If I could assign only one book (in addition to the Bible) on the subject of pastoral counseling, I wouldn't hesitate to assign David Powlison's insightful volume, Seeing with New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition Through the Lens of Scripture (P&R Publishing, 2003).

Although by no means an exhaustive treatment of the complexities of pastoral counseling, Seeing with New Eyes presents a thoughtful, sensitive and biblically-balanced approach to a subject that confounds all too many of us in the ministry.

Dr. Powlison devotes an entire chapter to what he calls "x-ray" questions: queries that force the counselee to search out the motivation behind the action. You can read Powlison's discussion of these questions in his book, but for now let me simply whet your appetite by listing the questions themselves:

1. What do you love? Hate?

2. What do you want, desire, crave, lust, and wish for? What desires do you serve and obey?

3. What do you seek, aim for, pursue? What are your goals and expectations?

4. Where do you bank your hopes?

5. What do you fear? What do you not want? What do you tend to worry about?

6. What do you feel like doing?

7. What do you think you need? What are your "felt needs"?

8. What are your plans, agendas, strategies, and intentions designed to accomplish?

9. What makes you tick? What sun does your planet revolve around? Where do you find your garden of delight? What lights up your world? What fountain of life, hope, and delight do you drink from? What food sustains your life? What really matters to you? What fairy castle do you construct in the clouds? What pipe dreams tantalize or terrify you? Around what do you organize your life? What magnetic north orients your world?

10. Where do you find refuge, safety, comfort, escape, pleasure, security?

11. What or who do you trust?

12. Whose performance matters? On whose shoulders does the wellbeing of your world rest? Who can make it better, make it work, make it safe, make it successful?

13. Who must you please? Whose opinion of you counts? From whom do you desire approval and fear rejection? Whose value system do you measure yourself against? In whose eyes are you living? Whose love and approval do you need?

14. Who are your role models? What kind of person do you think you ought to be or want to be?

15. On your deathbed, what would sum up your life as worthwhile? What gives your life meaning?

16. How do you define and weigh success or failure, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable, in any particular situation?

17. What would make you feel rich, secure, prosperous? What must you get to make life sing?

18. What would bring you the greatest pleasure, happiness and delight? The greatest pain and misery?

19. Whose coming into political power would make everything better?

20. Whose victory or success would make your life happy? How do you define victory and success?

21. What do you see as your rights? What do you feel entitled to?

22. In what situations do you feel pressured or tense? Confident and relaxed? When you are pressured, where do you turn? What do you think about? What are your escapes? What do you escape from?

23. What do you want to get out of life? What payoff do you seek out of the things you do? "What do you get out of doing that?"

24. What do you pray for?

25. What do you think about most often? What preoccupies or obsesses you? In the morning, to what does your mind drift instinctively? What is your "mindset"?

26. What do you talk about? What is important to you? What attitudes do you communicate?

27. How do you spend your time? What are your priorities?

28. What are your characteristic fantasies, either pleasurable or fearful? Daydreams? What do your night dreams revolve around?

29. What are the functional beliefs that control how you interpret your life and determine how you act?

30. What are your idols or false gods? In what do you place your trust, or set your hopes? What do you turn to or seek? Where do you take refuge? Who is the savior, judge, controller, provider, protector in your world? Who do you serve? What "voice" controls you?

31. How do you live for yourself?

32. How do you live as a slave of the devil?

33. How do you implicitly say, "If only..." (to get what you want, avoid what you don't want, keep what you have)?

34. What instinctively seems and feels right to you? What are your opinions, things you feel are true?

35. Where do you find your identity? How do you define who you are?