No movie has touched my life more dramatically than Good Will Hunting. It appeared on the screen in a season of my life in which alcohol and anger were seeping from my own father wounds, and during a time when the direction of my life and the purpose of my story were clouded in self-doubt, insecurity and confusion. Today, I mourn with the rest of the world as we contemplate the legacy of Robin Williams, who despite assuring us all that "It is not your fault," has taken his own life. As is often the case in suicide, the true rationale for such a final, and drastic measure, passes on with the victim. Even when a reason is given, it fails to tell the entire story. In fact, my first months of ministry found me picking up the pieces with a family in the wake of suicide. Their own questions mirrored the same “why?” that seems to just hang in the air like a thick smoke inside my mind to this day.
 
   Statistically, my work with college students places me in direct contact with a demographic that is more likely to end their lives prematurely than nearly any other. I say “nearly”, because the reality is that suicides that occur among those 18-24 is actually eclipsed by only one other age group, those above 65. Of this shocking trend M. Robert Mullholland, Jr. writes:

“I believe one of the underlying realities behind the epidemic of suicide among adolescents and senior citizens is that we are a culture that values people primarily for what they do.” 

   Teenagers and the retired are most vulnerable to despair and lack of identity in such a culture, he argues. Robin Williams, at age 63, could certainly fit into this demographic. And while this may very well be a legitimate diagnosis of the problem, it is certainly not the only one. My contact with those who have attempted suicide leads me to believe that many considered suicide because, quite frankly, life has become unbearable. I see the connection in the two age groups to be more along the lines of their place in history. Those older than 65 have fought long enough and are ready to move on. The young adults simply look at the potential of another 60+ years of hell in front of them and opt out early. When I look at the world outside my window and the one unfolding on the screen in front of me, I sympathize with their conclusion. This is not cynical, nihilistic surrender, it is empathy instead of judgment, and it is refusing to call it daytime when it is night.

   My personal conviction is that those who are considering suicide do not need sermons (formal or informal) exhorting them to cheer up, look on the bright-side, or reminders that things are not so bad after all, or be told one more time how much they are loved and appreciated…no matter how well intentioned. What I want to suggest instead is that, especially as followers of Jesus Christ, we need to be willing to sit in the darkness with others and refuse to call it anything less. A girl who is rapped by her uncle, a boy who has struggled his whole life with homosexual urges, the child who grows up in the foster care system, the man whose drunk father beat him daily and the women whose parents were killed by a drunk driver. Their pain is real and their tragedy has marked every aspect of their story. 

   What I often fear drives some to take their lives is that the world around them doesn’t want to hear their story. Our culture is unkind to those who are broken messes. Those who feel all alone in their struggle often wake to find one day that the world around them really has moved on without them. Theirs is not a winning story of overcoming and unstoppable victory against all odds. To all of you who are considering suicide today I want to remind you that Jesus came for the sick who know they needed a doctor (Matt. 9:12). He had little patience for those who thought they were already healthy.

   Your stories of pain and abandonment and crushing loss are all living reminders that the world we live in is broken and in need of the rescue that only Jesus can give. And we need you. We need your bravery and your honesty. We need truth tellers who have stared at the darkness of their own lives and are not afraid of the darkness lurking in the stories of everyone they meet. Truly, if this can’t start among those who know they are unconditionally loved, things may be truly worse than any of us imagine. That is why we need you to stay among us. Not because things are not as bad as you think, but because you know how bad they really are. We need people who are not afraid to take off their masks and let the world know, as Frederick Beuchner suggests, that our secrets are what we share most in common. Robin, I wish we all still had time for you to talk to Sean. You will be greatly missed.

At the close of last week I dressed early in the morning in order to attend the funeral of a friend who took his own life. The event causes me to come to the keyboard confused this week, feeling as if I have been turned inside out, my soul and my body somehow switching places. I dare not say I am feeling “sad” or “depressed” or even “melancholy” for that matter. Suicide has a way of giving a truer value to those words much in the same way Westerners are apprehensive to call themselves persecuted after hearing about the martyrs. I will, however, admit that I do feel quite vulnerable and fragile, like a sailor who has emerged from his cabin after a storm to find that the mast has been ripped from the deck. Disoriented. Not because I don’t know the right answers, but simply because I know that now is not the time for them to be given.

Stephen Hightower was a pastor, a husband, a friend and a fellow brother in the faith that we both share. And despite the fact that the news of his suicide was given to me a week ago, the words still seem to hang in the air like a thick fog that has no intention of lifting.

I have been confronted with suicide before. I have even written about it previously through this blog. I studied it during my years in seminary, read books and articles dedicated to it throughout my time as a pastor and I have counseled numerous people who had either attempted it in the past, or would attempt it in the future. Academically, I can interact with it. Theologically, I can wrestle with it. Emotionally, suicide leaves me feeling stripped and crushed, the weight of its darkness almost too much to bear.

This is especially true in the case of a man like Stephen who shared with me just two months prior to his death that his desire was to establish a church “for the people no other church wanted.” People that were misunderstood, people wrestling with doubts and hard questions, people on the margins…people just like Stephen.

