Reynolds is in the building.” Just the name, just the name spoken in whispered reverence and in the understanding of some kind of gravitas… hallowed.

The average person is seldom put into situations where such consideration is warranted, and where such a hush is fitting. Perhaps when a beloved friend comes to visit, and you want everything to be ‘just so,’ just perfect for their arrival. Perhaps on the day of a wedding, when you want everything to be just right for the bride. Then we hallow someone. But to hallow their very name?

Or maybe it’s because ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven’ was a sentiment that got me through a couple really rough patches early on in life. Sort of like, c’est la vie, ‘that’s life,’ whatever will be will be, ‘nevertheless not my will but yours…’ It’s a profound attitude of surrender to whatever’s going on in the present moment. I’m an abuse victim. It carries with it lots of being surrendered, feeling at a loss for control. But every aspect of my childhood felt that way.

We were talking politics the other day, and I said to my friend, like, you have to understand I grew up in a very different place. Inner-city. Downtown. Up north, in the city, not down here in the south, not in the country. You didn’t have acres of land between you and your neighbor; you had strangers on top of you every day. I found a gun when I was riding my bike as a kid. I saw drugs, saw junkies everyday. I saw a cop step on a kid’s head. We were robbed.

We lived between the ‘Koreatown’ area of my city and an enormous population of Ukrainian refugees fleeing after the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the lifting of the exit ban, and at times we felt outnumbered and unable to understand the actions of strangers. What I mean is, I saw some things. And I saw plenty of things that’d frighten the average person below the bible belt, where I now reside.

And I saw how, the more we tried to manipulate what was going on around us, to help or to prevent or to secure or whatever, the more we tried to divine favorable outcomes this way or that… all the more trouble. And trouble on top of trouble. But when we surrendered and said, ‘You know what? God’s got something for us in this, we better just seek his understanding and do the next right thing,’ the more joy and peace we felt as a family. His will above all else, knowing he has what’s best for us in the moment. So, you see a junkie crashing out? Do the next right thing. You get robbed? Do the next right thing. And you’ll have moments of true heaven-on-earth, like the time these sweet little Korean ladies got together and prepared us so much food when they caught wind we were in some trouble.

Maybe my reason for loving the Model Prayer had something to do with my great need for daily bread and the forgiveness of my debts, quite literally. I grew up with the sense that my parents were struggling to make ends meet, and I lost my stay-at-home mom to a much-needed second income from her managing a bakery. I became a latch-key kid in about the third grade, and many childhood psychological and behavioral issues followed. But we had incredible bread every night, from leftovers at shop’s close.

For all these reasons and more, I grew up relying on the Lord’s Prayer to get me through. I still say it, and often. I say it daily in the sauna—that’s my set prayer time. I say it whenever I sense trouble. It’s not a magic spell, it just helps me center my thoughts and ground myself in a practice that’s been around 2,000 years longer than I have, practiced by hundreds of millions of people (maybe billions) throughout history, a practice that joins me to a chorus of others.

“Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

The title of this introductory post is, ‘What is a coach?’ and I bet you’ve been wondering when I would get to that. One sec. The Model Prayer is given in two different places in the bible. Matthew 6 and Luke 11. In Matthew 6, Jesus is teaching the prayer to a wider audience, to thousands gathered to hear him preach. In Luke 11, he delivers the prayer to his disciples as I described before, in a more intimate setting. There is some variation between the two prayers—not much. Spot the differences, and then I’ll explain coaching. Read Luke 11:1-4:

“And it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples. And he said unto them, ‘When ye pray, say, ‘Father, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.’”

Difference #1: Matthew 6 locates the Father in heaven, whereas Luke 11 simply addresses the Father. Most bibles have a little note at the bottom that says, “Some Greek manuscripts read, ‘Our Father in heaven.’” Some do, some don’t. It’s not good or bad, it just is. I could explain all this but it’d take forever.

Difference #2: Luke 11 omits ‘Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven.’ If you read in the KJV, they re-inserted some of that to make the two sound more similar, but the phrase doesn’t appear in the source Greek.

Difference #3: Luke highlights the ‘day-by-day’ need for sustenance. It’s not just our daily bread, it’s our need for bread the next day, and the next, and the next…

Difference #4: Matthew’s gospel is more in-tune with the Hebrew ideas about debt and debt-slavery and Jubilee, and so he highlights our need for the forgiveness of our debts, which had cosmic-spiritual implications connected to the Jewish people. For us Gentiles, Luke spells it out: Your debt is a sin-debt. ‘Sin’ is the scary religious word for, “missing the mark,” or coming up short. You shot your shot and air-balled. Happens to the best of us. That is sin. It’s no mere accident, it’s a fatal flaw in the technique of the archer that keeps him from hitting a bullseye. Practice makes perfection, and in the interim, the intrepid archer puts holes in a great many places where holes don’t belong. Like the garage door. It requires grace, which is a big scary religious word for how, in Christ, your debt is not held against you.

