Category: suicide

Forgiveness Healed My Heart

Trigger warning: This post is about suicidal thoughts and hopelessness. If you are currently struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out to someone at one of the hotlines we have posted here.

I had all but given up. I mentally cataloged the various prescription and over-the-counter pills in my medicine cabinet. There were enough to end my hopelessness forever. I truly believed my one-and-a-half-year-old son and my long-suffering husband would be better off without me.

I saw no other way to escape this deep depression that had engulfed me for what seemed like forever. I had tried everything—academic accolades, career, marriage, counseling, antidepressants, alcohol, exercise, motherhood, even religion—but nothing pulled me from my pit of misery. Near-constant tears were destined to drown me if I didn’t kill myself first.

I credit God for stopping me from following through that day. His Word says, “The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and he delivers them.” Psalm 34:7. His word did not fail me when an angel stopped my hand from a dreadful mistake. 

“For no word from God will ever fail.” 

Luke 1:37.

When a friend learned of the depths of my despair, she invited me to a women’s Bible study. It had been a long time since I had engaged in any formal study of the Scriptures. I was nervous because I felt certain they would see me for the fraud I felt I was.

But those ladies didn’t judge me or tell me I just needed more faith. Instead, they loved me and lifted to God my simple prayer: “I just don’t want to be depressed anymore.” It took me over a month to whisper that prayer request, but it didn’t take Jesus long to answer it.

The answer came in a most unlikely way—through a dream.

I had been harboring bitterness toward a number of people who had harmed me, but the worst offender was the boy who had raped me when I was only 14. I had often said that he ruined my life. One night I dreamed I was going about my ordinary life, buying groceries, taking bills to the Post Office, and depositing a check at the bank. As I completed each errand I turned to find my attacker, down on his knees, asking me to forgive him. Each time I brushed past him, refusing to accept his apology.

I awoke from that dream with the knowledge that forgiveness would set me free. Yet I knew I could not do it alone. I sat on the edge of my bed and prayed for God’s help to forgive all those grudges I had recorded in my heart. Cleansing tears streamed down my face as I poured out my prayer to Jesus.

That very hour I felt something was different. The darkness had been lifted and the light of hope streamed in. That was over twenty years ago and although I can still be a bit melancholy, I have never again felt the deep and abiding hopelessness that tried to lure me to the medicine cabinet.

Your sister in Christ, Linda

AnotherFearlessYear.net

Are You Drowning?

painting of a person swimming underwater
“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

Untangle Me, Again

gordian-knot
“The Lord who rescued me from the claws of the lion and the bear will rescue me from this Philistine!”

Words of David, 1 Samuel 17:37

I wrote this post 21 years ago. To look back has been very helpful.

“In recent weeks I’ve gone through a time of profound confusion. My grip on reality has been tenuous at best. I’ve had a struggle with a depersonalizing sense, I seem not to “see” reality as I used to. Everything seems increasingly odd, and disjointed. I see myself outside myself. Everything is knotted up.”

“I have had bouts with this before. And yet every time the Father has “fathered” me. I have been led through each bout. In many ways, the clinical depression has changed, now it slams. It used to be kind of low grade—a grey fog, a steady and tedious despair, but now its more like a black lightning bolt.”

“I have had suicidal urges and thinking. I hate handling a kitchen knife, as I get the urge to plunge it into my chest. It’s funny like that, I call out to Jesus and He truly does find me. He straightens out my knotted life has only He can.”

“This blog initially started off in September 2009 following the idea of “broken believers.” Perhaps it was overly ambitious. But my heart’s desire is to be transparent and very honest. I still want to see this happen, and it does, sometimes.

I know I am no super saint with just the right answer for everyone. If I ever made this impression, please forgive me.

You see, I am the broken believer behind this blog.

 

 

Setting Yourself on Fire

Difficulty and pain sometimes come from others, and challenges to the Lordship of Jesus often come from our unique circumstances.

But what if it was something we’ve done?

I remember the classic picture of a Buddhist monk who sat in the middle of a street. He was serene as he soaked himself with gasoline, and lit himself on fire as a protest against a war he believed was wrong and evil. He burned himself in front of the cameras.

All too often we’re pretty much responsible for our own self-immolation. It is we (and we alone) that set ourselves ablaze. Sin affects our minds and hearts. We set ourselves on fire.

When we sin– when we walk in ‘known’ disobedience we always put ourselves in an awful place. We love it but learn to hate it too. But we continue to do it regardless of the awful death that ensues.

God promises to forgive us. Out of our ashes, He keeps bringing us life and hope.

You can be forgiven. You can find life again, even if you’re fully responsible for the evil we’ve done to yourself. Yes, we all sin, and yes we walk in our own personal rebellion. But Jesus knows it all. These awful things we’ve all done can be forgiven.

As a man and a preacher of the Gospel, I realize that I often choose to sin. In spite of all I know and teach I realize that I can live in the ashes of my own making. As one who also struggles with bipolar, I understand that I’m even more susceptible to doing awful things. I understand that I choose darkness even though others will call me “a man of God.”

As you read this I’m praying that you find His forgiveness and mercy. You’ve come a long way it seems, but you must see His blood that was ‘released’ from His veins and arteries for you.

He desperately loves you–even if you’ve set yourself on fire, and sit in the ashes of your doing.

“To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.“

Isaiah 61:3