Got a call at work today expecting additional tasks for my sons 7th birthday party. But instead...I was told that our neighbor and friend killed herself the night before. Alone in her big house. I know some of her troubles and her responses to these. But I did not know of course the impact they were making on her currently. She has lived a world of crap...some done to her...some her own doing. So much like everyone except she was special in her at times full commitment to her beliefs and to herself. But she could never hold on long, longer than others, but her deeply caring heart and intellect would come out and do its thing...helping others.
When this happens you see clearly all the good that was there in that life. The utter waste of the suicidal event. Many say the ultimate selfish act. But I am very aquainted with this act. I use to pick up bodies after jumping off the golden gate bridge...a college girl that didn't want to go to the college her parents were sending her to. I worked at a fire department in Alaska...young member killed himself over a girl who left him. My chief...after a newborn daughter came into his life. My father lost his father when he was 1 years old to this...I lost him to alcholism and abandoment when I was 1 years old.
Other than those chemically induced suicides...who take medicine to help their depression..do we understand. All the others...somewhere and somehow...find their breaking point. Where they stand alone at the precepice and search for the courage not to jump, a reason to live...and simply find nothing, nothing in time. And then they are gone forever. Only then do the people in their world, if they are blessed to have had people in their world, really take stock in the value of what they lost.
There is nothing to be redeemed from this experience because nothing is fully understood. It truly is the essence of sadness, violence, and the reality of our broken world. A person somehow touched the world that is so closely, so alone, and found that there is no hope. What they need merely does not exist...so all is hopeless. The options are clearly a pain that is unbearable or the only avenue to peace possible.
I hate knowing this. Faith in Christ and his finished work and the external hope extended that says wait...but wait not alone, but with me. There is nothing else possible than this. And the Bible says God so love the world he gave his only begotten son...he so loved the world? That in itself is so remarkable. I knew this woman and I watch the loss in her husband and sons eyes. It is impossible. Wait...but wait with me. How, in this hellhole, do we (who do not ignore the reality of the world and broken hearts of so many) move from wait...to wait with me?
I don't know.....which is salt to the wound. The Apostle Paul mentioned we should let go of the past (always...all the time...unless remembering points of Gods faithfulness). And that we should train to ponder just good things...if you are in a prison yard and beat up daily...look to the dandelion growing between the cracks of broken concrete. And to not forsake friends of faith. This is a practical survival guide...he knew well the powers against us.
Jesus today seems so trite and impotent to people, understandably. But faith, in someone knowable spiritually and real, is the only guide to get us home safely. He can make the difference. And if that is not true...then I agree, all is vanity and their is only one other exit door to pain and suffering here in this broken world. But I think about my friend, who maybe never found hope to her delima, and I would prefer that she had tried to live more dishonestlylike the rest of us often do, faking it...because then at least she would be around.
