Free The Reason: How I Discovered a Life Worth Living by Lacey Sturm Page A

buried life;
    A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
    In tracking out our true, original course;
    A longing to inquire
    Into the mystery of this heart which beats
    So wild, so deep in us—to know
    Whence our lives come and where they go. 1
    I feel like I can almost reach out and touch the thoughts of this old poet. In these lines he describes the longing, the sehnsucht . One of my favorite writers, C. S. Lewis, also talks about this deep longing that propelled him toward an encounter with God. I didn’t know it then but that deep desire, that desperate longing for something more, would also land me right in front of God, just like it did for Lewis. It’s like that for us all, really. You and I experience a deep thirst for satisfaction. But this satisfaction does not come sexually, or through material possessions—though that is how we try to quench that desire. We think money will make us feel safe or content, but it only heightens the desire.
    Lewis, or Jack as his friends called him, initially thought this deep longing was nothing more than romanticism. Butthrough conversations with friends and his own reading of Christian authors, he realized that it was not a great poem or a beautiful song or a great book that would give him unending joy. Rather, it was the thing behind the poem or song or book—and that “thing” was God.
    For me, though, this deep desire to be known, to be loved, to be healed, to be satisfied through and through drove me to places I never want to visit again, dark places. I’m not sure if Jack ever visited the dark places I frequented, but I’m sure he felt the letdown of thinking, Aha! This will surely satisfy , and finding that it was only a shadow.
    Every morning I awoke feeling like a burden to the world around me. I wanted to disappear or find that thing to satisfy my deep desire. Let me say this about suicide: it’s a liar. It will whisper to you and fill your mind with just the right amount of evil mixed with something resembling truth. But those are the best lies! Suicide will tell you to cling to the drama, to the people who hurt you, to the tough circumstances of your life and say, Look at all this! It isn’t worth it anymore. You aren’t helping anyone. You make no good difference. You only make everything more inconvenient. You will always feel empty and achy. Living is too painful, so why are you doing it? You just need to sleep forever.
    The truth is that we do need rest, but not the kind that sleep gives. And believing that suicide and sleeping forever are the same thing is to believe a lie. Dead bodies only look like they are sleeping, and our bodies are only temporary vehicles anyway. Our vehicle may feel worn out, but our soul is the thing that needs help. And at a certain point the onlyhelp it can get is for the marrow of the soul, the spirit, to come to life.
    We need rest for our souls.
    My soul was trying to be its own life source because my spirit was so sick it was almost dead. And a soul trying to stay alive without a spirit is like a beautiful autumn leaf that falls from a tree. It may be beautiful and awe-inspiring because before it fell it turned the most intense red, and it may have looked exhilarating and alive even as it fell to the ground, but very soon that beautiful leaf will turn to dust. I thought that my soul was coming to life whenever I would listen to certain music, or read certain books, or find romance. But it never stayed. The brilliance of the colors would always fade.
    I asked myself, Do I long for something beyond the songs I love, beyond the books I love, beyond my boyfriend or girlfriend? None of that seems to really satisfy me. Is the answer to end the longing? Or is the solution to go into the beyond itself and see if the light has anything to say about what is dark?
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    1 . Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold (London: Henry Frowde, 1906), 154–57.

9 The Reason I Couldn’t Kill Myself
    W hen Jazilyn came home