A former member of my church told me her ex-husband had taken his own life. They’d been divorced for years, but they still stayed close. They called often. They shared friends. Some family ties, too. He lived in New England. She moves between Dallas and Philadelphia.
She told me how she found out. They’d spoken a few days earlier. They used a location app to stay in touch with each other. First came a warning that his battery was dying. Then another — no longer traceable.
In light of what happened, those messages feel chilling.
She called his daughter. The daughter went to the house and found him. I didn’t ask how. Not important. I did ask about a note. She didn’t know yet.
The devastation is unspeakable. And it raises every question you can imagine.
The Aftermath
Suicide leaves wreckage. Always.
Those left behind carry the weight.
Sadness, because there was no goodbye. Anger, because someone they loved could leave them in that way. Relief too — followed by guilt — that the struggle is finally over. Compassion, when you realize how heavy the burden must have been. Love. And love, because love doesn’t just vanish, even in death.
I’ve seen it more than once: suicide is never only about the one who dies. It rips through every relationship around the deceased.
The pain is sharp. Anger rises. Tears come. Judgment too. And yet, in time, compassion usually has the last word. Survivors begin to see what was hidden — depression, despair, unspoken suffering.
Still, Scripture is plain. Life is sacred. It isn’t ours to end. Genesis says God breathed life into man. Job says, “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away.” That’s His call, not ours.
Suicide is self-murder. The commandment says, “You shall not kill.” That applies not only to others, but to ourselves as well. As Christians, we’re told to love life enough to guard it. To honor God as the giver of each day. To resist the pull to take into our hands what belongs only to Him.
Faithful to the God Who Gives Life
Sociologists have long noted that suicide rates are lower among Jews than other groups. Why? The reasons aren’t hard to guess.
Jewish communities are tight. No one suffers entirely alone. And Jewish teaching is clear: life is God’s gift, sacred, not to be thrown away. They live close to the Ten Commandments, and the seventh one covers self-murder.
That should make Christians stop and think. If we really believe the gospel of life, then we ought to live as people who cherish the life God has entrusted to us.
A friend of mine once told me — after a grim diagnosis — that he planned to move to Oregon for physician-assisted suicide. I told him it was unthinkable.
He’d rob God of the chance to redeem his suffering. He’d rob his wife of the chance to live out her vows. He’d rob himself of the blessing of finishing the race faithfully.
He thought he was being brave. Thought he’d spare his family the decline, the long nights, the cost of care. But in truth, that choice would have cut deeper.
By taking control of his death, he would have cut short his wife’s promise “to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death.” He would have denied his family the privilege of walking with him in weakness, of giving back the care he had once given them.
What looked like courage was, in reality, a refusal of love’s highest calling: to remain, to endure, to carry one another’s burdens all the way to the end.
Hard as it is, it is never God’s will that we take our own life. That choice belongs to God, and Him alone.
The Bible doesn’t hide these stories. Saul fell on his sword. Judas hanged himself. The accounts are blunt. And history hasn’t remembered them kindly.
But the same Scripture tells us this: God’s revelation is marked by mercy, kindness, forgiveness. Isaiah says, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench.”
That’s why Cranmer put these words of Christ into our liturgy: “Come unto me, all who travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.”