Distinction without a difference, or Difference #5: Matthew’s ‘as we forgive our debtors,’ is answered by Luke’s, ‘for we also forgive every one who is indebted to us.’ Perhaps this reads as a distinction without a difference, to you. For Luke, and for Jesus, your forgiveness of that weight of mark-missing attempts (sin) is predicated on your forgiving others when they miss the mark with you. ‘Holy friggin’ air-ball’ is the TikTok sentiment. Matthew’s gospel doesn’t shy away from this or try to hide it. He just records it later, in the same chapter: “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” Let people off the hook.

Difference #6: Luke 11 omits the petition to ‘deliver us from evil.’ The word for evil there in Matthew’s gospel is a word which could mean, ‘deliver us from the hurtful,’ or deliver us from the calamitous, or from disease or from mischief or from the malice of an enemy or from guilt or from other (perhaps worse) sinners. Basically, all trouble. Matthew records Jesus praying, ‘deliver us from all trouble,’ and Luke omits that, and there are reasons for the omission—it’s not a conspiracy—it’s all good. If you want to really nerd out on this stuff, I can give you some resources.

Within both accounts, and among their distinctions, we see the answer to the question I posed at the top of this post. What is a coach?

Jesus’ disciples were his closest students. Luke records it this way: His closest students saw how he prayed, and they asked him to give them a prayer they could pray. That leads me to my first point: A coach is someone to emulate, who can be trusted to give his or her methods freely. Look at how I live, and ask me, and I’ll tell you how I live and I’ll give you my tips and tricks, my secrets, my method.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus gives his prayer to all who hear. A coach is someone who has a few good students, but who isn’t afraid to adapt his or her method to a wider audience. Matthew’s gospel shows signs of adaptation in that Jesus adds helpful clauses (if you will) to certain bars in his prayer.

Thirdly, a coach is able to synthesize these things and make them timeless. This prayer stands the test of time because it comes from the master teacher, and is spoken masterfully. I could go on and on about this point, but much ink has been spilled already and by many more capable writers. The Model Prayer has something for every facet of human life and it’s the most important ‘creed’ ever. Leo Tolstoy said, “The Lord’s Prayer is nothing less than Christ’s whole teaching, stated in most concise form.” It’s the whole enchilada, for believers.

Fourthly, a coach is a teacher who gives direction (‘pray like this,’ and pray ‘to your Father who is in heaven’), speaks to attitude (‘hallowed’), speaks to outcomes (‘thy will be done’), makes reasonable concessions for the body (‘give us our daily bread’), makes accommodations for mistakes as well (‘forgive us our debts’) and speaks to obstacles or pitfalls in the way (‘lead us not into…’).

Fifth, a coach makes careful additions in mixed company, careful omissions among an intimate group of devotees to his method. A coach has to clarify more, making concessions and defining exceptions and allowing modifications, like in a podcast speaking as an aside, than he or she has to do in private conversation. Take CrossFit for example. There are beginner classes with modifications to the workout, then there are workouts, and then there are coaches who train competitors one-on-one. They’re all doing the same exercises, but trainers and coaches are adapting differently, and at the highest level, much more intimate, personal care is taken, with much greater discretion.

Sixth, similarly, a coach adapts his or her message to each particular audience. Speaking to Jews and to his followers, Jesus spoke in terms of the old law with its views of sin-debt and debt forgiveness, of Yom Kippur. Speaking for the benefit of non-Jewish followers, Luke spells out Jesus’ words more plainly.

Seventh, a coach speaks not only to an experience in the moment, daily, but to the day-by-day, the weekly and the monthly and the yearly experience of practice over time.

Eighth, a coach is raw and real. ‘Deliver us from all troubles’ is a sweet thing to give to the grannies in the audience, but to his closest disciples Jesus said, “In this world you will have tribulation.” He uses a different word there than the one for troubles of many kinds, but I think the idea remains the same. One word means various kinds of trouble, and the latter word in the Greek means ‘pressure.’ In this life, you’re going to have pressure coming from all sides. Jesus, a good coach, prepared his students for reality. You might criticize my view, saying that that means he gave his wider audience an empty platitude. I don’t think that. I just think he chopped ‘deliver us’ off when first teaching the prayer to his students because he knew his students would each carry his message and method to their deaths, whereas, the wider world would benefit greatly because of him. Maybe we could debate that one day.

Up ’til now, I’ve described a good coach, and I’ve even called Jesus—the greatest teacher of all time—a good coach, but I haven’t exactly answered the question. Well, Jesus said that we’re to call no one Teacher, Rabbi, for one is your Master (the connotation being, ‘one is your Schoolmaster’) and we are all equals as brothers and sisters. He’s our only teacher. To his disciples, he was a rabbi, and that had a whole world of meaning in another context than our own.

