9
The Mystery of
Freedom and Suicide
The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly.
Søren Kierkegaard1
The hotel was a cheap one. By now, my boss and coworkers were probably wondering where I was. I wasn’t sure if I would have a job when I got back, but I didn’t care. The flight to Colorado from Texas was last-minute and expensive. My excuse for this trip was that I was meeting Robb Kelley, a sort of spiritual granddad. Eric Patrick called him his own spiritual papa. He had always been kind to me, and since I had not spoken to Eric Patrick in so long, I thought maybe it would be good to talk to Robb.
That’s how good liars are—setting their lies down in a pool of truth so you dismiss the lie in the middle because of the truth surrounding it.
The truth was, I was ready for change. Change had to come. The days kept coming and time wouldn’t stand still, go backward, or fast-forward. So I knew, whether I was ready or not, change was the thing that was suffocating me. I had to give in.
Nathan was also there, ready to meet me. He had a busy weekend working in Colorado for his new job with a timeshare company, but he said he would make some time to see me.
The way I saw it, I had three choices before me.
One, I could leave with Nathan.
Two, I could leave him.
Or three, I could die.
Dying for my convictions had been one of the chief objectives of my life ever since I was a little girl. I always found the idea to be so heroic.
On this day, my problem was that I faced two convictions I was ready to die for: dying for someone else to be saved or dying for my faith.
I felt like if I consented to turning this emotional affair into a full-blown physical one where we ran away—Nathan leaving his wife and children and me leaving my life as well—then I would be added to the large group of people who make up the list of reasons why so many say they hate Jesus. People like my teenage atheist self, waiting to blame Jesus for the bad things Christians do.
But I also felt that if I didn’t consent to the affair then I would be contributing to the death of a severely wounded and needy man, whom I thought I was keeping alive by loving him.
So I met him at this cheap hotel. He sat in the corner of the room and could only give me a few minutes of his time. I sat on the ugly floral print–covered bed. I didn’t say much.
He explained the reasons why he needed me to keep loving him. How he couldn’t live without me. How I was such a healing part of his life. Then he explained why he couldn’t leave his wife and children. Next he taunted me about his desire to run away together. Then he came back to the fact that he didn’t see how we could do it just yet. And lastly he spoke about something else that he couldn’t have known was in my heart, the way he often did, pulling out my deepest held secret thoughts and talking about them like he knew me better than I knew myself. This special ability was the most confusing part about him, because it made me want to let this part of our talk validate all the other confusing parts of the conversation. The things I wasn’t sure about must be true if this part was so obviously true.
That’s how good liars are—setting their lies down in a pool of truth so you dismiss the lie in the middle because of the truth surrounding it. Good liars also work really hard to make themselves believe what they are saying. They make conscious decisions to believe the lies they are creating. This is why it is so hard for them to recognize truth if it is something they don’t want to believe. “Truth” ends up being reduced to whatever the liar wants to believe, regardless of its veracity. Liars are just sick, that’s all, and they need healing like we all do. They need to be made whole instead of dividing themselves up with lies.
After he made his last chill-inducing, how-could-you-know-that-about-me point, I immediately thought of the phrase Ryan had said to me. Beware of false prophets.
Then we sat in silence for a while. I loved this man. I wanted him to use his amazing gifts for all that God intended them to be used for. I wanted him to be well, healthy, full of joy, truth, and freedom. I saw how much love God had for him as well. I didn’t know how I could hurt him and risk his words being true: “I need you or I can’t keep going another day.”
At the same time, I knew that I couldn’t risk dragging Jesus’s name through the mud, giving skeptics like my young atheist self another reason to mock the name of Jesus. So we sat in a heavy silence until he left me alone in the room.
I called Robb Kelley but he didn’t pick up. I had left him a message, but he still hadn’t called back.
All I could think of, while I sat alone in this cheap hotel on that ugly bed, was the pink razor that lay on the edge of the bathtub. I wondered how hard it would be to take apart. Our thoughts can create our reality. As I thought through wanting to die rather than hurt Nathan by leaving, and wanting to die rather than misrepresent Christ by being in an affair, the only thing that made sense to me was to kill myself.
