I watched this video earlier, was somewhat fascinated by it, wondering how it was going to end. And also because some years ago, it could have been written by me. Thought about posting it at first as an encouragement to the survivors of abuse, as it struck me perhaps it was written from that angle. The girl in the video, who wrote the poem or text, keeps talking about how people always care, lots and lots of them, and how you don’t have to cope alone. That is not always true, its not been true for me for a very long time now, though I have friends, they are far away. But, there is also another common hyperbole in this poem or text, that the person considering suicide has low self-esteem, and a low opinion of themselves. Actually, that is not true, it is what we have been led to understand in by the psychiactric movement all pervading our lives as far as us knowing the diagnoses and causes of so-called mental illness, it is one of the great myths of our age. Yet, people considering or about to take their own life, are actually experiencing the very opposite of low self-esteem. They are hurting, without a doubt, but the reason they are considering taking their own life, is because they believe they deserve better in life than they have; better from people, or just better from life in general, which actually indicates quite high-self esteem, that they think more or themselves than perhaps other people do, and they think they deserve better.
Friends, you, I, and everyone is deserving of hell. Anything we have above that, is a manifold blessing and a reason to praise God in thankfulness.
I could understand where the author was coming from, having felt every thing she wrote at one time or another. Yet, the thing I have disagreed with in this post are still true.
Of course, some of us are dying a long, agonizingly painful death alone; albeit slowly. And when you have no loved ones or dependants, a perfect scenario has been made for euthanasia. And yes, in the last few year at times that has seemed a viable option, perhaps the only option, open to me. But no: yes, I feel my aloneness deeply at times, till it cut like a knife and pierces my heart and till it feel so tortuous while so sick, that it feels like a knife in my heart and that I can’t stand it another moment; but, friends are the answer as the video suggests? Well, friends and loved ones are a blessing, and are part of the solution and answer no doubt, as we all need people, none of us are an island. But the only lasting answer, or complete answer, is the love of Jesus Christ.
My days are hard at times, when my illness increases and the isolation in such phsyical suffering feels like it will send me insane. And at those times, I do not in all honesty, know how to not feel all I feel, not yet at least. Yet, at any other time but those times, when still suffering beyond what most people can imagine, in illness, and still all alone, except for my cat, depite the gravity of the suffering, through the love of Christ and the power of His Spirit, I have honestly been enabled to say at any other times, and mean it with my whole heart, that HIS grace is sufficient, the Lord is my portion, and that I have learned to be content whatsoever my condition. All except those times above, I would say this is true for me.
Yes, Euthansia or self-murder has seemed an option at times, who wouldn’t it do to anyone in a similar boat? But, if you learn to be content whatsoever one’s condition, then no matter one’s condition, you can say along with Paul, also, that to live is Christ, to die is gain. [2 Cor 12:9; Phil. 4:11; Psalm 73:26; Phil. 1:19-23; Phil. 3:8-9;]

To close this post with another video, yet unlike the first one, this one is through the eyes of faith:

Matthew 4:19 And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

Christians are the followers of Christ, and they should follow him… We see from what we have heard, how great the labour and travail of Christ’s soul was for others’ salvation, and what earnest and strong cries to God accompanied his labours. Here he hath set us an example. Herein he hath set an example for ministers, who should as co-workers with Christ, travail in birth with them till Christ be found in them; “My little children, of whom I travail in birth against until Christ be formed in you” (Galatians 4:19). They should be willing to spend and be spent for them. They should not only labour for them, and pray earnestly for them, but should, if occasion required, be ready to suffer for them, and to spend not only their strength, but their blood for them: “And I will very gladly spend and be spent for you; though the more abundantly I love you, the less I be loved” (2 Corinthians 12:15). Here is an example for parents, showing how they ought to labour to cry to God for the spiritual good of their children. You see how Christ laboured and strove and cried to God for the salvation of his spiritual children; and will you not earnestly seek and cry to God for your natural children?
—Jonathan Edwards

When we consider this fighting life aright, we need not be dissuaded from loving it. We rather have need to be strengthened with patience to go through and to fight on with courage and assurance of victory; still fighting in a higher strength than our own, against sin within and troubles without. This is the great scope of this epistle.  Against sin the apostle instructs us at the beginning of this chapter. And here again, against suffering… He urges us to be armed with the same mind that was in Christ… The words to the end of the chapter contain grounds of encouragement and consolation for the children of God in sufferings, especially in suffering for God.
—Robert Leighton “A practical commentary on 1 Peter”

As the eyelid is made to open and shut, to save the eye, so patience is set to keep the soul and save the heart whole, to cheer the body again. Therefore if you note when you can go by an offence and take little wrong, and suffer trouble quietly, you have a kind of peace and joy in your heart, as if you had gotten the victory. The greater is your patience, the less is your pain…. “In all things,” says Paul, “we are more than conquerors” (Rom. 8:37)… As the tree which Moses cast into the spring seasoned the bitterness of the waters, so patience, cast into our troubles, seasons the bitterness of the cross… This power has God given to patience, the medicinable virtue, that it should be like a wholesome herb in the world, or a general physician for all persons and diseases.
—Henry Smith–”The Trial of the Righteous”

