{"id":195144,"date":"2026-06-24T08:04:37","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T16:04:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195144"},"modified":"2026-06-24T08:51:56","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T16:51:56","slug":"the-good-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195144","title":{"rendered":"The Good Report"},"content":{"rendered":"

A boy of eight sits at a low table<\/a> in a room on a high floor of a hospital in Los Angeles. Wooden blocks stand in front of him. A man sits across the table with a stopwatch and a clipboard. The boy knows, the way a small animal knows weather, that he is here because something might be wrong with him. In the car his mother used the word evaluation and then talked about ice cream. He builds the blocks. The man writes. The boy watches the pen and tries to read his own verdict in the man’s face.<\/p>\n

Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924-1974) put two terrors at the root of a human life. The first is death, the knowledge, carried by no other animal, that the body ends. The second runs quieter and lasts all day. It is the terror of not counting, of living and dying as a thing among things, of never having mattered to the scheme of the world. Becker called the cure a hero system. Every culture hands its members a script for earning significance, a way to feel like a person of worth in a world that means something. The boy at the table has not read Becker. He does not need to. He is the primal scene. He is the small creature, dependent and breakable, waiting to be told whether he is enough.<\/p>\n

The man across the table is Andre van Rooyen, Ph.D.<\/a>, a licensed psychologist who tests children’s minds for a living. His website states his creed in one sentence. What is right about your child is stronger than what is wrong. He builds a treatment plan from strengths first, then maps the weaknesses around them. He draws, he says, from three fields: neuropsychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, and developmental psychology. A parent reads the site and meets a careful clinician with a strengths-based method and two graduate degrees and a faculty post at a children’s hospital.<\/p>\n

That account leaves something out. The same site lists his training in a tidy column. Loma Linda University, 1994. Fuller, where he took a master’s in theology beside the master’s in psychology. The theology degree sits on the list like any other line, present and quiet. A reader skims past it. The line is the hinge of the whole man.<\/p>\n

Andre’s father is Smuts van Rooyen<\/a>, who worked for my father at Good News Unlimited. When Smuts came to GNU I had never seen the old man so glad. The two of them had been through the same fire. Both had studied under Edward Heppenstall<\/a> (1901-1994), who taught a generation of Adventist preachers that the gospel is good news and not a sentence. Both had stood with Desmond Ford<\/a> (1929-2019) at the ranch in Colorado in August 1980, where more than a hundred theologians and administrators read Ford’s nine hundred pages on the heavenly sanctuary and decided what to do with him. A month after that meeting the church took Ford’s ministerial credentials. Smuts lost his ordination in the years that followed. The church restored his collar in 1990. Ford stayed out. He handed in his membership in 2001 and never went back inside.<\/p>\n

The doctrine they fought is called the Investigative Judgment. Adventism holds that in 1844 the books opened in heaven and a divine audit of every professed believer began. Ellen G. White (1827-1915) taught it as a pillar of the faith. The believer must be found wearing the righteousness of Christ or be blotted from the record. No one knows when the audit ends. A man could be examined at any hour, and the hour comes unannounced. Heppenstall’s students called this what it felt like from inside. An impossible demand. An unbearable insecurity. The mainspring of perfectionism and the fountain of despair.<\/p>\n

Against the audit the two fathers preached imputed righteousness. The verdict on the believer is already favorable, they said, because Christ’s standing is credited to the believer’s account as a gift. What is right about you, given and not earned, is stronger than what is wrong. They named their ministry for the message. Good News Unlimited. The gospel as the report you long to receive.<\/p>\n

Read the son’s sentence again. What is right about your child is stronger than what is wrong. Andre took the form of the Investigative Judgment and reversed its sign. He sits a small creature at a table, opens the books, and examines every domain of the mind. Cognition, language, memory, attention, the reading and the writing and the math. He keeps the procedure of the audit whole. He keeps the parent interview, the observation, the test battery, the written report, the file that follows the child into the school. Then he renders the verdict his father’s circle paid for, the verdict the church withheld from his father’s mentor. The boy is more right than wrong. The boy can be carried.<\/p>\n

This is where the word work begins, because the sacred words sit differently inside different hero systems, and a man’s creed runs on words that mean one thing to him and another thing three feet away.<\/p>\n