It’s funny what “making sense” means in times when we are deceived, confused, and oppressed by suicidal demons. Suicide didn’t really make sense. For a Christian, it spits in the face of the God who made you and gave you another day for a reason that you may or may not see. As I look back on this time, I think about that mysterious verse where Jesus talks about demons. He said that when a demon is cast out of a person, it goes through arid regions looking for a place to rest. If it can’t find a new place to inhabit, it returns to the place from where it was cast. If that place is swept clean and in order, but unoccupied, then it comes back and brings seven more demons more terrible than itself, and the condition of that person is worse than before (see Matt. 12:43–45).
This is a mysterious verse that I don’t fully understand, but what seems clear from my experience is that suicide is most likely the name of a demon that torments people and tries to convince them to kill themselves. I am very familiar with this sort of torment, and many times can even sense when someone else is struggling with it. I also know that on that day at the hotel, while I was alone for that little while, I was closer to suicide then than I ever was at age sixteen, or any time after that.
Just as I was about to go get the razor, the phone rang.
I looked at it for a few seconds and let it ring, wondering if I should answer or continue with what I was doing.
I wanted it to be Robb, but what if it was Nathan?
For no reason I could understand, I picked up the phone almost while I was still wondering if I should.
I didn’t speak for a minute, but then I heard his voice.
It was Robb.
“Hello? Lacey, are you there?”
Tears fell from my eyes as I answered his strange question, not sure if it was really true.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“We got your message, Lacey. My wife, Shiloh, and I are on our way. It will take us about an hour to get there, but we wanted to let you know that we will be there soon.”
I knew I would wait for them. It was like God himself had called to interrupt my plans. I love that he uses people to do great, seemingly impossible things in the lives of others. That must be one of God’s greatest joys—to call other people who will say yes to him, to help intervene in miraculous ways at just the right moments in other people’s lives. Oh, if only we would all listen and obey when he nudges us to do out of the ordinary, loving things.
I just sat there while I waited, swinging back and forth from being overwhelmed and crying to feeling completely numb and empty.
A Father’s Love
When Robb and Shiloh finally arrived, they both gave me particularly long, extra-tight hugs. It made me feel awkward how they displayed their love for me, like I was a daughter. Our relationship felt sort of random and yet they seemed to view me like I was a precious family member. I had never done anything to benefit them and they really had nothing certain to gain from dropping everything to drive an hour out of their way to a crummy hotel to maybe talk some sense into me—especially when I’d been known to be gifted with the ability to reason my way in or out of whatever I wanted, no matter how right or wrong it was. I didn’t understand this was how fathers treated their daughters.
Fathers provide presence.
But when you are honestly ready to die, I think there is something about everything you are, and know, and are used to, being really fragile. In this moment it only took one conversation to break apart my default settings so that I could really hear.
I didn’t know where to start with Robb. As weird as it sounds, I wanted to respect Nathan’s wife by not sharing too much of what was going on. I vaguely told him some of the story and asked a question about not knowing whether what you heard in your heart was really from God.
That’s when Robb began telling me his story.
Fathers provide wisdom.
He talked about how he met a woman who seemed to have the same type of spiritual gifts as him. When Robb first spoke with her, she would light up in amazement at how well he seemed to understand her heart. Robb felt the same way when she spoke to him. She would pull out the deepest secret truths of his heart.
“We made the mistake of thinking that because we connected so deeply spiritually, it must be a sign from God that we were meant to be together romantically,” he said.
Later he realized that the relationship was destructive in many ways and was able to salvage their hearts by ending it. I had never considered this before. It flew in the face of everything pop culture taught me about following your heart and recognizing “true love” in romance. Pop culture taught me the main purpose of life was to find your soul mate. Pop culture taught me that I would recognize this person by how we connected in our souls. It didn’t matter what gender, race, or circumstance the person came from either. If your true love was romantically involved with, or even married to, someone else, that was simply a plot to overcome in this great love story before you got your happily ever after.
Pop culture has glorified coveting. Pop culture has painted a desire for someone who is not yours into the beginnings of a grand love story. In reality, this is not love at all. It’s theft.
It’s deceiving yourself.
It’s idolatry.
It’s adultery.
It’s our orphan fear that God doesn’t have something good for each of us in mind.
It’s pride and greed, wanting something that isn’t yours to have.
