“For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia:
that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life.“
2 Corinthians 1:8
“We should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism.”
“But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others’, that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.”
John Piper
It is my deliberateness, and not the impulsiveness that scares me. I know despair. I know what it is like to be ‘backed into a corner’ and then feel a totally empty desperation. But you must understand, there can also be a weird seductiveness to ‘being lost,’ a strange sort of nobility, a twisted kind of weird honor when it comes to despair.
Some people are convinced they are never going to change. They embrace the ‘dark certainties’ of knowing they are profoundly flawed and therefore damned. It’s these dear ones that Jesus especially came for.
Now, this really seems rather bizarre, that people could do this intentionally, deliberately. But I’m afraid to tell you that it happens all the time. Despair is chosen over the option of life. This is the ‘lostness’ of the race of Adam.
Perhaps suicide begins before the action? Perhaps it starts days, weeks or months before we actually do the deed?
Pop culture has given us words, albeit in a rather simplistic form. I just happened to think right now of an old AC/DC song, ‘Highway to Hell‘. The lyrics are pretty basic and very simple, but the lead singer seems to really have a chronically, decided dedication to being one of the irretrievably lost.
The songwriter formats a ‘certain glory’ to being part of the damned. This is a simplistic approach to the next stop– a more advanced case of stark-white despair, suicide. (We can call this ‘spiritual hubris,’ or even, “sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.”)
In dealing with sin we can make two mistakes. One is to make light of it. The other is to be overwhelmed, throw up our hands, and surrender.
When we decide to live this kind of living, we’re pulled into a vortex of a black melancholy with a dash of fatalism, which makes it reasonable and weirdly heroic in some perverse way. We love the dark, and we embrace a fatal life–it becomes our identity.
To escape this ‘drowning despair’ we must first dethrone our right to personal sovereignty. And secondly, we need to grab the concept that God’s grace has an ultimate power that supersedes our notions of a ‘deserved’ love. (It’s completely undeserved.)
We must believe that somehow, someway, God chooses us out of a pile–a pile of the worst and ugliest that has ever existed. And somehow, He delights in doing this, and after all, He is the Lord.
We’re meant to be the people of true hope.
Our problems, our addictions, force us to clearly renounce our evil folly of despair. Our issues make us vulnerable. I’ve discovered that there is a seductiveness to giving up and taking up the sin of despair. There can be a ‘weird romance’ that lures those who walk out this living DEATH.
But honestly, is it not even more heroic to live in hope? To live a life full of joy?
“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. My soul is downcast within me; therefore I will remember you.”
Psalm 42:5-6
Broken Believers 