Take strength. A bloodstock agent at a yearling sale reads strength in a colt’s shoulder, in the angle of the hock, in how the animal walks away from him down the shed row. Strength is conformation and a page of black type in the catalogue and a bet on a body that has never raced. For a Calvinist, strength belongs to God and to no creature. The elect bring nothing to their own rescue. A man’s own strength is the first thing grace must clear out of the way, and to boast of it is to misread the entire account. For Andre van Rooyen, strength is a score in a domain. Verbal reasoning carries a boy whose working memory fails him. A gift for visual patterns routes a reader around the place where the words break apart. Strength is a lever. You find what is sound and you use it to carry what is not. The bloodstock agent prices strength. The Calvinist distrusts it. The clinician spends it.<\/p>\n

Take the verdict, the written thing that goes on the record. A diamond grader sets the loupe to the stone and reads color, clarity, cut, carat. The grade goes onto a certificate, and the certificate travels with the stone for the life of the stone. A buyer in another country, years later, reads the grade and never meets the grader. The verdict outlives the room where it was made. A parole board reads a different kind of file. The question there is whether a man has changed, whether the man who enters the room is the man who did the thing. That verdict can move. Mercy sits on the table. A man can be remade and walked to the gate. In Salt Lake City, where Andre spent his postdoctoral year, a bishop sits across a desk and works a set list of questions. The interview decides worthiness. A favorable answer admits the member to the temple. An unfavorable one bars him, and the interview comes round again on a schedule, so the verdict never fully rests.<\/p>\n

Now set the Investigative Judgment among these. It has the diamond’s permanence, since the record stands in heaven. It has the bishop’s worthiness question, since it asks whether the believer is fit to pass. It withholds the parole board’s mercy, since the standard is a perfect life and the examination has no announced close.<\/p>\n

Andre’s report borrows from each and answers the last. Like the diamond’s certificate, his report follows the child for years, into the school file and the meetings where adults who never met the boy read a grade and decide his classes. Like the parole board, his report leaves the verdict open, because a child can be carried and a deficit can be routed around. Where the bishop asks whether the member is worthy, Andre asks what in the boy is already sound enough to build on. And where the heavenly audit holds up a standard no one meets, Andre starts from the strength and lets it bear the weakness, which is the gospel his father preached, set in a clinic and stripped of its God.<\/p>\n

There is a second register where the man meets the terror straight on. Andre cycles and surfs. The road on a fast descent and the wave over a reef are the two places left in a soft city where a body learns again that it can break. A man who spends his working hours telling frightened parents their child is more right than wrong spends his free hours on the exact edge where no creed denies the animal. Becker would recognize the pairing. The hero system holds the terror at arm’s length all week. The body goes looking for it on the weekend.<\/p>\n

How much of this does Andre see. From outside I cannot say, and I will not pretend to read a man’s inner weather from a website. The site names neuropsychology and cognitive behavioral therapy and developmental psychology. It does not name 1844, or imputed righteousness, or the ranch in Colorado, or his father’s stripped collar. A reader meets a clinician. The theology master’s sits in the credential column beside the clinical degrees, present and silent, the way an inheritance can rest in a man’s hands while he calls it a method.<\/p>\n

Here is the hero. Andre is the examiner who weighs the small creature and returns a verdict of grace. He took the audit that broke his father’s circle and turned its sign from minus to plus. He kept the books and the loupe and the written report, and he reads them now toward mercy.<\/p>\n

Here is the rival he never names. It is the auditing God of 1844, the books open in heaven, the standard no child clears. It is the committee at the ranch that read a man’s nine hundred pages and found him wanting and took his collar. Every favorable report Andre writes answers a verdict he does not cite.<\/p>\n

And here is the cost. The battery yields scores. The report carries numbers. The numbers cannot hold the child whose right does not outweigh his wrong, where no strength compensates and the good report must still say the hard thing in plain rooms to soft parents. The numbers cannot hold the older cost either, the one off the page. Grace handed freely to a frightened parent in a clinic on a high floor was, one generation back, fought for at a ranch in Colorado and paid for in lost ordinations and long years in the cold. Smuts found his way back inside the church. The man he had worked for stayed out. The gospel that says what is right about you is stronger than what is wrong did not, in the end, keep its first preacher warm. His son hands it now to other men’s children, and they leave the office lighter, and they will never know the price of the good report they carry in the file.<\/p>\n

Some of us were the older boys. We did not look twice at the younger brother who hung at the edge of the group. We did not think about what he might become, or that the creed our fathers lost everything to argue would outlive the argument, change clothes, and go to work on the minds of children in a hospital above the freeway, where a boy stacks blocks and waits to be told that he is enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A boy of eight sits at a low table in a room on a high floor of a hospital in Los Angeles. Wooden blocks stand in front of him. A man sits across the table with a stopwatch and a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventist"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t