Replacing the Thought Is Not the Same as Suppressing It
Counseling talks about "taking every thought captive" as though it were a matter of willpower. The text describes something closer to substitution — and the difference decides whether it works.
Writer. Biblical counselor in training. Navy veteran.
Anne Marie Norling
I write about Scripture and the ordinary work of caring for people — as a mother of service members, a Navy veteran, and a student of biblical counseling. My hope is that what I write sends you back to the Word with steadier hands than you came with.
- Navy veteran
- Service shapes how she reads Scripture on fear, duty, and waiting.
- M.A. in progress
- Biblical counseling — working toward licensure and clinical practice.
- Homeschool educator
- Three scholar-athletes taught at home — two of them now in the Army.
- Non-profit board member
- Governance and care for an organization serving her community.
Devotional study
Written for the people doing the waiting
These are short studies — five days, one passage a day — written for a particular person in a particular hard season. They are meant to be read slowly, with a Bible open and a pen nearby.
All devotional series →Recent writing
Essays
The Psalms Are Louder Than You Remember
We hand grieving people the calm psalms and skip the ones that shout. That editorial decision costs more than we think.
What the Kitchen Table Taught Me About Counseling
Twenty years of homeschooling turns out to be an unusually good apprenticeship for sitting with people — mostly because of what it teaches you about pace.
Academic writing
Papers from the coursework
Work written for the M.A. in biblical counseling — exegetical papers, theological essays, and case studies. Each one is summarised here with the full text available to download.
About
A long apprenticeship in paying attention
Before the counseling degree and the writing there was the Navy, and then two decades of teaching three sons at a kitchen table. Both taught the same lesson from different directions: that people are formed slowly, by people who stay.
That conviction is what took her back to school for biblical counseling, and it is what she is working toward now — a counseling practice, and books worth the shelf they sit on.