To my lovely and faithful readers, God bless you for continuing to visit this site even though I have not added a new post in a really long time! Many things were going on in my real life and I had to delay posting in order to make room for some important changes. I am excited to share with you that I graduated from seminary with my Masters in Theological Studies. I also began working in a rural church with an older adult population. I am grateful to be getting hands on experience so close to graduation and in an area that I find new and challenging. If you ever want to pray for me, pray that God continues to bring people into my life who I can help. And again- thank you for your faithfulness concerning this site.
Although we have passed through the holiday season and are celebrating the first few days of a new year, I wanted to share some serious words with you about suicide and mental health. Overall society has come to a place where it recognizes that we must be willing to engage with people about their mental health by recognizing the struggles and providing strategies to maintain good mental health. The problem is that beyond expressing ourselves, there is no clear answer about how to handle these problems. People who know the Lord have access to His peace and His comfort, but many are not taught explicitly how to access these spiritually abstract concepts in a tangible way. The answer is not pray harder, read your Bible or go to church, although all of those actions will help towards keeping you balanced once the crisis has passed. When this is the message from the pulpit, people are embarrassed and likely to hide their thoughts, or else they will feel alienated from the church. Worse than that is when they start to live a divided life of one person on Sunday and another person throughout the week.
From a secular point of view, I have heard it said that the answer to a mental health crisis is to seek therapy. I think that can help sometimes. There are many people in crisis who are not in the right frame of mind to enter therapy. They find the experience to be even more painful, or else they come in with their defenses charged up, ready to discredit whatever is being offered as relief. Not to mention that there are not enough therapists out there, or the fact that the quality of the service varies, depending on how experienced and skilled the therapist is. Save your money until you’ve done some of the preliminary work! Dismantling poor mental health is like working with land mines. You never know when they will explode or what will precede detonation.
I am on the bomb squad. A big part of my job as God’s secret agent is to help dismantle the parts of your psyche that are prone to deception from the enemy and give you time to breathe. During that time out, you will see yourself clearly and hopefully you will do the work it takes to get you to a safer place. Today I want to unpack some of this with you, specifically about suicide. What I’m going to say to you is coming to you as if we are sitting side by side in church. Imagine everyone has gone, but your heart is so heavy, all you can do is sit. And because I see those wires lighting up, I move to sit with you, knowing there is some work to be done. I’m going to say things that people in authority do not say. It isn’t that they are hiding anything from you, it’s more that they know in order to properly represent the position God has given them, it’s not appropriate for them to share about this. It’s like instead of hearing it from your parents, you’re going to hear it from a sister who can bring a different perspective to the matter. So even if this sounds wrong, stick with me to the end. I promise it will make sense.
First, let’s talk about evil. The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy of books that was written by J.R.R. Tolkien in the late 1930s. Tolkien was Christian. The trilogy is a series of fantasy tales about the nature of good and evil and the role that humans play in the quest towards pursuing a life that will lead to eternal life. It is not a Biblical text by any means, but there are certain truths about spirituality that are embedded in the story. In fact, many stories and media created in the fantasy genre have roots in religion and spiritual beliefs. (I like to watch Sailor Moon, an anime series from the 90s, about a group of girlfriends who are fighting evil and are taking care of world. When I listen and watch, I see that the show presents various beliefs from buddhism, new age and general occult magick. There are people who are not able to watch these shows or read these books without confusing Christian belief with the subtle values that are embedded in the fiction. The recommendation is to generally steer clear of this, especially if you are a new Christian, because some of it is designed to cause that confusion. You may recall people being upset about the book the Da Vinci Code in the early 2000s… same thing, except that one was making suggestions about the life of Christ that were invented and not consistent with what Christians value or believe. But I digress.)
The Lord of the Rings is still very popular, you may have seen a movie depiction of it. One of the main plots is about a young hobbit (human) named Frodo. Circumstances cause him to come in possession of an evil ring that must be returned to the firy pit it came from in order to stop evil from taking over their world known as “middle earth”. Frodo does not journey alone, he has several companions who all play a role in helping him achieve his destiny. There are many true aspects of the story, but I am going to focus on one for you today:
When you look into darkness, darkness is attracted to you.
