Thinking about suicide

I read Calum's post about suicide and was going to comment there but my thoughts got a little garbled so I decided to do a post here instead.

But even when I was pondering this while walking George, I was still finding it hard to get any shape to my thoughts. I considered analysing reasons for suicide and the whys and why nots - or maybe that should be who nots - but it's such an enormous topic, and one I think that has some basic principles that nearly everybody would go along with i.e. there must be controls and protection for the vulnerable and unstable.

But when I try to imagine how it would if I were terminally ill and in dreadful pain, if I weren't living as such but being kept alive, if I were a burden to those around me - however much they might protest otherwise - then i really don't know how I would feel.

And this is where if I start to explain I'll ramble so I won't. I'll just concentrate on one aspect, the religious angle.

I'm a Christian. I don't think I've ever received any teaching about suicide but I get the impression the general idea is that it is a sin against God - and in some people's eyes means the person wouldn't go to heaven but to hell. But I think it's very presumptuous of us to say who will and won't get to heaven. Or, more particularly, who won't.

I suppose the sin is doing one's own will rather than God's but I can cite examples of me doing my own will rather than God's most every day. I am human; I fail. One sin is no worse than another; suicide isn't an unforgivable sin.

But God asks that if we sin, we repent. So I suppose if we commit suicide, we don't have opportunity to confess and say sorry, so we go to hell?

I'm sorry but I cannot believe that my God, who loves me and gave his son for me, would give up on me at that point. He will have known my situation, the struggle, the battle, the guilt, the pain, the anguish. No, I refuse to believe that the loving God that I know would condemn me.