My Advocacy For Assisted Suicide

My mother is 83 years old; she’ll turn 84 next month; she suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. A regimen of medication that my mother is on makes an amazing difference in her quality of life.

On days when my mother takes her medication faithfully life is pretty good for her; conversations are coherent and enjoyable. On days when she forgets to take her medication life is painful; events give way to a short-term memory that fades within an hour or two, names cannot be recalled and places seemed to never have had a name.

It’s a quiet Wednesday morning, another partial inch of soft snow covered our car windows and sidewalks. I recall days like this when I was a kid; days when it was hard to get warm after trudging many blocks to make it to school.

I don’t know if my mother remembers days like this when she was younger; in some ways Alzheimer’s hasn’t so much affected her long-term memory; I’ve listened to some of the same stories of her life nearly a dozen time—crystal clear as though she experienced it last week.

I’ve retreated from the noise of life to find God.

I sat alone with God this morning, and like a kid asking his father for another cookie I asked the Father to sit next to me and tell me what was on his heart. I wanted what was on his heart to be on my heart.

Part of my personal growth plan for this year was to read just twelve books of the Bible; typically I try to read the Bible through in a year, reading a different version each year. But this year I just want to campout for a month at a time in one book—read it over and over and let it sink deep inside of me.

I’m reading Ephesians. Paul was in prison; maybe a place where he retreated from the noise of life and was able to find God.

Chapter 4 is where I began today, and I only made it through the first two verses. I’m not so much interested in reading a chapter a day, or three chapters a day; I’m interested in allowing God to teach me, however he chooses to do it, with as much or as little of scripture as is necessary for me to get what he’s teaching.

I’m grateful for my mother’s spiritual heritage, and her mother’s before her. My mother became a follower of Jesus around sixteen years old, the same age I did. She’s recounted the story many times of her awakening to Jesus, of hearing music for weeks that was humanly indescribable; even she couldn’t put the experience into words that does it any justice. But, that’s what real encounters with God are like—they’re endemically personal.

Through what I know to be a very hard life my mother has always read her Bible and prayed; I’m certain it was her prayers that picked me up and carried me through my difficult times in life. My mother and I are alike in some ways, we both made some choices in life that didn’t have God at the center of them and the consequences were more than unpleasant, they were painful. But neither of us ever stopped crawling toward God.

I asked God for wisdom this morning; wisdom that James writes about in chapter 1 and verse five of his contribution to the scriptures. I know I lack wisdom in every area of my life, including what the scriptures say. I need wisdom.

In those first two verses of Ephesians 4 Paul was encouraging his readers with these words…”I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness with patience…”

The room grew quieter as I read those words and realized I am so unworthy to bear the name of Jesus. I am a sinner saved by grace and mercy. So often I don’t look like Jesus. I pleaded with God for forgiveness.

Like a kid asking his father for another cookie I asked God to teach me humility, gentleness and patience; the kind Paul hoped for his readers.

I don’t know where that stuff (humility, gentleness, patience) comes from other than God. Those are qualities I’ve observed in my mother for my fifty-two years. My mother has never been a self-promoter, she’s always given you the impression that you are more important than she is. I’ve known it takes a lot to get my mother angry; her longsuffering and patience are things I give up on much more quickly than she ever has.

So, I asked God to create in me humility, gentleness and patience. I did that after backing up and re-reading the latter verses of Ephesians 3; it’s in those verses that Paul makes it clear that humility, gentleness and patience are born of his Spirit in our inner being.

And, the room grew quieter.

Surely, those qualities in my mother must have been rooted in her real life encounter with the living God around sixteen, and refined in the fires of life.

Then God spoke in a faint, conscious whisper…

Learning humility is painful because I don’t want to die. God was asking me to commit spiritual suicide—purposefully kill the spirit inside of me that is unholy, that keeps me from being humble, gentle and patient.

In the middle of the whisper I recognized I cannot do this on my own; I don’t want to do this on my own. And, I recognized that God was going to have to help me die. Jesus, the Great Physician, was going to have to help me kill me. In that moment I became an advocate for assisted suicide.