About Me

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Rona Michelle Sbraccia, MA

Hello there! I am a biblical counselor located in the beautiful Twin Valley area of Pennsylvania. I married my best friend in March of 2021 and we have two precious and rowdy sons. Every day I thank the Lord for the gift of getting to love my boys.

I am a Westminster Theological Seminary graduate, received my counseling training from CCEF (Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation) and have over 13 years of counseling and ministry experience as both a former cross-cultural missionary overseas and as a biblical counselor Stateside.

Education & Experience

Undergraduate Education

I completed my undergraduate studies at Missouri State University, double majoring in Global Studies and Religious Studies, minoring in Asian Studies. I studied cultural anthropology, post-colonial literature, international relations and each of the major world religions, as well as the philosophy of religion. My undergraduate studies provided me with incredibly valuable insight and skill in understanding the cultural, social, and religious forces shaping us.

Graduate education

I received an MA from Westminster Theological Seminary in 2020, where I received rigorous and rich training in the original biblical languages, reformed theology, the bible, and biblical counseling.

I completed a 6 month practicum, a year long internship, and Levels I, II, and III certificates through CCEF’s biblical counseling program. During my training, I received counseling oversight at CCEF through consultation groups and one-on-one supervision from wise and experienced biblical counselors.

Ministry Experience

I served for 6 years as a missionary in Seoul, South Korea where I directed our church’s college ministry. I gained valuable cross-cultural ministry experience in discipleship, leadership development, campus-planting, curriculum development, prayer, teaching, evangelism, and counseling. I thrived and came alive serving people from all over the world and it was in this ministry setting that I discerned a call to counsel.

Counseling experience

I counseled at CCEF through their one-year internship program and was then hired as a contract counselor afterwards. When my husband and I started having children, I ended my time with CCEF to be home with my babies. Since fall of 2022, I have counseled a limited number of sessions per week through my private practice.

Formerly, I counseled or consulted at both Amnion Crisis Pregnancy Center and Logan Hope School for over three years.

At Amnion, I helped women from many different cultural, religious, and social backgrounds to navigate the complexities of abuse, trauma, addiction, unexpected pregnancy, motherhood, post-abortion recovery and healing, poverty, single-parenting, and culture shock as many of the women I served were acclimating to life in the US.

At Logan Hope, I worked with K-8th grade students in an under-resourced neighborhood of Philadelphia who were mostly 2nd and 3rd generation Cambodian-American. I counseled students struggling with anxiety, depression, trauma, troubled home lives, and with the complexities of living as 2nd and 3rd generation Asian-Americans.

Consulting experience

I supported the wonderful ministries of Amnion Pregnancy Center and Logan Hope School by providing consulting work and biblical counseling support to their staff as they served these communities.

Background

I fell in love with the work of counseling long before it became my vocation.

I grew up in a broken and abusive home and as a biracial, half-Korean kid in the middle of the Ozark hills of rural Arkansas, Spain, and South Korea. The “third-culture-kid” experience was my norm, and my whole life, I longed to find a place to truly belong.

While studying at university, the reality of Christ’s saving work gripped my heart and I began to experience the profound joy of belonging to God, of being adopted by Him, of his truth and love healing and freeing me in ways I could never have imagined. I also discovered that my background uniquely equipped me to connect with people from many different walks of life. God wastes nothing.

Abuse, biracialism, a broken home, the cross-cultural moves of my childhood, the third-culture kid experience, and more recently, serving overseas for an extended time as a full-time missionary - these threads have led me to ponder more the themes of belonging, finding home, acceptance, and a true identity in our belovedness as God’s children.

All our life and healing orient around the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is in the beauty and power of the Gospel that we finally come home. Better: God seeks us out of our utter lostness and brings us home.

Through the shame and rejection of my past, God brought me home. I love the work of counseling because I see the Holy Spirit bringing others home, too. “Who would have thought my shriveled heart / Could have recovered its greenness?” But as this glorious God invites us to feast with Him when He has every reason to cast us out, the miraculous happens. His love nourishes us back to life.

Reader, I have so much hope for you.

Maybe you no longer have any hope left for yourself. I know the feeling of deadness and darkness closing in. I know you may feel you are broken beyond repair. But know this: our God of light brings dead hearts back to life. And He is so very close to you.

Want to know more?

I know looking for a counselor can be hard. It is scary to consider sharing personal information with a stranger. I get it. I hope that this page helps you get a sense of what working with me might be like and if we are the right fit for one another.

Here are some fun facts about me

  • I love alpacas, sloths, and most baby animals. A lot.

  • I love the outdoors. Hiking, kayaking, rock-climbing, horseback riding, camping, bike riding. I love it all. My husband does not like these things, but sometimes accompanies me because he is wonderful.

  • I love to chase beauty. Good wine, a perfectly cooked and seasoned meal, a surprising act of kindness, a sentence in a book that completely takes my breath away and etches itself into my heart by its precise rendering of my reality, the vibrant star-lit sky on a clear night, sharing laughter with dear friends, an incredibly good pizza, a warm hug - I feel as though these are peeks into what heaven must be like. I slow down and savor these moments. The beauty and goodness shining brightly on this earth point us to its source, and I want to enjoy it unto him until I see Christ face to face.

  • I love learning new things. Being terrible at a thing and doing it again, and again, and again, and ever so slowly growing, that makes me feel truly alive.

  • I absolutely love being a wife and mom. The art of homemaking, from scratch cooking, creating cozy and beautiful spaces, cuddles with my boys - these are great treasures to me. Something about cultivating beauty in quiet, unseen spaces is so special.