Tomorrow, November 22, 2008, is the 10th annual National Survivors of Suicide Day. My experience as a person who has lost someone to suicide is not something I normally talk about openly but recently its been on my mind and that is mostly because of To Write Love on Her Arms. I'd seen the shirts all over the place and always assumed it was a band or song lyrics or something, but last month I decided to look it up after seeing another shirt and I stumbled onto something that I wish I had known about so much sooner. The work that To Write Love on Her Arms is doing has given me a new sort of hope. It reminded me that my generation is not without empathy and that there are people in the world who want to help and who want to love those who are hurting. I am horrible at trying to explain what TWLOHA is, so I'm just going to let the mission statement speak for itself:
To Write Love on Her Arms is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery.
As I read this and the story of the young woman who started it all, I became more and more emotional because it made me think of my friend. I've written about her before, but I was afraid to talk about the circumstances surrounding the greatest loss I have ever felt. But in the past few weeks, the Lord has been moving in my heart and I think that some of the wounds that I thought would never go away are slowly being healed. I think that there has always been a small part of me that has wanted to make sure that no one was ever in the place my friend was in, where all hope seems lost and there is only one way out.
But for almost 5 years now, I've been wrapping myself in the pain of her death and allowed all of that pain to take over the part of me that will always be connected to my friend. I think that in a way, it was me trying to keep her with me, if I was constantly focused on the loss and the tragedy, then I could be sure that I'd never forget her. But lately something has changed. I now know that there is no way that I will ever be able to forget her. And its not just because of how she died. More and more I am remembering her life and the impact she had on mine before she passed away. There is so much more to her story than her death, and it has been such a blessing to be moving into this place where her life is what I can focus on. Of course her death will not ever be forgotten, and it is because of her dying that I want to help others in similar situations, but her life has to be remembered as well.
My prayer is that God can use me and my experiences to reach out and remind someone of how much he or she is loved and that hope is never gone. I guess the 'point' of all this, if there is one, is that I want to remember my friend by helping someone who might be in a hole that seems impossible to climb out of. I want to make sure that the light she was in my life can be seen in others lives as well. The Lord has been so faithful in my life in the past five years, bringing comfort and healing and I want to serve Him by loving people who seem to need it the most, who might have forgotten what it's like to have the love of the Father in their lives.
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