Anonymous asked a question:
I’m only a teenager, but I already feel like my life should just end. For my whole life I’ve felt like I am only a burden to those around me, and feel I don’t deserve to live. Honestly, I cant even get myself to pray because I feel I am undeserving of gods love and insight, and that he couldn’t love someone as foolish as me anyway.
Hey dear friend: I love you. We love you. Stay alive. You deserve life. God loves you. I have experienced God’s love, and while it’s hard to believe sometimes, He does love you. I promise that if He can love a guy like me, He can love anybody. I mean it. I seriously mean it.
Maybe this won’t be very comforting, but I love this study. Almost everyone who tried to jump realized later that their pain was bound within time, within a crisis, rather than a permanent pain. One of the people who survived jumping the bridge said, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”
I cannot promise that life gets better. Life can be cruel, unfair, intolerable. People can be downright mean. Failure and rejection will happen. Risks don’t always pay off. You will miss chances and opportunities. Injuries and disease are a real danger. Our brains are often broken by depression and other lifelong illnesses. People will leave.
But none of these things, none of these things, determine your worth as a person. Nothing that has happened to you gets the say on who you are. Of course, life hurts. We’re allowed to hurt. We’re allowed to be mad. We can vent and yell and shake a fist at God. All of that is being human. But all the ways in which life can be unfair do not have a single thing to say about you as a person. You are loved, regardless. You are loved simply because you were born. For me, that’s often enough for the next breath. Looking back, I’m glad I breathed again.
As it were, your life has launched into being, and it is the one song you get to sing. It is a song full of beauty and terror. It is a tree full of colors and crevices. There are wonderful and terrible things that life has to offer. But all of it is yours. I hope you lean into it as much as you can. It’s a crazy and ridiculous thing to be alive. I remember the philosopher saying we can look at how things are and we will go mad, but if we see that things are, that things even exist at all, we might find joy in the madness.
No, I do not feel loved all the time. It comes and goes, often based on my performance or my mood or from some bad pizza the night before. We are weird temperamental creatures. We are capable of having complete blissful giddy euphoria in one second, then chest-crushing deflated saddening numbness the next. Again, none of these things determine your worth. You are loved through and through. You were loved before you got here. You are loved, outside of your age or achievements or acclaim or applause. You are loved. I mean it.
— J.S.
Photo from Unsplash
J.S. Park: Hospital Chaplain 
Hey Anonymous… I had tried 20 times ALWAYS to be found in what could of been my last few moments on this earth. BUT God showed up and today when I tell my story I am able to give hope to someone. Please don’t die before you have even begun to live. Yeah, life sucks a lot of the time. I get that, but you know what else I know. EVERYONE of us have a story to tell and in that story is going to impact desperately someone else . When those thoughts come at you and you want to die understand that God wants your hurt. No, He does not expect perfection out of us… He wants you to run your race well. You… a teen ager holds someone’s breakthrough! Your life story can only be told by you! Please do not die! There are a lot of people who do love you. I don’t know you but I do know that your life matters to me and I sure don’t want to hear that something happened to you. May God give you the grace and hope that God has for you. You are sooo loved.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I needed this. I can’t tell you how much I needed this except I feel I wrote this at 52. I am precariously standing on a bridge daily but my greatest fear is that God will look up at me and say, child…oh the future I had for you…if you would’ve held on. As a believer in Christ, I feel guilt and shame over this debilitating depression I’m in but I also can recognize that there are mitigating circumstances ; ie: being out of work four months, health issues, medication changes. So I have done what every weak 7th grader has done in gym class, tied the proverbial knot in my rope and I’m hanging on. It is posts like this that give me comfort for today. When you can’t find a reason to go on, sometimes getting by one day at a time is plenty.
LikeLike
I think all your personal struggles and pain serve a real purpose, J.S. Your writing always comes across as so deeply thoughtful, and you just have such rich experience and wisdom to share. I always feel blessed by your words, because it genuinely feels like you take a lot of time and effort to think through what needs to be said. Wow. I don’t mean to put pressure on you though, since no one is perfect, but keep doing what you’re doing and make sure you give yourself time to recharge as well. Take care. 🙂
LikeLike