“In the crowded rooms of a mind unclear”
Mother's Day shone bright and beautiful in southern Manitoba. After yet another cool and cloudy week, the radiant sunshine and warm air were more than welcome. It was a wonderful day to worship and also to pay special attention to those women who have brought new life into the world and provided good care for children. It was a good day to take a walk in the park, to see the leaves on the trees beginning to unfurl and fertile-looking flowerbeds eager to showcase the blooms of summer. The promise of life was all around.
But not everyone saw the day through the same lens. In the late afternoon I happened to drive by a building under construction and was idly curious about the activity on the site. "What's that guy doing up on the scaffolding on a Sunday?" I wondered. And then I saw the police tape on the side streets and the truth became chillingly clear. The young man perched on the scaffold seven stories up was threatening to end his own life. The torment he was suffering exceeded his fear of death.
I drove past in a chastened mood and thought about the Christian missionary couple who live just up the street from where the drama was unfolding. Jamie and Kim Arpin-Ricci serve in urban ministries with Youth With a Mission and recently started a church and intentional Christian community in their inner city neighbourhood. This was happening on their turf.
And sure enough, an early morning message filled in the sad facts that I passed by so casually between my walk in the park and a baseball game on television. On Sunday morning Jamie had received a call that a young man new to the church, who had become a Christian just a few short weeks ago, had climbed the scaffolding, removing planks behind him so no one could come close to his precarious seven-story perch. Jamie was the first person on the scene after the police, watching a young man who struggled with untreated mental illness wrestle with his invisible demons in broad daylight. "He'd clearly lost touch with reality," laments Jamie.
And just after six in the evening, after seven long hours working pastorally with family members and looking into the sun at the tortured soul on the scaffold, Jamie watched as the troubled man jumped to his death like someone leaping from a building to escape a fire. Later he accompanied family members to the hospital as they viewed the body. And now he faces the challenge of comforting a family and guiding the fledgling Little Flowers Community through this dark valley of the shadow of death.
Never beyond reach
This is hard news to absorb. It is sad and disturbing to learn of the mental misery and social dysfunction that hastened the death of a stranger on an otherwise joyful and life-affirming day. There is small comfort, but comfort nonetheless, in knowing that the people of God were standing with that young man in his darkest hour, beseeching him in every way possible to hold on to life. With hopes of healing in their hearts, they begged him to realize he belonged. Alas, he was blind to their beckoning and deaf to their entreaties. A compulsion beyond reason severed his young life from this earth.
God alone knows why these things happen. God alone knows what it's like to feel the entire oppressive weight of the sins of the world unto death. But God does know and God does care. He is a constant companion in the valley of the shadow of death. In her deeply touching "Sanctuary," songwriter Eliza Gilkyson injects the psalmist's "Thou art with me" refrain into the midst of every tribulation, shining a ray of comfort even "In the crowded rooms of a mind unclear / Thou art with me."
Anger and despair drive some people to suicide. So does mental illness. Jamie's funeral message is not yet formed, but I expect him to uphold the fundamental Christian teaching that "we are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of." He will, however, emphasize that "grave psychological disturbances" can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide. No one, he will affirm, is ever beyond the reach of a loving God.
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