Walking through tragedy with help
Uncomfortable, but one that definitely needs to be discussed because it has touched so many in our community.
The topic is suicide, and our goal is this: to responsibly broach the subject, offer an opportunity to engage in meaningful conversations, and hopefully provide a stepping stone for our readers to begin to address how to walk through this tragedy and even prevent it.
Today we turn to resident pastors and guest columnists, Brent Barry and Mark Wingfield, who talk about the role of faith in conquering this monster in the closet.
"When something tragic like suicide happens," says Brent, "I believe that God does not come to make a judgment or give an explanation. God comes to shed the first tear."
"It's important to remember that God does not leave us alone in our grief. God grieves with us and enters the depths of the pain with us."
One almost unbearable effect of suicide are the questions it leaves unanswered by the survivors. Yesterday, it was referenced as the ‘what-if’ scenarios.
Mark reminds us not all illnesses can be healed this side of Heaven.
"To continuously play the ‘if only’ game becomes unproductive and sometimes spiritually damaging."
"When we try to dissect life's tragedies too closely, we may challenge the mystery of God as Creator. And when we insist on assigning an action of God to every tragedy, we may deny the truth that we live in a fallen world of free will that has not yet fully become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ."
Brent refers to it as the depths. He references Psalm 130 in his explanation.
"The psalmist was in the depths, and in the Psalms the depths are used to refer to that place closer to death than life. The very pit of life one psalm calls it; the place where death stares you in the face and will not look away."
Do you know anyone who has been in the depths? Chances are we all do.
For Brent, it was his father.
"My father’s name was Mike Barry. He was a fairly big man. 6'4", 250 pounds with dark wavy hair, engaging blue eyes and an oblong face like mine. He was a band director for 16 years who later became a college relations director at two different colleges."
"He was smart, kind, charming, funny and often went into the depths."
"I was only 11 when I was looking around our apartment for a deck of cards, and I found the note. It was a suicide note my father had left on top of his pillow on my parent’s bed."
"I cannot take it anymore. Please do not try to find me."
"Well, thank God, an hour later we did find my father. He was groggy, but he was alive, holed up in his office on the college campus on which he worked."
Family counseling followed, but the questions remained. For Brent, it was the need to know what his father referenced as an inability to forgive himself.
"That was the one phrase I have often thought about. It was on the back page of his letter about a fourth of the way down. Scribbled in my father’s barely legible cursive handwriting, it read simply, “I cannot forgive myself.”
Even in recovery, that answer never came. But the talking, and the listening, did continue.
