Cries from the Heart by Johann Christoph Arnold Read Free Book Online

friend who had recently lost his wife and in his anguish
considered suicide so that they might be reunited again:
    She was further on than you, and she can help you more where
she is now than she could have done on earth. You must go on.
That is one of the many reasons why suicide is out of the question. Another is the absence of any ground for believing that
death
by that route
would reunite you with her. Why should it?
You might be digging an eternally unbridgeable chasm.
Disobedience is not the way to get nearer to the obedient.
    Kaye, a woman who wrote to me
from California after reading
an article I wrote on suicide, lost a sister through suicide, and
almost took her own life, too – three times. When still an infant,
she was almost killed by her mother; later she suffered sexual abuse
at the hands of a man she trusted.
    For those of us who survive the ravages of suicide and learn from
our experiences, abundant life is in store. We do not live lives that
are lies. And the shards of what was can be molded into beautiful
pottery. I speak for those who have experienced “the dark night of
the soul” as I have, and have survived to tell about it.
I believed in God through every moment of my long, dark
struggle, and he is the reason I am alive today. I listened to his
voice that night in June 1986 when he said: “Don’t do it. Don’t
commit suicide.” So although I had the syringe full of deadly
drugs at my side, I did not do it. I obeyed God and am very
grateful today that I did. But I was angry, very angry that I had to
live in hell three more years…
We who are (or were) suicidal live with shattered spirits and
souls. To exist with a shattered soul is excruciatingly painful
because we live by going through the motions. We know there
is more there, but we are trapped as if in a giant ice cube…
Depression is a sickness of the soul starved for unconditional
love – the unconditional love that only God can provide. All
people have their dark side, and our love is only conditional;
that’s why we need God. He knows us better than we know
ourselves, and he is still the Great Healer. He has promised us
trouble in life, but he has also promised us joy and peace in the
midst of our trouble and grief.
Yes, prayer is the best help for despair and for suicidally
depressed people. At times, eating – or even just breathing – is
the only prayer they can pray. But God understands that this is
enough of a prayer!
    However poor and inadequate prayer may be, it is the only real help
for despair. Even if we think we don’t know how to pray, we can
turn to God. Praying with the psalms can be a help, since the
psalmist often shares our innermost longing and voices it in prayer:
“Give ear to my words, O Lord, consider my sighing,” and “In my
anguish I cried to the Lord, and he answered by setting me free.”
Prayer can be a mainstay, even when we despair to the point of
entertaining suicidal thoughts, or when God seems far away. Jane
Kenyon writes:
    My belief in God, especially the idea that a believer is part of the
body of Christ, has kept me from harming myself. When I was in
so much pain that I didn’t want to be awake or aware, I’ve
thought to myself, If you injure yourself, you’re injuring the
body of Christ, and Christ has been injured enough.
    In
The Adolescent,
Dostoyevsky emphasizes the importance of
praying for those who are desperate.
    “How do you look upon the sin of suicide,” I asked Makar…
“Suicide is man’s greatest sin,” he said with a sigh, “but God
alone can judge it, for only God knows what and how much a
man can bear. As for us, we must pray tirelessly for the sinner.
Whenever you hear of that sin, pray hard for the sinner, at least
sigh for him as you turn to God, even if you never knew him –
that will make your prayer all the more effective.”
“But would my prayer be of any