Anytime Frodo wore the ring, the ring’s owner would be able to tell where he was. He slipped it on because it would make him invisible in his own reality. The ring gave him access to seeing some things in the spiritual realm, but it never lasted long before other evil spirits would be attracted to Frodo’s presence and come to try and kill him. Here is what is true from that: Evil is real. The enemy, Satan, wants to kill you. He genuinely hates you because you have the potential to make it to heaven and be reconciled to Christ. His entire existence works to thwart humanity with sin and pain so that they stay unaware of God the creator, who wants to be in relationship with them. He wants humans to be angry at their situations and the state of the world, and blame God who has the power to change things. No one ever talks about why God doesn’t just intervene… for example, He has knowledge we can’t fathom, and has good reason to not be dared by mere humans for intervention. Back to the point- the enemy wants to create blindness for humans so that they will never see beyond their problems, their struggles and the more they participate by agreeing with these negative thoughts, or entertaining them, the harder it gets to turn away from evil and look to God. I believe that this is at the root of our mental health struggles today.
If you surround yourself with darkness, if you spend time looking into it and wondering about it, you will empower negative thoughts and feelings to surround you. They are waiting for the opportunity to drown you out- overwhelm you so that your decision making is impaired and like a helpless child, you will only be able to react to pain.
Evil is around you all the time, but there are definitely times when we are more aware of it. There are locations that have a dark attraction and a pull on us. You have choices to make friends, of where you direct your thoughts and energy. Depression is real, and I’m going to argue its normal to feel it from time to time, but what you need to do is make yourself strong enough to withstand those overwhelming times and be prepared for when the enemy will strike. You make yourself strong by regularly turning towards the good, honest, noble and true things that God wants you to think about. Don’t give your time to people who drain you and bring you down. Go to church and do all the things you used to doing because it is making you strong so that when something big hits, you can handle it.
Next, let’s talk about death. Death is something that every human being has to grapple with. The older you get, the more real that statement is, and the more real the struggle feels. When you read the word grapple, picture yourself taking hold on something big on either side with your hands digging in and struggling to see if you can throw it off balance or if it will throw you down. Eventually we either realize how fruitless the resistance is and we feel weak or it topples us, and we lay there crying, realizing that death is a reality we can’t avoid. All humans will die. Christians will die. But the question is what comes after death? If you have received Jesus into your heart and are walking in relationship with him, then you believe His promise to come back for you and that at the end of your earthly life, you will be with Him. Death is a struggle because at times we see it as the end result that would deliver us from our problems, since we would be with Jesus or at least no longer facing our current situation. Other times, especially when we love people who are coming close to death or dying, we want to fight it because losing that person’s presence will break our hearts and change our lives forever. Death in itself is not bad, but there is a high chance that it will feel bad to the body when you are dying. The systems of the body are designed to resist death and work together desperately to try and help you survive. That’s good! We want to live. But when you are ready to die and the body is still fighting… well, by then you will feel different about it. When people die, we feel the finality of it in a deep way. We grieve, but the grief does not get better, it only subsides. It continues to show up in waves at other times in life, and you can only hang on and cry it out. Time, talking and continuing to move on with life all help to minimize the impact of grief, but it is true that there are people who get stuck. Many mental health problems are a result of grief, and not just grief from death, but also from disappointment. Understanding death: thinking of it, planning for it for yourself and your loved ones, these are all very normal human things to do while you are grappling with it. This is how we try to understand death. This is how we try to put it in its place, because it scares us. It is certainly possible that your relationship with God and your walk with Him will help you handle death and the thoughts of death easier, but that’s doesn’t always happen, because there are many church leaders who don’t know how to respond to this topic without having to go back to what their positions dictates they should say. Overall, we need to be able to have better discussions with people instead of resorting to platitudes and telling them to pray more. It is healthy and normal to think of death and to grapple with it. If we embrace these discussions and lead people in them, we can show a healthy way to grapple without overindulging the darkness.
Now, let’s talk about the Deathwish and control. Humans will think about death from time to time as they grapple with it. In the process of doing this, it can expose us to darkness (or evil). The more time people spend fascinated with this, the more darkness surrounds them. Their energy and participation stimulates negative thoughts and feelings. They find themselves in poor mental health. But! Most humans can pull themselves away from this and get back to the business of living. We have to work, we have to eat… we have responsibilities and people who depend on us. The grappling is not meant to take over, but it is an occasional part of growing up. The concept of the Deathwish is that humans are drawn to the idea of their death. I have taken the time to explain that it is necessary to reflect on death but being drawn into this can open up darkness.