It’s exchanging real pearls for fake ones that won’t last. We yearn for it, because it masquerades as the true love we need from heaven. But when the mask comes off, we realize that true love is not who we are dancing with. There is a faint voice at our backs whispering truth to our hearts.
Following your feelings has deceived you.
Looking for a soul mate has taught you to chase the wind.
True love is not a wind that deceives and disappears.
Love Speaking Truth
I was so thankful that Robb could speak truth to me out loud. It was a heart-wrenching relief to come to the understanding that just because we could connect deeply on a spiritual and emotional level did not mean that Nathan and I were meant to be together romantically.
When Robb spoke, something shifted in my heart. I understood that what he explained was exactly what had brought so much confusion in regard to this married man I was involved with. It was confusing for both of us, and Robb’s story helped explain why. If we had looked at our connection as a mere marvel from God, because of how he freely gifts people, we would have understood our connection differently.
It would have been an encouragement to know that God made others who share our passions and see life similarly. We wouldn’t have filtered our similarities through pop culture romance and began to covet romantically in our hearts what was not ours to have. We would have understood that we were simply a brother and sister in Christ. And we actually would have appreciated each other in appropriate ways.
I sensed such a light enter the room that I felt peaceful and hopeful. Then the phone rang again. It could only be one person. I didn’t know what I should do, and Robb encouraged me to go ahead and answer. I don’t remember our conversation, but as we talked, the cloud that was over my heart before seemed to return. When I hung up, Robb pointed that out.
“I want you to acknowledge what just happened. There was peace here before, and now there is a darkness in the room. Do you sense that?”
I did.
“I want you to see that there is no life in this relationship, and you must trust God in order to receive the life he wants to give you. If you don’t trust God, you will end up with counterfeit versions of life that only look good for a short while. Once you get into that place of resisting God’s best for your life, you will find strife and struggle and hardship you were never meant to face.”
Fathers protect and correct.
It was then that I remembered an email my friend Victoria had sent me before I even met Nathan. I thought the email was strange and had no idea what it meant, really, when I read it. This was the first time I’d thought about it since she’d sent it over a year ago. It read:
I had a dream that you were in a broken down, dirty trailer house, and you were with a man. In my dream it was as if he was your husband. . . . You were sitting on the edge of a bathtub and you were staring at a string of pearls that were hanging over the edge of the tub. When I saw you, I knew that you were being abused in this relationship.
When I looked closer at the pearls, I could see they were really cheap costume jewelry pearls and they were chipped and faded. When I woke up I felt like God was saying that this doesn’t have to be your future because he says he has true pearls for you and such blessing you can’t even imagine.
As I remembered this email from my prophetic friend, I wept. In my heart, I asked God to forgive me and to help me find a way out of all of this darkness I didn’t know how to escape. Robb and Shiloh prayed for me. Shortly after, they left. I ended up using the return flight I previously did not expect to use and went home.
God Speaking
I arrived late that night and my roommate Melanie was still up, sitting in the kitchen when I walked in. She had been trying to connect with me because she knew I was struggling with depression lately. But I didn’t answer her calls. I had been rude to her and she had loved me all along anyway. She gave me a quick hug and then looked me over in a strange way.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m better, I think.”
“I had all my church pray for you yesterday.”
“Why?”
“Because I had a vision of you. I saw you sitting in a hotel room on a bed with a floral print, and you were really sad. You were thinking about the pink razor that was sitting on the edge of the bathtub and you were planning to take it apart.”
I was so amazed that God would speak to Melanie to pray for me. I was amazed that she would say yes to God’s invitation to pray for me. And not only her, but she asked others to pray. I was astonished at how much God loved me. It is phenomenal how personal and specific he can be in the way that he loves.
That night I opened Mel’s Bible and read Proverbs 5–7. It was another mirror. It felt like I was reading everything I was going through with this emotional affair. I wept and wept and prayed. But when I prayed I felt so empty and lost. It felt like I had pushed God a million miles away and didn’t know how to get back to the place where I could sense his love for me.
It took me some time to understand that it is impossible to push God away. We turn our backs on him. We forget about him. We deal badly with him. But he does not leave us. He does not betray us. The poet-writer of the psalms writes, “If I make my bed in the depths, you are there” (Ps. 139:8). We can turn from him but he stays with us. He follows us into the blackness, waiting for us to reach out and grab hold.