Day Thirteen Back: Wed 2nd Oct
Reflecting on Job: Chapters 38, 39
Well, I’m back again. I was discharged yesterday morning. It’s a scary thing, how a hopeful soul can plunge so quickly into hopelessness.
I do think that we need to deeply reconsider the characteristics that makes one “at risk” for suicide. On Thursday, the day of my second attempt at suicide, I was actually feeling hopeful – as you can see in Day 9’s post. What I didn’t recognize was that I definitely wasn’t out of the tunnel yet.
I guess today’s learning would be the importance of recognizing the tunnel: that you’re still in it, that you need to give yourself time to get out, that you need to be patient when it comes to healing. God is all powerful and great, but I am not. I need time, time to heal.
In Job 38 and 39, God responds to Job. He begins by saying, “Who is that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?”. He is basically saying, “How dare you opiniate and challenge me when you lack the information to do it?” The rest of the chapter through 39 is just a raised challenge of what Job knows about the universe. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” Here, God is not flexing. He is simply stating the reality of what is: that Job cannot fully conceive God and His ways. Similarly, I’ve been in leadership positions enough times to fully recognize and appreciate when I can take a step back to submit and follow another who can take me the distance.
One of the most difficult things I’ve had to face in this time was definitely that I could no longer see into my future. It was an ability I always had, and it’s not just in my imagination. God was telling me to take it one day, one moment at a time. Who am I to make such grand plans for myself? Look, see how a day of hope can so easily turn into a day of death.
At the hospital, the psychiatrist asked me, “Do you know you could have died?”
I didn’t have a response. In that moment of grief, when I decided to take my life for the second time, all I thought about was how the lives around me would be better without me, and that my time had come.
Where was I when God formed the foundations of the earth? Nowhere. I am nothing without Him. So now I choose to cling to Him, moment by moment, day by day. I’m Yours, Lord.
Prayer:
Dear Lord, truly, I was nowhere when you formed the foundations of the earth, as you moved through creation. I am but a speck in all of this. Help me to embrace Your truth and soak in Your word. I decrease, so that you may increase. I want to embrace the magnitude and bigness of what You are and who You are. Help me to see things like You do, help me to see the things You’re desiring to show me. Open the eyes of my heart. Amen.