The Lord Jesus had no need to bear the cross, endure trials, except to attest and prove his obedience towards God his Father. But necessary for us it is, for several reasons, to be unceasingly afflicted in this life. First, as we are by nature inclined to exalt ourselves and claim all things for ourselves, if our frailty is not set before our very eyes, we immediately value our own virtue beyond measure, unhesitatingly deeming itself unconquerable against all troubles that could beset it.
From this it comes to pass that we are puffed up in empty foolish confidence in the flesh, which later rouses us to haughtiness against God as if our own strength suffice without his grace. This arrogance he best restrains in showing us by experience how in us there lies not only stupidity–but also frailty. Therefore he afflicts us either by disgrace, by poverty, disease, bereavement, or other calamities to which—resist them as we will–directly we succumb, not having the power to bear them.
Thus humbled, we learn to call upon his power, which alone makes us stand firm, unflinching, under the weight of such burdens.
—-”The Piety of John Calvin” pp. 88

Psalms 119:67 Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept thy word.

The world and all it’s vanities, all the world had to offer that I could not have, dazzled me more blindly than if I could have feasted upon it till I had my fill. Those supposed pleasures as I saw them, those comforts were vain, yet so enticing that I almost sold my soul for them, because rather than my afflictions drawing me towards God, which were great already by any stretch of the imagination, the pleasures I supposed that would make them lighter, easier to bear, drew me away from Him, a heart frozen in vain desire and need; I thought my need was in the world, in people, and relief from the prisoner my body held me trapped within it. Wanting some relief from such great physical suffering, seemed the most natural thing in the world. But my real binds, was not in seeing my need, not seeking God with all my heart, but only going so far then standing still, demanding God supply my need and prove his love and kindness and mercy and compassion. But the fill I wanted and demanded was from His creation, not from the Creator, and how I mourn now those years of bondage, those years of longing for the vanity that the world had to offer to others, how the blessings of others especially those who had added to my lot needlessly or thoughtlessly fuelled my desire for a world full of vanities.

I loved, I laughed, I cried, felt tormented and tortured and I railed against the God of heaven against the providence that had brought my life to this. We think that being with people will relieve our loneliness and longing of the soul our inner hungers and fill the emptiness and voids we feel. We believe that our joy, our liberty and freedom, comes by being enabled by being comfortable and prosperous and popular — finding purpose in our own self-reliance –  being important in however a minute a way in the big scale of things that sense of import means to us.

We rely on ourselves to find a way out of the hole we are in–if we are helpless to do so, we rely on others to. The natural man doesn’t see his need, his want. He sees his want, but what we want is not always what we need. That verse of David from Psalm 119, refers to his illicit affair with Bathsheba; he wanted her in a fleshly, lustful desire, his want and lust became his need in his mind–it was the thing that burned inside of him, stronger and with more passion than anything else. Even if it meant departing out of the will of the God that he had served since he was a shepherd boy. (2 Samuel 12:24)

When the child that Bathsheba conceived in adultery with David was born and was ill, as the Lord had threatened that the child would die, and that the sword would never depart from David’s house from that time on. (2 Sam 12:10-18) David prayed and fasted and wept, and sought the Lord with all of his heart. He knew that sometimes the Lord’s threatening’s could be averted by pleading and intercession and prayer. (Joel 2:13). David’s devotion to God during the time of his infants illness, by fasting, prayer and tears of penitence was a great humiliation for his sin. It was a sure sign of his sincerity for sinning against God with Bathsheba. Commonly, when men beget a child by a mistress, they detach or turn away, in these days they may even persuade the mistress to have an abortion, in order to keep the child conceived in sin a secret to protect their own comfort zone; to keep the calm peace and tranquility of their home life with their wife. The child being murdered on the abortionists table cannot witness against men as a living child and evidence of their sin and indiscretion can. In some cases, they would rather murder their off-spring, rather than their sin be found out. David, aware that his own sinful actions had brought this about, in a truly penitent spirit, begged God to spare the child’s life, even knowing if the child lived it could bring him great shame and reproach, as a living child was evidence of and would testify against him in the case of his adultery. It would have been a terrible shame for God’s anointed to bear. But he begged, prayed fasted and wept for the life of his child, willing to pay the consequences that the reproach of a living child could bring down upon his head, because he owned his sin and was truly penitent for it and contrite.

