JUST MUSING BASELINES
So I Hope November 2, 2025
When I got home from church that Sunday afternoon, my wife was still in bed. That alone wasn’t strange, but something twisted inside me when I called her name and she answered in slurred, loopy syllables. I bolted to the medicine cabinet. Her Lorazepam bottle—refilled two days earlier with sixty pills—stood empty. “What have you done?”
“Nothing,” she muttered.
“Where are the pills? The bottle’s empty.”
A limp shrug. “Downstairs.”
“Show me.” She stumbled down the steps, slipped, and crumpled. I dialed 911. One hour later she slipped into a coma at the hospital. Four days after that, she was gone. Forty-three years earlier, when we married, she had professed faith in Christ. For the last fifteen of those years, she fought a brutal triad: deep depression, crippling anxiety, and chronic, screaming headaches. Every medication piled on weight she couldn’t bear to see in the mirror. A professed believer who takes her own life raises brutal questions about her final estate. Some insist she lacked the faith to be healed. Others brand suicide the unpardonable sin. Many simply fall silent. What do I—her husband of forty-three years—say? I stand with Spurgeon: “If you are saved, you are always.”
Of course, that’s a thunderous if. Yet hope flickers. A neighbor told me that, not long before, my wife had said, “I just want to be with Jesus.” Those words tell me she acted believing she would be with Him—and whatever is not done in faith is sin. Then there’s Samson, yanking down the Philistine pillars on his own head, listed without apology in Hebrews’ hall of faith. Bottom line? Is she with Jesus? That verdict belongs to the Father and will be announced by the Son. I cling to the One who promised to finish what He started. And so I hope.
“Nothing,” she muttered.
“Where are the pills? The bottle’s empty.”
A limp shrug. “Downstairs.”
“Show me.” She stumbled down the steps, slipped, and crumpled. I dialed 911. One hour later she slipped into a coma at the hospital. Four days after that, she was gone. Forty-three years earlier, when we married, she had professed faith in Christ. For the last fifteen of those years, she fought a brutal triad: deep depression, crippling anxiety, and chronic, screaming headaches. Every medication piled on weight she couldn’t bear to see in the mirror. A professed believer who takes her own life raises brutal questions about her final estate. Some insist she lacked the faith to be healed. Others brand suicide the unpardonable sin. Many simply fall silent. What do I—her husband of forty-three years—say? I stand with Spurgeon: “If you are saved, you are always.”
Of course, that’s a thunderous if. Yet hope flickers. A neighbor told me that, not long before, my wife had said, “I just want to be with Jesus.” Those words tell me she acted believing she would be with Him—and whatever is not done in faith is sin. Then there’s Samson, yanking down the Philistine pillars on his own head, listed without apology in Hebrews’ hall of faith. Bottom line? Is she with Jesus? That verdict belongs to the Father and will be announced by the Son. I cling to the One who promised to finish what He started. And so I hope.