Stephen Hightower was usually seen wearing a clerical collar and a large iconic cross around his neck with a head-full of beautiful dreadlocks and jean-clad legs draped over a motorcycle.  All of which made him incredibly whimsical and disarming. It also makes his death all the more difficult for me, and many others, to deal with. In the face of such tragedy (and all tragedy for that matter) we are often tempted to grab onto a solution to the problem. We look for answers, and even absurd ones will often do. We desperately want to know the why. Our anxiety is fueled by an overwhelming sense of our smallness, our mortality and our ultimate powerless, the fact that in the face of catastrophic events we are confronted once again with the glaring reality that, indeed, we are not in control.

In the wake of suicide we are often tempted to look for solace by questioning the victims faith and their spiritual maturity. We talk about a lack of hope or a diminished view of God’s promises. Sometimes we blame the pride that kept them from asking for help. In the case of Stephen Hightower the truth of the matter remains that Stephen knew the gospel. Not in mere cerebral terms, but in life altering ways. Ways that changed his own life and called him into ministry where the central focus of his life would become the simple act of bringing that message of hope to others in desperate need.

So what remains for me is to let go of my need for resolve and admit that the darkness that some people experience is, at times, profoundly unbearable. The sun fails to rise. And day after day, even if it does shine, the sunrise fails to lift the night.

In the days after his death I quickly found myself reading the Psalms. They are often a place of refuge for me during such times. They are honest, and raw and have a sort of human integrity that only poetry can convey. The words are often able to express what my heart longs to say. Psalm 6 finds David crying out to the Lord,  

“I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping. My eye wastes away because of grief.”

While the church has made great strides in recent years dealing with mental illness, much is still left to do in order to help lift the stigmatism of depression. And while the need is great for honesty in the pew, it is all the more essential in the pulpit. If the masses who cross the thresholds of churches each week feel the constant temptation to mask their pain, how much more are their leaders asked hide? We live in a world, and even a Christian subculture, that prizes the strong, the successful, the beautiful and the powerful. Leaders are seldom if ever invited to lead from their weakness. It is the anti-gospel, and it causes thousands of pastors, young and old, to walk away from their calling - sometimes with violent permanence.

In God’s sovereign grace I was scheduled to teach on the subject of “God and the Problem of Evil” less than 24 hours after I heard the news about Stephen. Tempted to cancel the class, I instead took the opportunity to glance through my notes to see if there might be some way to salvage a talk that offered some semblance of coherence despite my clouded thoughts. Thankfully, years ago I had come across the writing of Os Guinness whose book Unspeakable Evil had thoroughly transformed the way I approach human suffering. I end with the quote I shared with my class that day. I am holding onto it for dear life.

“No one can ever go so low that God in Jesus has not gone lower. The horrendous evil that looks as if it is the final obliteration of goodness and humanness becomes God’s deepest identification with his creatures. There is hope for victims; there is even forgiveness for perpetrators. For those who know the cross, the pages of history are stained indelibly in blood with the evidence of the goodness of God.”

What I remember most was the fluorescent lights. They refused to dim or turn off and they cast a strange pale blue onto every surface, making the already surreal scene that much more discomforting for me. In the corner, dressed in hospital scrubs, was a young man who was in charge of a campus ministry at the college I was working for at the time. His long hair was falling in front of his face and as I scanned his body, slumped in the corner of the padded cell, I couldn’t help but to see the gleaming white bandages wrapped around each of his wrists. They were the reason we were both there.

The young man survived his attempt to escape this world, but my naïve belief that Christians do not succumb to mental illness, thankfully, did not.  

Last week Matthew Warren took his own life in California. I am positive he was not the only person who chose such a path, but his name has caught the headlines more than others simply because his father was a pastor. And that fact has disturbed me, greatly.

There is a subtle, and at times, not so subtle, belief floating around the evangelical world which has long suggested that sin and darkness and pain and tragedy and anxiety and sadness and loss and disappointment and insecurity and crushing despair, hopelessness, mental illness and gnawing emptiness are aspects of our fallen world for those “out there.” Become born again, many believe, and this evil world can no longer penetrate your fully fortified heart and mind.

Thankfully we don’t need the Warren family nightmare to debunk this myth for us, because the one whom we claim to follow was “a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering.” The pictures we create of Jesus smiling represent a minority of prints, in part, because artists have read the Gospels. It is an interesting exercise to read through the life of Christ while taking note of the number of instances he is associated with words like, weeping, sadness, illness, grief, and anguish in comparison to the number of times we find his name in conjunction with happiness, joy, or laughter. I am not suggesting that Jesus was bi-polar, but I am saying that he would have felt much more at home in the hospital I mentioned earlier than I did that day.

I believe the scriptures when they promise that God is close to the broken-hearted. That knowledge does not always talk people off of the ledge of their despair, but it should most certainly help those of us who appear to be so uncomfortable with issues of mental illness in the Christian community, to know that God may actually be as close, and at times, perhaps, even closer, to those who have them than those of us who claim to be healthy. After all, Jesus himself clarified that he only came for those that are looking for a doctor. Maybe it is time for the church to function more like a hospital for people in search of a physician than a hall of fame full of trophies and winners.

P.S. Last week our guest in chapel was a writer and teacher named Natalie Flake. Her story of her husbands suicide and the struggles and blessings that stemmed from the tragedy is a must read on the subject. www.natalieflake.com