Bringing Healing to the Hurting for Two Decades

U.S. Missions Chaplain Liz Danielsen, president and CEO of Spiritual Care Support Ministries (SCSM) in Warrenton, Virginia, has witnessed God’s care and direction for her life and ministry since childhood.

Prompted by God originally in 1989, Danielsen founded SCSM’s bereavement and personal loss counseling and support ministry in 2004. Since that time, the ministry has flourished, bringing God’s comfort and hope to more than 35,000 people in desperate situations. SCSM counseling services are free, supported by individuals, churches, and grants. She takes no salary.

Her dysfunctional upbringing with its dark baggage had almost crushed her future.

“I didn’t think it was possible that God saw something in me that I was incapable of seeing in myself,” Danielsen, 75, says. “God still works through ordinary people.”

Danielsen’s alcoholic father had abandoned her mother and siblings on a busy street corner in Brooklyn, New York, when she was 5-years-old. His poor choices triggered her mother’s subsequent heavy drinking and inability to care for her children.

In contrast, her Christian maternal grandparents intervened, which influenced her commitment to Christ at age 11.

After her marriage at 19 to Arvid Danielsen, 20, a mechanical engineer, she became a typical suburban New Jersey stay-at-home mom. She raised three children and was active in church while her husband’s job required frequent trips abroad.

Her compassion helping her terminally ill mother led to pursuing AG healthcare chaplaincy credentials and endorsement in 1988. At age 50 it was a leap of faith. She served in New Jersey hospitals and hospice programs, before the family moved to Virginia in 2000.

SCSM was born from a divine prompting to comfort those grieving from personal losses.

“I saw desperate people coming for help to a house on a hill,” she recalls. “Pain was embedded on their faces, stained with tears. But they left praising God as they found healing.”

Since the ministry’s modest beginning with one volunteer in a small building previously used for spiritualist meetings (tarot cards and palm readings), it currently serves up to 2,000 people annually. They carry a range of losses and trauma – deaths of spouses, babies, children, and other loved ones, divorces, terminal and chronic illnesses, victims of violent crimes, and sexual abuse.

SCSM’s current 75-member volunteer staff offers in-person and online counseling nationwide and overseas in a 10-room house on a hill, the outcome of her original plan. Designed especially for the ministry, the center includes a large volunteer training space also available for prayer and events, a library and counseling rooms.

Hurting people and families overwhelmed by losses need understanding and support that only faith-based grief ministries offer.

The Powers family needed urgent care when their 2-year-old son Colton Lee died of complications from Covid and pneumonia in October 2021, after suffering for five weeks.

“Our hearts were broken as we spiraled into despair and depression,” Rebekah Powers, 36, remembers.

Powers barely made it through SCSM’s front foyer when she dropped to her knees and felt the warm hand of Liz Danielsen on her shoulder; the personal touch of presence. She joined a bereavement group with others sharing their own suffering in a community of healing and understanding.

“The shattered pieces of my soul may never fit perfectly back together, but the love and support I’ve received from SCSM can be nothing but an example of God’s mercy and miraculous grace,” Powers says.

Danielsen passed through her own season of heartbreak for four and a half years. She cared for her husband fighting IPF (idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis), a terminal lung disease.

Married 52 years, the couple were joined at the hip spiritually and in many other ways. Arvid supported and encouraged Liz’s ministry wholeheartedly as SCSM’s treasurer from its launch. He told her that his life was part of God’s story and he would not have changed anything. He knew he was going home to Jesus.

Danielsen admits going through the motions of normal living during the first seven months after Arvid died in May 2020.

One evening at home, she raced through the rooms screaming, “God, I needed him!” Finally slowing down, she collapsed on the living room couch when she sensed the still small voice of the Holy Spirit indicating that she needed Jesus at that point, much more than Arvid.

While crying and asking God’s forgiveness, an amazing peace settled her spirit. “Through this experience I learned again that Jesus Christ is my first love, and Arvid my second love.”

People watched her deal with her own pain and saw joy and hope spring up, rather than sorrow.

Greg Hackett, lead pastor of the 900-member Bridge Community Church in Warrenton, credits Danielsen and SCSM for providing a biblical perspective on counseling that most clergy are not trained for. She also has the training and dedicated time to navigate solutions, he notes.

“As pastors we can say or point to what the Bible says, but people need someone to apply practical, carefully thought-out helps,” Hackett, 63, says. “Grief has so many tentacles that must be addressed, and Liz is very skilled at that.”

Peter K. Johnson

Peter K. Johnson is a freelance writer living in Saranac Lake, New York. More than 500 of his articles and short stories have appeared in Christian and mainstream magazines and newspapers, including the Pentecostal Evangel,Charisma, the Saturday Evening Post, Guideposts, and Decision. He also serves as a consultant and contributing editor to a scientific journal.