When you don't want to be here anymore

If you are reading this because you do not want to be alive anymore, I am glad you are still here to read it. Before anything else: if you are in danger right now, or you have a plan, or you have already done something to hurt yourself, please stop reading and call your local emergency number, or one of the crisis lines on the Help now page. They are real. They are free. A person answers. You do not have to explain yourself well. You only have to say, I do not want to be here anymore, and let them take it from there.

The rest of this article is for the minutes after that call, or for the night when the thought is there but you are not in immediate danger. Here is the answer, plainly: the wish to die is not a sign that you are beyond God’s reach. It is a wound, and the Father comes to wounded people. He is not disappointed in you. He is not standing far off waiting for you to pull yourself together. He is near, closer than the thought that is telling you to go.

You are not the first of His people to feel this

It may help to know that the Bible does not hide people who wanted to die. It does not tidy them up. Elijah, straight after the greatest victory of his life, walked into the desert, sat under a bush, and asked God to end it.

while he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He sat down under a broom tree and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, LORD,” he said. “Take my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.”

1 Kings 19:4–5

Notice what God did not do. He did not lecture him. He did not tell him to count his blessings. He sent an angel with bread and water and let him sleep, then fed him again. The first thing God did for a man who wanted to die was give him a nap and a meal.

Job, in his grief, asked why light is given to people who long for death that does not come (Job 3:20–21). Jeremiah cursed the day he was born (Jeremiah 20:14). Jonah told God it was better for him to die than to live (Jonah 4:3). Moses, exhausted by the people he led, asked God to kill him rather than let him go on like this (Numbers 11:15). These are not the Bible’s villains. They are its prophets. Their prayers were kept in Scripture on purpose, so that when you pray something like it, you would know you are in company.

What the thought is, and what it is not

The wish to disappear usually comes dressed as a conclusion, as if you had thought it all through and this is simply where the facts lead. It is not a conclusion. It is exhaustion, or grief, or shame, or an illness of the mind and body, speaking in the voice of reason. Pain this deep narrows the world until the only door you can see is the one marked exit. There are other doors. You cannot see them tonight, and that is not your fault. It is what pain does.

That is why this is not a night to make decisions. It is a night to be kept. The psalmists knew this feeling of being near the edge and having no strength left.

O LORD, the God of my salvation, day and night I cry out before You. May my prayer come before You; incline Your ear to my cry. For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol.

Psalm 88:1–3

Psalm 88 is the darkest prayer in the Bible. It ends without a resolution. It is there so that you have words for a night without a resolution, and so that you know that such a prayer can be prayed to God and still be a prayer. He kept it in His book.

What the Father says about you

He does not say you are a burden. He says you are His child, and He counts your tears.

A bruised reed He will not break and a smoldering wick He will not extinguish; He will faithfully bring forth justice.

Isaiah 42:3

A bruised reed. A wick with barely a glow left. That is a description of exactly the state you are in, and the promise is that Jesus does not snap it or snuff it out. He handles it with enormous care. There is nowhere you can go where He is not.

Where can I go to escape Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, You are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle by the farthest sea, even there Your hand will guide me; Your right hand will hold me fast.

Psalm 139:7–10

Even in Sheol, the grave, the psalmist says, You are there. Nothing about you tonight has put you out of His reach. If you cannot believe He loves you, you can at least hold onto this: He is here, in this room, and He is not leaving.

What to do in the next hour

Do not try to fix your whole life tonight. Just get through the next hour, then the next one. Here is what that can look like.

Make the call. If you have not yet, call a crisis line or your emergency number. If you cannot bring yourself to speak, most of the lines listed on Help now also take a text message. Saying it out loud to one person breaks the thought’s power to keep you alone.

Tell someone near you. Wake them if you have to. A spouse, a parent, a friend, a pastor. Say the plain sentence: I am not safe tonight and I need you to stay with me. You are not ruining their night. You are giving them the chance to love you.

Put distance between you and anything you could use to hurt yourself. Give it to the person you told. Lock it away. Leave the house if you need to.

Eat something and drink some water, even if you do not want to. This is what God did for Elijah, and it was not a small thing.

Then say this, or something like it, out loud:

Then read Psalm 40:1–3 slowly. It is about a man who was in a pit and was lifted out. It does not say how long he waited. It says he was heard.

Tomorrow is not yours to carry tonight

When morning comes, there will be more to do. See a doctor. Talk to your pastor. If you are not in a church, find one and tell someone there the truth. Thoughts like this are often the sign of an illness that can be treated, and taking it to a doctor is not a failure of faith. It is what a child of the Father does with a wound.

But that is for the morning. Tonight your one job is to still be here when the sun comes up. The psalmist, after his own night at the edge, wrote this:

I will not die, but I will live and proclaim what the LORD has done.

Psalm 118:17

You do not have to feel it. You only have to let it be true of you for one more day. Then, in the morning, there is another article waiting, and there are people who want to see you. Stay.