i was at a thing tonight in west belfast called solidarity against suicide. it was pretty powerful, a bunch of people from different churches coming together to talk about the issue, pray, give and consider practical steps to stopping the spiraling suicide rates in west belfast and ireland as a whole.
it seems really twisted to me that even the most broke person in belfast is like 1000s of times richer than over 2 billion people on the planet yet life can still get so hopeless they kill themselves. not that money = happiness but more suicide = despiration and dispiration means a lack of hope on job / life / money front. i dont know its a kinda deeper thing too i guess.
the question i have is how have we let our city get to the point where 26 of every 100,000 people would rather be dead?
its easy to point the finger and the "problems of the world" and moan about how powerless we are, but here i our city there is something really really wrong that we need to address. a part of our destiny lies in the hands and lives of all the people of this country and if we say just cause they wear tracksuits and have bad mostaches we dont want to know them, then we are missing the point of who Jesus was; we cant deny the humanity in another induvidual without losing a bit of our own.
but more, much more than this, God's heart is for hope and freedom and destiny, and he longs to use his people to set the captives free and let the down-trodden know God is on their side (see luke 4,18> for details). and its on these adventures we discover who we are and see him move in power to do miracles and bring that freedom...
so maybe the restless middle class church goers, myself included, that seem to overrun this city / country should stop watching dvds and drinking coffee and start getting involved with the least of these on our doorstep....
3 comments:
It is not that simple and sometimes sharing a coffee with someone can change a lot. You never know... I unfortunately lost a friend who killed herself three years ago. I didn't realise it could happen to someone so close and I keep thinking "maybe a call, a visit (or a coffee) ... could have changed something". We never know. But I know that taking care about your family, your friend and reminding them how much you love them is the first thing to do. We have to talk about suicide as much as possible. Thank you Graham for this article.
I think you're looking at it in a twisted way, you can't just assume because someone in Belfast has more money than someone in Africa that they'll have more hope. I guess depression leads to suicide, so what leads to depression? Surely not lack of money. Quite interesting on Wikipedia almost all the countrys male suicide is much higher than female, apart from China:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
Your passion is evident. I pray that our Heavenly Father uses you in this land to be that voice of hope and the hands that will reach out to the hurting and the forgotten in this land. Keep going!
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