When the infant died, his calm composure, putting on fresh clothes to go meet with God out of a holy reverential fear and honour of going to meet with the Living God,  to worship Him, knowing that the child’s death was God’s divine disposal and he could not now do a thing to change it. By his going to worship he practiced what Job spoke in “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the Name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)  He had tried with his whole heart to avert the threatening of God as concerned the child when he was still alive, knowing that where there’s life there is hope, but once the child died, he accepted it in quiet resignation knowing it was final and there was nothing more he could do. He went to worship God, thankful that God had had mercy on him and spared him, and also pardoned him for his adulterous act. It is widely thought that after Nathan left David, after reproaching him, that is when David penned Psalm 51. When he says, his sin will be ever before him, and asks for the Lord to purge him like hyssop, he was not really talking of the external ceremonies of the law, but to purge him, make him clean. Purging from the Lord normally comes by way of affliction. And when he says in  Psalms 119:67 Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept thy word. he is clearly alluding to this affair.

You see in David’s longing, his lust was for a beautiful woman, he was over-whelmed by temptation in what he saw in her. Things pleasing to our senses particularly the eyes have a power in the way of temptations and are more alluring to us.

My Bathsheba was the world outside my window and all that lay out there that I could never taste or partake of. My isolation and sense of abandonment by both God and man made me hunger and yearn after it more than anything I have previously known. I was already sick unto death, yet the afflicted state of my body and inability made it all seem the most  natural thing in the world that anyone in my shoes would want if it was them. Why? Because I knew not God nor myself. About a year or so ago things got worse still, though not by my own making, yet I was suddenly alone with God. Very alone. Totally alone–still sick unto death.

I even said goodbye to some folks of my own choosing, feeling that in all I felt by being so very alone, even more so, that to continue on in friendship of a kind, would be more destructive than cutting those ties, because it was like throwing crumbs to the starving, a little taste but not near enough to fill a belly that had been empty so long, and  made me hunger more and feel more alone than ever and more hurt over my lot in life, and when hurting so much already, they could only wreak more destruction. I chose finally, to go it alone with God, and turned my ear and heart to learning, by the sound advice I had been given repeatedly by someone of, the only way I was going to find life tenable, was to live a more spiritual life.  I also put other similar counsel into practice. I started pouring over eternity, reading such things as Baxter’s Everlasting rest. I started to know God better, and in doing that, alone with God, I started to know myself. I started to understand the actions of people I esteemed that had sometimes been a confusion to me. As I got to know both God and myself better, the penitential tears and a contrite and broken spirit started to be wrought. Yet, unlike in previous times of grief and mourning, like David, they were tears of repentance for past things that I found pierced me, and even to this day when I feel my afflictions I weep anew, not because I don’t believe I am forgiven, but because I know that before I was afflicted so severely, I went astray, and those times of mourning and grief and penitential sorrow are times of cleansing and purging even further. My aims and goals are not any longer to be rid of my sufferings or find relief at any cost–to sell my soul for relief from this great affliction– but live out my life to the glory of God. Yet I believe that there will likely always be times of great penitential mourning, because sometimes everywhere I look in Scripture reminds me of how I rejected the Word of God and God Himself, and how He had to bring me so low, that I could finally see Him for who He is, and in that he raised me  up for his honour and gave me the dignity I longed for, that I felt had been taken away from me by the actions of people I had known, that I thought I could get from the world, yet it was alone with God it was given to me. God is my portion alone as far as people, day in day out, even when in this condition physically, and yet I am fuller than ever before in a multitude of ways.  He is the strength of my countenance, and I know that, because He is my portion Alone when sick unto death. If I was surrounded by comforts and loved ones it is likely I would not be so sure of that, because it can be a very fine line about what or who we have as our chief portion, where our comfort and delight comes from if there are multiple channels of it coming to us,  and the lines can easily become blurred. Psalms 73:26 My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever. The world is still outside my window, with all its streets of gold, yet it’s a gold that will turn to rust, and inside this room, alone with God, He and me with his strength and by His grace, are building an incorruptible treasure that can never be taken from me and will never rust in the least. In a million years time in eternity, The Lord and His heavenly treasure will still be as shiny and dazzling,  even more so than now, when all the streets of gold have long rusted and corroded and  long been forgotten by those who ever walked on it along with those who walked on it also long forgotten.

The treasure any of us need, first and foremost, whatever our place in life, however rich or poor our estate, is the Living God and the treasures He has to offer,  yet it can be so easy to indulge in the world and its pleasures at the cost of falling short of the mark. Pleasures and recreation are not sinful in themselves, it’s only where we place them on our priorities or how much time we indulge in them that makes them so, if we are intemperant.

I may have more to say on the David and Bathsheba affair, as it’s such a rich history with so many strands. One final note on this however, for now, is Proverbs 31. The virtuous woman. The woman all godly women long to be, was also told to Solomon by his mother, Bathsheba, and she had obviously also repented of her sin with David. Because she warns her son against the very things happening to him by taking a bad course, that had come about upon David’s house, because of her and David’s adulterous affair. (Proverb 31:1-3)