There are some days that I wake up and am excited to church. Others, I am tired, cranky, and don’t want to get out of bed for anything. Today was a mix of both. I was pretty tired, but I only stayed in bed about ten minutes after my dad told me to wake up, instead of twenty minutes and dragging me out of my comfy kingdom where dreams come true.
Waking up to face the world, where those dreams are far away, is never fun. However, today I was a bit excited for the church service. I figured they were going to talk about Dottie, the amazing woman who passed away recently.Our whole church was shaken by her death. I also was excited to be with my church family, who grieved along with me and to give each other a sort of comfort you can only find at a church.
Recently, I have been having a hard time keeping up and paying attention in church. The only thing I can keep my concentration at least part of the time iste sermon. This is where my pastor gets to use his own words to describe the lessons we are learning that day. Today. That theme was asking the question “Is life meaningless?”
As someone who has dealt with suicidal thoughts on and off for years, this question hit me hard. Is life meaningless? One example my pastor gave was from a baseball player. When the player was asked how he got through each game, he answered this: “Ten million years from now, when then sun burns out and the Earth is just a frozen iceball hurtling through space, nobody’s going to care whether or not I got this guy out.” (http://www.baseball-almanac.com/quotes/quomcg.shtml)
Is this true? Is nothing I am doing now going to matter to anyone when the world ends, or when I end, whichever comes first? To a person who has dealt with suicidal thoughts, the answer to this is NO. Nothing I’ve done, even if I someday become the most famous writer in the world, is going to matter the the sun sucking us in. I’ll matter as much as murderers. Even if it’s just me dying and the world doesn’t end for a million years, those million years later, no one is going to think about me at those million years, or in a thousand years, or even in a hundred. If the history books were to ever say my name, those books are going to be gone or worthless by the time the world ends. I am not special.
My pastor also talked about Dottie and her boyfriend John’s recent deaths. John, who also lived with Down syndrome, died very soon after Dottie. It is believed that he died of the stress of losing Dottie. The pastor talked about how even with their challenges, they lived a full life, even fuller than some of us without a disability. They didn’t think life was meaningless.
The Special Olympics choir sang a couple songs at Dottie’s funeral, and those kids were fully into it. Even though their friend was gone, they put their full hearts into the performance. They live every moment of their life in a meaningful way.
We need to be like them. Yes, I might feel like life is useless sometimes. I might think I’d rather be dead than face the reality that life means nothing, that I mean nothing. It sometimes feels like I have a weight on my chest keeping me from doing anything useful, and that I am worthless and nobody needs me. These people who live with disabilities don’t let them get in the way. They live life to the fullest, not caring if people are going to remember them or not.
While life might be a black hole in the times I am suicidal, it can also be the sun. Not the sun sucking us in, the sun giving us light, allowing us to live.
Who care’s if we are remembered in a thousand years? As long as we live a life that pleases us, why worry if we are a memory preserved in time? We are here. We are now. Let the future belong to those who live there. Dottie and John never let their disabilities define them. We shouldn’t let our problems tell us we are nothing.
Life might seem meaningless at times. To tell you the truth, I think that life is meaningless at times. This is just my brain talking. It is just your brain talking. We are not nothing. We are something. Our problems won’t keep us from heavens. If we act as a child, with no worries of being remembered, we will get a lot farther than adults who spend life thinking life has no point.
Suicidal thoughts are the stem of why this sermon was so meaningful. Everybody has their own reasons. I’m sure everyone was shocked and deeply moved by my pastors words. We all learned that we are not everything, but we are something that is worth being acknowledged in our lives and in God’s kingdom above.
Beautifully Bipolar 