But coaching sits somewhere pedagogically between providing instruction, condensing information for the purpose of putting it into practice (as on the football field), being a rabbi or pastor which applies wisdom to life and listens for confession, and standing as a light or a guide (one who lights the path or serves as a kind of tour-guide, showing the way). A coach is a trusted mentor and friend, and a close confidant who at times needs to know personal details about his players in order to assess readiness for the game.

A coach takes what he or she has learned and makes it practical and tactical. It’s a different role than an instructor who determines what information is vital and delivers it, and tests for understanding, but there’s some of that to coaching. It’s different than a spiritual counselor, but anyone who’s had a good coach will tell you they could confide in none other.

I’m a coach. I’m a student myself, and working on a degree in counseling. I have no certifications yet. I’m not a therapist, not a doctor, not a chaplain… sort of like a life-coach, where you don’t have to be qualified except in the school of hard knocks. I’ve had trials, I have walked a long time in a particular direction, I’ve seen some success, and I’m interested in showing others the way. And doing so in a way that is practical and tactical.

I understand that this blog post has been in no way practical. It’s long, and probably boring. You’ve probably checked out by now. Your eyes are going cross. You’re nodding off. That happened to Jesus, too, his disciples falling asleep when he’s trying to teach them… I don’t claim to be anything like Jesus, I’m kidding around. I’ve given you the Model Prayer as a means of speaking about who I am and what I do for a reason.

The best coaches model attitudes and behaviors which lead to success. I’m not particularly interested in financial success, like some coaches. I’m not particularly interested in weight loss or fitness, like some coaches. I’m not a football coach. I’m not coaching to a specific discipline, like that.

When you get injured, you go to a physical therapist and you receive orthopedic or occupational therapy. But who deals with moral injury? With shame? With complex grief? And when you feel you can no longer turn to a friend or a pastor? That’s where I coach. I’m a life-coach for men and women who find themselves at rock bottom, and I coach from time-honored Christian traditions, like the Lord’s Prayer, or Sabbath-keeping, the Practice of the Presence of God, the ‘Jesus Mercy’ meditation, the Enneagram, and a little of the Tetramorph and other weird stuff like it. Many, many simple practices from Christian tradition.

I’ll leave you with this: I am a lifelong sufferer from Major Depressive Disorder, recurrent, and I have examples of depressive episodes going all the way back to my infancy. Stories from my mother, and others. As a child of about 9 years old, I suffered a major, major mental breakdown which I’ve come to believe was the result of sexual abuse that I buried, that has only come back up through years of regression therapy. I’ve been in cognitive behavioral therapy and in Christian counseling all my life, on meds most of my life, and I attempted suicide four times before the age of 30. Despite this crippling condition, and a particularly horrific challenge because of it (long story short: My depression played a part in a false accusation that got me kicked out of my dream school; I lost a full-ride), I was able to graduate college, and I entered the workforce and experienced quite a lot of success. I was working on major accounts in advertising for national cable television, and working in contact with some major figures in media. The stress of life mounted, and I had some setbacks and some heartaches, and ultimately I found myself waking up from a blackout in the county jail. I went to rehab. In the following months, I truly lost everything I had built and earned. Thank God I had support, and I’ve dedicated my life to supporting others.

Throughout these awful experiences and the accompanying shame, I’ve relied on my practices. I meditated, I prayed, I exercised and did breath-work, I sought the Lord, I read and studied, I rested. And I recovered. Not only did I recover, but I experienced marked improvement in my lifelong depressive symptoms. I was able to (safely, with the help of my doctor) cycle off all medication for anxiety and depression. Today, through the practices I coach, I’m happier than I have ever been. The shame is still there. The embarrassment. The accusation. I’m still pretty canceled, or cancelable. I’m broker than I’ve ever been. But what I have, I wouldn’t trade for all the money in the world. I wouldn’t want any other life. Abuses I’ve endured as a child, accusations as a student, adversities in business… I’m thankful, today, for it all.

I want to coach you! I don’t have set rates, I go by what you’re able to pay. If it’s an hour conversation and the best you can do is buy me a coffee, that’s wonderful! If you’ve got the means to bless me, Lord knows I need it, as a student paying my way through a pastoral counseling degree. We will work something out. Regardless of your contribution, you will receive life-changing practices from my coaching, and you’ll find a wonderful listener in me.

By way of disclaimer: I’m not a doctor, nor am I an ordained pastor, nor am I a certified therapist of any kind. I don’t give medical advice. I am hesitant to give biblical advice with regard to ethics or morality. I’m like a very well-educated buddy, who has been through a lot and who has a heart tuned to grieving alongside others who’ve been through a lot. And I’m like a coach, who knows some practices which yield success on the field of play. Nothing I say to you can’t be found in free resources on your own, but I’m particularly adept at applying these practices—Christian traditions—to issues of complex grief, of scandal, of shame, of regret and remorse, or of spiritual abuse or moral injury. I do maintain complete confidentiality. I ain’t snitchin’.

I hope you like the blog. I’ll be writing on here much more in the days to come.