Christ vs. the Guidance Counselor

In the last year, I have been trying to emulate a certain person without even realizing it. My goal was to understand people almost perfectly, yet be loving and honest. I did not even realize until recently that I have been trying to be like either Jesus Christ or the ideal of him. He gained many followers by claiming to be the Son of God, working miracles, and showing compassion for people that the religious leaders shunned. From a Christian perspective he is the only person in history to have both perfect logos and perfect ethos. Nobody else has had even one of those. From a non-Christian perspective he is remarkable in one or both of these areas. Some scholars hold that he was a good teacher. Therefore, he had a good amount of knowledge and strong convictions, the combination of which is rare in a person. Others say he was a charismatic liar. In other words, he simply wanted to gain as many followers as was necessary in order to eventually seize power. To do this, he would not be honest or ethical, but he would need to have strength as far as logos. He would need to read and understand people really well, and know how the system worked.
Still others believe he was a charismatic lunatic, believing in his own outrageous words. This suggests strong ethos and possibly logos. He was possibly well-educated, not in touch with reality, and backed up his conviction with actions to the very end. Therefore, it was his passion that got him followers. When he was put to death, he said “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” That is the ultimate ethos, if one believes he said that and meant it. Even if he was not the Son of God, my behavior has been influenced to where you might say I am trying to emulate the ideal Jesus, with the logos of the liar, and the ethos of the lunatic. The usual pattern with people seems to be having strong ethical convictions before understanding sets in. But once you truly understand people, you no longer love them. The ethos deteriorates. Looking at Jesus, one sees how difficult it is for logos and ethos to co-exist. When you meet someone with both a genuine love and a genuine understanding for people, you are deeply touched and wonder, “How can it be?” They have the logos of someone with no ethos, and the ethos of someone with no logos! In the Bible, it is called being “as wise as a serpent, but as gentle as a dove.” Even if Jesus was not truly the ideal, his remarkability in one or both of these areas gives one the desire to balance knowledge and ethics.
Likewise, seeing someone with weakness in ethos and/or logos can inspire one to try to be strong in one or both. I have a strong desire to be a child and adolescent psychologist. One of the main things that motivated me in this direction was knowing how it feels to be the patient of an incompetent counselor. I have been to quite a few, and it was difficult to choose one counselor to focus on, but the one who inspired me to be the opposite of himself was a man who worked as the guidance counselor when I was in junior high school. Even now, thinking of him makes me feel annoyed and frustrated. At times he seemed to care for the students, and at those times he got carried away emotionally. However, he just didn’t focus on the right things. It is possible that he didn’t know any better. For example, when speaking to the student body, he cried about our sinful state, so to speak. He was one of the biggest proponents of interfering with students’ lives. That alone I personally found irritating. But in addition, he never knew whose life to interfere with, if this makes sense. Based on what he said to the student body, he saw problems where there were none, and vice versa. He didn’t seem to know his audience either. He spoke to us as if we were all strong Christians and the worst possible offence was listening to "profane" music, although his position as counselor told me that he knew this wasn’t true.
One on one, he was a bit different. He came across as cold and contemptuous, as if I was one of the monkey wrenches who was ruining his ideal school. This may not have been what he was thinking, but it is not how a counselor should come off if they expect to help someone. While there was a time in my life that I interpreted everyone to be thinking negatively, this was before that time. Indeed, not knowing any better, I had entered his office expecting something different, even though I did not think I needed to be there in the first place.
As far as ethos, he showed a definite weakness. During a pep rally, the male teachers wore cheerleaders’ skirts. A couple of years before, there had been a cheerleader who was very overweight, and her skirt was unmistakable. It was worn by both the guidance counselor and the principal at the same time. Since this school was small, they might as well have said, “Look whose skirt can fit two grown men!” It would have been bad enough coming from any other teacher, worse from only the principal. But from the principal and the guidance counselor from a Christian school, it was especially appalling.
Nobody has perfect strength in logos and ethos. But the aforementioned weakness has been such that if I have children, I am not sending them to that school unless the alternative is worse, especially if I have an overweight daughter. However, through my anger at this and other aspects of the school and of life, I have been inspired to try to be the strongest I can in understanding and love.