There is so little in life that we have actual control over. As children, we have control over our choices as we grow and adults give us options. It is meant to be a progressive release, that as children mature, their responsibilities increase and they have more options and choices until they are adolescents and then young adults, living as they please. But there are things in life that we have no control over. We cannot control who our parents/family will be, or our skin colour or gender, or what class or caste we are born into. We cannot control natural disasters, political unrest or bad things that happen. Often, we are left trying to pick up the pieces of our lives and move on after tragedy strikes.
When we feel that there is nothing left in our control, or that we are powerless, it is natural to think about the only thing that you have control of…. YOUR LIFE! Thoughts of suicide are common among teenagers because they are in the stage of development where they are often frustrated by not being able to have the power to make the choices that seems best to them. Others have been raised under oppressive circumstances and the only thing that isn’t regulated or dominated by adults is the breath in their lungs. It is natural to ask oneself what would the world be like if I didn’t exist? But if you have darkness around you, the answer that gravitates towards you is given by the enemy of your soul. This is why we have to support all believers; there are some who do not have the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit in a strong enough concentration yet. We need to do activities and encourage them to be in the word more because it will help to strengthen those inner muscles (sometimes it used to be called the inner man) so that when a challenge comes, instead of hearing the enemy, they will hear the Holy Spirit.
I’ve noticed that people in this day and age like to drop bombs in conversation and judge the response. What I mean exactly is that if an adolescent or adult says that they contemplated suicide, they are carefully watching my reaction and expecting (if not demanding!) concern and sympathy. Usually I say nothing, and then they do more to explain to me how serious the situation is. I have learned that people who understand what it means to CONTEMPLATE suicide carry with them the darkness of someone who has been playing with the ring Frodo had to carry for too long. Since discernment is my spiritual gift, I also know that the ones who are really thinking of it are not likely to easily talk about it.
Too many people in society are looking for attention in the wrong places and if you don’t give them exactly what they want from you, emotionally or verbally, they look for reasons to cancel you. I know that it is likely that everyone thinks of about killing themselves at some point and wondering if that’s a way out of dealing with pain. Others are preoccupied with thinking about how others will mourn them. When you control nothing else, your life becomes your own precious hostage, and you can hold it against God and others by threatening to end it. Fortunately for most of us, it’s a passing thought. For others who entertain it, the likelihood of it increasing to being a regular thought goes up. And by the time it is always on your mind, you have spent too much time listening to negative thoughts and embracing negative feelings in the darkness.
I believe that suicidal thoughts that result in suicidal action are the result of an attack. It descents in a sudden, overwhelming wave of thoughts and feelings that leave the victim hopeless and unable to think logically. The only option that “makes sense” or will “stop the pain” is death. We don’t know how long people struggle with these things unless they share it. In fact, regularly sharing what has happened and how we are doing need not be called therapy, but helps us feel seen and understood as humans. In this overconnected world, we are able to be in detailed contact with each other, but few are brave enough to be real or share their hearts. One of the ways that this manifests itself is when we get used to seeing influencers, celebrities or people we don’t really know only through their social media, and then when we hear that they have committed suicide. Everyone has crafted a careful public self who gives no indication to the layers or depth or problems that cause us too suffer.
You can think of your death, friend. You can be sad about it, struggle with it, and feel emotional. Biblical figures like Elijah and Jonah also expressed wanting to die, but even so did not. The difference between you and everyone else is when you have a relationship with Jesus, you are engaged in things that will strengthen your spirit and give you the ability to lift yourself out of that darkness. Even though it doesn’t feel good, you have to keep engaged with church life, and more than ever, giving your time to helping others. While we use our strength to help others, God works on our own situations and they are easier for us to bear. The cultivation of gratitude also takes the focus off of self and will not feed suicidal ideation. There are things you can do before it’s too late.
I am praying for you this year, especially that you will find good friends who you can share your heart with. Our best human resource is each other, and while we are ready to acknowledge that feelings and thoughts shape our experience of humanity, we are still not actually connecting with each other. May God bless you as you continue to pursue him with your one, beautiful, precious life.