I want to start this post because there is such a need for it to be discussed openly and honestly. It is something many of us have thought about and no one likes to talk about. I am talking about suicide.
I had no idea f2b even existed when Yowee wrote those words: “I would rather be dead than admit I am gay”, but I had heard them more than once in varied forms from the hearts and mouths of my friends. I even heard “Would you rather I was dead than be myself, be honest?” coming from my own father. What do you do or say to a person contemplating suicide? What can anyone possibly ever say to ease the pain? I wish I knew.
I want to share with you my own experience of contemplating suicide in the hope that my eventual reasons for rejecting it may resound in the minds and hearts of others, that we may have less people echoing Yowee’s cry for help, that we may have less broken hearts and fewer lives lost. I have never told this story before, not to my parents or friends, but it is too importnat not to try and help now, not when lives and faths are at stake, not to share it would be impossibly selfish.
I wonderfully became a Christian in 2006, in doing so however I felt it necessasary to break off a 5 year relationship, a relationship that still holds the place of second best thing ever to happen to me. I was deverstated and so was she, I felt like my heart had been ripped out of my chest and torn into peices, anxiety attacks were frequent, sleep was impossible, my life was consumed with the loss. About a month into my Christian life I was gang raped by three men. I suffered injuries that could have killed me and put me in hospital for two months, unable to walk, unable to sleep. Unless you have experienced it it is difficult to imagine how dirty you feel after being violated in such a way, how disgusting, infested and rejected. I hated myself, my very skin felt diseased, looking in the mirror was not an option, I thought I’d be doing the world a favour if I killed myself. I was constantly being told from all my friends that God loved me, even my non-Christain father and friends were desprete to ‘cheer me up’ though they had no idea what I was really thinking.
Honestly, if while in hospital I had of had a means to kill myself I would have. I don’t make that declaration lightly with the voice of highdsight. Frtunatly lying in a hospital, barely able to sit up was not an ideal place to do such a thing, but I wished it, I hated myself so much that I would imagine my family and friends rejoicing at the funeral, glad I was gone. All the while people kept telling me how much God loved me, it made no difference, I knew better, God could not love someone like me I was tainted, used and disgusting. In my own mind I ha become the very act that was commited against me. My friend Claire would spend hours at my bedside reading from the bible, after I left hospital she kept up this tradition, she forced me to move in with her and refused to let me give up. Evntually through constant repitition and the work of the spirit I realised that maybe, there was a slight chance that God still loved me, that I could be forgiven for who I was. I had only been a Christian for 3 months so there had to be an adjustment period right? I hardly believed it but there was a spark however small and fragile.
I considered that even if there was a remote possibility, a tiny chance, that God loved me or was at least willing to forgive me then I could not kill his creation. I saw this ‘good’ part of me that God loved as something totally seperate to myself, the good part was an ‘it’ the bad part was ‘me’. I could not comprrehend that the two were the same thing. If God loved ‘it’ then I could not kill His creation, I could not commit murder. I did not see the ‘it’ as ‘me’ so it would be like killing someone else. I wanted to destroy the disgusting ‘me’ so badly but if it housed the good part, the loveable part that was God’s then who was I to destroy His work? I came to the conclusion that if God wanted em dead He would have killed me. I wouldn’t have to do it myself. And since I wasn’t dead, then He must want me alive. It would be a long time before I could truly see myself through God’s eyes insted of my wn, before I could differentiate between who I was and what had happened to me, before I could accept myself as a child of God.
Some of you may remember Anthony and I discussing how much joy God has in His people and with Anthony’s help I reaslised that he truely did love me, that the rape was not a punnishment, it was not my fault, that I needed and more significantly wanted to live. For anyone out there who is in the position I was I urge you to remember that you are here by the grace of God, He wants you alive and that is the one and only reason that you are. God loves you. Those simple words hold a truth that trancends the way we feel about ourselves, it is the truth that saves.
I dedicate this post to a very special friend who is going through something similar now, it is my prayer and my plea that you know the love of God in your life, a love that validates you and makes you worthy.
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