He had more compassion to give, more mercy, more communion, more repentance, even more children waiting on the other side. This dark night is preparing for you an eternal weight of glory.” You can’t bear any more you gaze ahead into an endless night. Perhaps you sit in the rubble, scorned by former days and missing loves. Death now glitters as a treasure, wafts as sweetness. He muses aloud, “Why is light given to him who is in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death, but it comes not, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures, who rejoice exceedingly and are glad when they find the grave?” (Job 3:20–22). Job, staggering with grief, curses the day of his birth: “Let the day perish on which I was born, and the night that said, ‘A man is conceived’” (Job 3:3). His shards of a prayer rise from the ruins of a former life: all his wealth gone, many of his servants slain, and what was more, all ten of his children buried beneath a house, collapsed by a great wind. Job, a righteous man without rival on earth (Job 1:8), now sits in the ashes, boils rising on his skin, surrounded by accusing friends, and plagued with a heart too heavy to carry. They come in the winter of life, when even songbirds are too cold to sing. I wager that anguished prayers for death are the most common. Oh that I might have my request, and that God would fulfill my hope, that it would please God to crush me, that he would let loose his hand and cut me off! (Job 6:8–9) And the prayers we find in Scripture come not just from normal saints like us, but from the ones we would least expect to struggle with this life: leaders and heroes of God’s people.Ĭonsider a few men of God, then, whose prayers the Holy Spirit captured to remind us we are not alone and, more importantly, to witness how our kind and gracious God deals with his own at their lowest. For different reasons, at different times, from different pits, men and women of God have prayed to be taken away. If you have asked God to take your life, one of the first truths to realize is that you are not alone. “If you have asked God to take your life, the first thing to realize is that you are not alone.” By faith, they would continue, one foot in front of the other, until their all-wise Father brought them home. When suicidal ruminations sought to guide them to another exit, even amid debilitating and cruel circumstances, they knew to resist Satan’s suggestions. They knew such a crime was not a romantic gesture between teenage lovers, but a heinous sin against the Author of life.

Now these, again, were Christian men and women. Few had felt the impulse to stop, turn, and welcome the beast as a friend. Most of humanity had only run from the dread that gained on them moment by moment. It took courage to bring into the open the secret thoughts of death. But they each concluded that death was better for them now than life. They were of different ages and different ethnicities they had different personalities and different reasons. Over the years, I have talked with several Christians who have told me they wanted to die.

I knew you were trouble mp3