Your Calling Is to Every One of Them
Purpose, Ministry, and the Gifts Born of Suffering
Guiding Text
Teaching Section
Post-Traumatic Growth and the Ministry of the Wounded Healer
Lesson Plan
Mark the transition. Sessions 1–6 were deconstruction. Session 7 begins construction: building purpose, agency, and calling. Your suffering has qualified you for a ministry no institution could assign.
Present Tedeschi and Calhoun (2004): five domains of PTG—greater appreciation for life, new possibilities, enhanced personal strength, improved relationships, and spiritual change. PTG requires deliberate rumination rather than avoidance.
Introduce Nouwen (1972). Pair with Mosiah 18:8–9: willing to bear burdens, mourn with mourners, comfort those needing comfort. These verses describe people who have suffered enough to know what suffering feels like.
Present Meyer (2015): minority stress is buffered by community-level factors. This program is itself community resilience.
What specific gift has your suffering given you? Who needs that gift?
Detailed Lesson Content
We have spent six sessions doing hard work—naming harm, processing grief, dismantling pseudoscience and transactional theology, reclaiming self-compassion. That work was preparation. Today we talk about what you are for. Tedeschi and Calhoun coined post-traumatic growth to describe positive psychological change emerging from challenging circumstances. Five domains: greater appreciation for life, new possibilities, enhanced personal strength, improved relationships, and spiritual change. PTG is not denial. It is not everything happens for a reason. It is what you have done with the suffering—how you have alchemized it into compassion, insight, and ministry you would not otherwise possess.
Henri Nouwen described this as the wounded healer: the person whose wounds become the source of healing power. He wrote: 'Nobody escapes being wounded. The main question is how can we put our woundedness in the service of others.' This is your calling—not issued by a stake president but authored by your Savior and sealed by your suffering. Mosiah 18:8–9 describes Alma's covenant community. Requirements were pastoral: willingness to bear burdens, mourn with mourners, comfort those needing comfort. That is you.
Meyer (2015) found that minority stress is buffered by community-level factors: social support from people who share your identity. This program is community resilience. By showing up, you build a protective factor that will outlast this program. The teenagers, the returned missionaries, the parents will find you, because the Spirit knows where to send those who have walked through the fire.
Recommended Videos
Henri Nouwen, ‘The Wounded Healer’ (lectures/tributes, 15–30 min)
A look at the life of Henri Nouwen and his groundbreaking insight that our own wounds, when acknowledged with honesty, become the source of our greatest capacity to heal others.
Watch Video →Carol Lynn Pearson, ‘No More Goodbyes’ (author talks)
Mormon author, poet, and advocate Carol Lynn Pearson shares stories of gay Latter-day Saints and their families—a powerful witness to the cost of silence and the redemptive power of love.
Watch on YouTube →Additional Reading
- Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). Posttraumatic growth. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18.
- Nouwen, H. J. M. (1972). The Wounded Healer. Doubleday.
- Meyer, I. H. (2015). Resilience in minority stress. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 2(3), 209–213.
- Mosiah 18:8–10; Alma 7:11–12; D&C 81:5.
Academic Framework
Meyer's Minority Stress Model identifies community resilience—the capacity of a community to empower its marginalized members through tangible and intangible resources—as a critical protective factor against the adverse effects of minority stress (Meyer, 2015). Research shows that LGBTQ+ individuals who engage in community-based coping strategies, such as involvement in LGBTQ+ organizations and peer support networks, demonstrate greater psychosocial adjustment than those who rely solely on individual coping mechanisms (Goldbach et al., 2021).
The concept of 'post-traumatic growth' (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004) is relevant here: the documented phenomenon in which individuals who have experienced significant adversity develop enhanced personal strength, deeper relationships, new possibilities for their lives, greater appreciation for life, and spiritual or existential change. For gay believers, the trauma of religious wounding can become—not through minimization but through intentional processing—the foundation of a ministry to others who are similarly wounded.
Theological Reflection
Mosiah 18:8–9 describes the baptismal covenant: 'to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places.' This covenant does not come with an asterisk. It does not exclude the gay believer from either giving or receiving comfort. In fact, the gay believer who has mourned deeply is uniquely qualified to fulfill this covenant—because they know what it means to need comfort and to have it withheld.
The Dear Forrest letter describes a calling that 'transcends any single institution. It is administered through the pure love of Christ, and it was given to you precisely because you know what it feels like to wonder whether you belong—and you found your way back to God anyway.' This is not a lesser calling. It is a calling authored by the Savior Himself, one that no handbook authorized and no man can revoke.
Discussion Prompts
- What gifts has your suffering given you? What do you understand about human experience that you would not understand if your path had been easier?
- Is there someone in your life—a teenager, a fellow member, a parent—who needs what you carry? What would it look like to offer it?
- The letter says your calling was 'sealed by your suffering.' How do you feel about that framing? Does suffering qualify you for ministry, or does it just hurt?
Integration Exercise
Ministry vision: Participants write a personal ministry statement—not a church calling, not a formal assignment, but a description of the work they feel called to do in the world because of who they are and what they have experienced. The statement should answer: Who am I called to serve? What do I carry that they need? How will I offer it?
Therapeutic Methodology
Primary Modality: Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG) Framework (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). This session is designed to facilitate the deliberate cognitive processing that PTG research identifies as essential to transforming trauma into growth. Clinicians should guide participants through the five domains of PTG: (1) greater appreciation for life, (2) new possibilities, (3) enhanced personal strength, (4) improved relationships, and (5) spiritual or existential change. For each domain, participants identify specific ways their experience as a gay believer has produced growth they would not otherwise have achieved. The clinical key is that PTG is not the denial of pain—it is the integration of pain into a larger, more meaningful narrative.
Secondary Modality: Logotherapy (Frankl, 1946/2006). Viktor Frankl's meaning-centered approach is uniquely suited to this session's focus on purpose. The logotherapeutic technique of 'dereflection'—shifting attention from one's own suffering to the service of others—mirrors the Dear Forrest letter's vision of a calling 'authored by your Savior, sealed by your suffering.' Clinicians should help participants identify their 'will to meaning': the specific, irreplaceable contribution they are positioned to make because of their unique intersection of faith, orientation, and experience. Frankl's insight that suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds meaning is the clinical heart of this session.
Facilitation Note: This session often marks an emotional turning point in the program—a shift from grief and deconstruction toward agency and construction. Clinicians should honor this transition while remaining alert to participants who are not yet ready for it. Not everyone moves at the same pace. Forced optimism is its own form of invalidation.