Our will to survive is beyond comprehension.  You hear stories of people caught in horrific situations and how they managed to live through the experience and come out on the other side.  I know unhappy people who have existed for years without really living at all, just going along, because, well, you have to, right?  So when you hear over and over that young people, good young people – with all their life to live stretched out before them – just give up on it all and turn their backs on life, their loved ones, their family and friends and choose death over living, . . . well, it’s unfathomable.  

How could this possibly happen?

I have been there myself – oddly enough in my twenties – so perhaps there is something particularly vulnerable about our psyche at that point in our growth.  If not for a friend tapping me on the back and asking the weirdest of questions, perhaps I would have followed down that road.  (“Hey, Cher, do you know that Jesus loves you,” was the question.  I lost it)

So then I have to wonder, why did God save me and not them?   They loved the Lord, too – so didn’t he send people to rescue them?  That is a question I may never have answered until we meet face to Face. 

Doctors claim that people are depressed because of the pain from chronic diseases and from chemical imbalances.  Both are partly true.  These are what I would call contributing factors.  But I would venture to claim that it goes much much deeper and is connected to the Curse, the Fall and the oldest War on the books – Spiritual Warfare.  

Lucifer is not a tall handsome man with an English accent misunderstood and toyed with by his father the lord god almighty.  He is in a war with heaven and God is not his Father – He is his Creator and satan hates us for how much the Lord God Creator loves us.  His intent is evil and vile and full of contempt and his sole purpose is to ruin what God has created and loves.  Well, besides winning the war with heaven, which – newsflash – ain’t a gonna happen!

When we who have fallen under the wiles of the Curse (by our own choice – not by God’s design) have circumstances, imbalances, opportunities that lead us down that solitary path of sadness within, satan sees the possibilities and jumps onboard that rabbit hole trip with us.  He sinks his claws in deep and whispers of futility and blackens out our vision of hope and closes our eyes and ears to the love pouring in from all sides.  It’s like we flip a switch – oh, I’m sad, let me shut everyone else out now.

And, truth be told, it is also a learned device, mainly because we don’t like being around people who are sad, so why should anyone want to be around us when we are sad?  And boys especially, there’s the difficulty with crying and expressing emotions, probably tied up in testosterone and our created need to survive in difficult situations – situations that rarely exist now in modern times, but the way we are created still needs to suppress that side of the emotional scale and this can lead to perhaps (I’m not a man, so guessing here) compounding the spiral of depression because they want to cry, to express their sadness and that is so very not manly, so very unacceptable.  An easy hole for satan to poke.

But understand that all this means that no one who has poured their love into their child, fought to teach them what they need to know to survive in this world, has walked beside their friend sharing all sorts of secrets and experiences – NO ONE should ever feel responsible for this decision.  It is a lonely, deliberately secret action done by one who is aware he should not do this thing, but has come to a point where they no longer see the whole picture, where the words of scripture no longer reach to offer hope, because they have shut off all the good, positive input and only allowed in the perception of what is bad.  It is a choice.  A bad one, a fatal one and a very much solitary unadvised one, except by the darkness within fighting so very hard to destroy the creation God loves so much.

We can only offer our own lack of ability to understand, or to even know what to offer to those who must now live through the suffering of such a drastic and final decision.  Those who would call it the unpardonable sin have no understanding of scripture, I believe.  He knows our deepest inmost being and He loves us beyond all measure of comprehension.  He knows our frailty and how easily we lose our way and how much we need His hand to guide us.  The act may be more final than others, but it is no less covered by His grace, when the one lost has put their faith in Christ.  

I have known and loved the Lord from a very early age, committed my life to Him at the age of sixteen, and yet, I have made so many foolish, unhealthy, life ruining choices along the way.  God’s grace covers it all.  And His love for me is unchanged.  He holds us as precious and delights in us, in our faltering, failing faith-of-a-mustard seed walking.  This life altering decision is no different, and often the result more of chemicals gone awry in combination with all sorts of circumstances, including the weather, which none of us has any control over, wrapped up and twisted inside out by whispers of the destroyer, than any true logical decision.

There is an unpardonable sin.  That I will touch on next, for I believe it is at the heart of the dying church in the United States and something each of us should look square in the eye and ask, “Is it I, Lord?”