At this writing the American society is wounded by the rash of suicides among young students – reaching down even to preteens, and by dangerous behaviors suggesting that many of the young men and women are deliberately careless about their safety and respect for life. A number of boys and girls have taken their lives because of bullying accented in and around the schools they attend. Various programs are being studied in an attempt to forestall further tragedies. I remember the fear I saw in my younger daughter in grade school running to my nearby office as an older lad accosted her, chased her, and caused fear that made her cry, and wish that she did not have to go to school the following day. It revived in me my own feelings when as a youngster I was a victim of the local bully about three years older than I was. He would hit me, yell at me. This was done without any instigation on my part. He would sometimes come up behind me and strike. I didn’t know he was there until a blow fell. The public seems unsure of the meaning of all this. We can assume that it relates, early in experience, to activation of flawed character in the bully.
In my adult life, I have often heard of adults, suffering related experiences, perhaps refined somewhat in some alleged sophistication that led them to take their lives. George Sanders, a well-known actor, took his life leaving a simple note: I have lived long enough. I am leaving because I am bored. As I recall, he was 65 years of age. Ernest Hemingway was stern in criticism about his father’s suicide as a cowardly act. Ernest never seemed to get over it. He fired a shot gun into his mouth decades later. The stories can be multiplied, some known personally to me. A dear friend of mine, a Christian, so suffered in the weeks after the sudden death of his wife, that he sat for some minutes on the side of his bed, with a revolver beside him. I couldn’t take my life, he said. What would that do to my Christian witness, and my children?
One wonders what to do with death by suicide. The matter is large, when we consider death as judgment. Scripture makes death an important issue. It is seen as a human enemy. The enemy is not ceased consciousness, with a corpse to be treated with dignity as the container of a person we knew. The enemy is that the deceased is shorn of any privilege to make more of what he or she wanted to be. Death is a bully of life. Like the bullies of natural life, death dogs us, first with our weaknesses in body, then with accident, then with disease, then with physical decline and decrepitude to death. No wonder Jesus gave attention to the matter. He accented it in his healing ministry, in his attention to the sick, in his calling of Lazarus from the grave, and finally, in his own death and resurrection so to take the sting out of death. By removing the stinger, there is no ability left to sting. Death will be ended. Resurrection will do that. Jesus deals fully with the bully. There is so much more, of course, so that the person of Christian faith may expect from him the same recovery from the bully that he was able to achieve on his own volition. Deciding for Christ, in faith, we engage his victory. In Christ death dies. It becomes transition and that to better context.
We can follow that process, if we have Christian faith, but what if we are the bully of ourselves? We may follow habits that amount to slow suicide. Some persons drive their cars as though they want to end their lives. We are told that many deaths on the highway may be suicides, even to the point of taking others with the driver. The matter of death is such that laws are being passed, the first in Holland: the first in Oregon in the United States, in which persons may end their lives with the care of an authorized individual. The story is becoming extensive in consideration. The Christian waits, partly to take the sting from death, no matter the cause. For Christians death is transition experienced in God’s time – from our shore to his. It honors God for us to live as long as he means for us to live so to honor life – life, a proof of God. That does not mean we take great heroic means to stay alive, because that too gives too much honor to death. The idea of living or dying is not where the truth is found. God has a dignity for the individual to interpret his or her own life and death as a steady stream of the creative life of God from one home to another, from a lesser to a greater, but always left to God’s timing. Those ending their lives with chemicals or violence may not believe in that resolve. Life may become too conflicted – illness for them. We have no competence to judge. The future will offer ways out of our sufferings. Not all clearly serve well. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020