Redeeming A Father's Heart

Chapter Two

A Deadly Perfectionism

It was about 3 a.m. when I called my pastor’s home and got the answering machine and left this not so cryptic message, “I just called to say goodbye.” I was in the middle of another sleepless night ruminating on how my life had fallen apart. I played judge and jury in this courtroom in my head and kept coming up with the same sentence…Death! I was a complete and abject failure as a man, as a husband and as a father. I couldn’t stand the thought of waking up to face another day in my own tortured skin. I hated what my life had become, I hated my weakness and fear, and I hated myself. I told myself with deadly self-pity that everyone I knew would be better off if I was out of the picture.

I meditated once again on the bottle of sleeping medicine on my bedside. Before I could lose nerve I shoved the pills down my throat swallowing them with a can of beer. I lay on my bed and said goodbye to life.

When I came to consciousness I was in the emergency room of a hospital. Thank God, my pastor Jim woke from a sound sleep and hearing the phone ring felt the strong feeling that he should check his answering machine. After hearing my message he called 911.

Pastor Jim visited me in the hospital once they pumped my stomach and I was out of danger. He told me, “I knew you were going through a tough time, but I didn’t realize just how much you were hurting. I hope we can work together to make sure you never see suicide as the only way out.”

As I lay in that hospital bed feeling so weak and numb, I wanted to believe that he could help me, but I was still felt depressed and hopeless. In the days ahead I began to hope that maybe God, through Pastor Jim’s help, had spared my life. There was a reason I had called him; somewhere inside me there was a desire to reach out for help and find healing…but I didn’t know how. I started by trying to honestly look at how I got to this point in my life, confined to the psychiatric unit of a hospital on suicide watch.