I Needed This and It Didn't Exist - Building the Model: Part 1
She already believed everything she was supposed to believe. She knew that God was good, that He works all things together, that suffering has purpose. She wasn't looking for a theological correction. She was a mom having to make a really hard choice about a child, sitting with grief and praise at the same time, and what she needed was something far more specific than that.
"I know I'm supposed to grieve and praise God at the same time," she said. "But how do I actually do that?"
I pulled on what I had: research on lament, Scripture on suffering, the coaching frameworks I had developed over hundreds of hours of practice. I gave her the best answer I could. But I felt the gap between what she needed and what I was able to give her. And the more I sat with it, the clearer it became that the gap was not hers to solve. It was a structural one. Positive Psychology (PP) has developed a robust library of evidence-based tools for human flourishing, but most of them were built on philosophical assumptions that sit uneasily with Christian anthropology. Christian Psychology (CP) has produced theologically rich models of flourishing, but they tend to be organizationally thin: conceptually coherent, and largely without the construct-level operationalization that practitioners need to actually measure where someone is and support movement from there. What was missing was something that worked within both traditions honestly, something research-grounded and practically accessible for non-clinical practitioners working with Christian populations.
That question, repeated across coaching contexts, ministry settings, and personal conversations, is where the Building the Model series begins.
The moment that clarified the research direction came in a graduate course at the University of East London, while I was writing a wellbeing intervention for a Christian nonprofit. I referenced biblical wellbeing without defining it. My professor's note was precise and, in retrospect, essential: define, define, define. If you cannot define a construct, you have not made an argument. If you have not made an argument, you cannot build on it.
When I went back to the peer-reviewed literature looking for a definition I could have used, I found an operational gap. The CP field has produced an abundance of models of Christian flourishing but very few that address Christian well-being specifically as a psychological construct. The existing models, from Kapic and colleagues, Pennington and Hackney, Jauncey and Strodl, and Counted and colleagues, were theologically substantive and consistently organized around a relational hierarchy of loving God, loving oneself, and loving others. But none had systematically catalogued the well-being constructs present in CP literature, nor mapped them against the broader PP framework in a way that preserved their emic meaning while making comparison possible.
That is the gap this research was designed to fill. Not to replace the theological work that had come before it, but to build the construct layer underneath it that practitioners need to answer the question my client was actually asking: not what does faithful living require, but where am I now, and how do I move?
The failed paper was not the problem. It was the gift that made the research aim clear. Episode 2 is where the methodology begins.
