Tag Archives: Mental health

09.25.13
by

Out of the Darkness

As seen on “Healthy Living & Natural Beauty”

As I was looking through devotions for today, the image above all but leaped off the page.  For some time now, I’ve been puzzling over what seems to be an epidemic of teen suicide.  My younger brother lost three friends in about a year to this horrible end.  In the work that I do, I get regular training on how to talk to students who may be contemplating suicide.  And unfortunately, I’ve had to witness the aftermath of attempted suicides and completed efforts.  The pain and suffering of loved ones is unimaginable.  The most recent case was just this month, so perhaps that is why it is so fresh in my mind.

I’ve been wondering what it is that we’re doing wrong that there seems to be so many young people taking their own lives.  I’ve been thinking about the pressures that they’re under in our American culture– pressure to produce, to succeed.  I’ve been thinking about the fact that the question has often become “Where are you going to college?” rather than “Are you going to college?” I think about the expectations that universities have that high school students participate in all kinds of extracurricular activities to look good on their applications.  I also think about the state of our economy and the fact that our young adults are coming into college with feelings of entitlement only to learn that they may not get a job out of college. Ouch.

Then I started thinking about what we need to do as a culture to stop putting these kinds of pressures on our young people.  How can we better prepare them and educate them to handle challenges? How can we stop setting them up for failures?  And how can we protect them from feeling so low that they take their own lives?

But then I saw the image above today, and it makes me wonder… have I been thinking about this all wrong?

Perhaps the message needs to be less about preparation for the world and more about God’s love.  It seems that our colleges are filled with more and more atheists and agnostics than ever.  Could the suffering be because of an absence of faith and the loving support of the Heavenly Father?

And if that’s the case… how do I as an employee at a Higher Education institution use my position to show them God’s love so that they might know that they can fully rely on Him.  Knowing that there is a Father who protects and provides will surely make life’s pressures a little easier to handle.  So where do I start?  Where would you start?

 

 

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