This is a late post today because after Church, I ate lunch, which was beans and cornbread that we posted about yesterday. After lunch, I was sitting down checking scores and was about to start writing when a wave of nausea and pain went through me, and I spent the next 6 hours between the toilet and bath. I have been battling Kidney Stones lately, and today, I lost that battle for a few hours. For some reason, when I have them, they tend to make me have bad gut reactions to the pain.

Either way, here I am a little broken, but I am kind of used to that feeling. As I was dying on the toilet earlier, I was reminded of the feeling of just wanting it all to stop. I have been there before and actually came close to just ending it all had it not been for a friend that randomly called me that night. I was not at this point today. It just reminded me of it when I was just wanting it all to end. This time, I just wanted it to end so I could go hang out with my babies and stop being in pain.

This thought has been with me since then of that pain that is not always physical but many times emotional or spiritual that those with PTSD feel whether it is a feeling of not being enough or a fear of being too broken for those you love. I know the feeling all too well. I have felt broken for years, especially since my accident. Do you know how it feels when you, as the man of the house, need your wife and oldest daughter to move most of your house into the trailer because you can’t grip anything. That feeling of failure when your wife is at work for you because you can’t work and the disability is not enough.

Before my accident, I struggled with self-esteem problems and actually went home most nights from work worried that I messed something up and stayed up for hours worrying. This didn’t matter my job because I’ve had a few since leaving the military. More than once, I felt like my family could live a better life, and I came very close to ending it many times.

A secret of mine that no one knows is that I almost ended it a day after my brother died. I was in the lowest place I had ever been, and my best friend in life had just died. I figured my family was already grieving, so it would just be like when you get hit with that extra jab on the way down. It was actually a friend calling that I hadn’t heard from in a while that snapped me back. To this day, I don’t even know if he knows how close to the end I was with the gun in my hand sitting in my truck in a parking lot.

I tell you all this to say I struggled heavily in my life with suicide and for the first time in forever the past year, I have not once actually considered it as a real possibility the past year. I have found peace in my life. It is one any of us can have, and all of us should look for it. Jesus said his Father would send a Comforter. That is the Holy Spirit he is the part of God that resides with us. I have known the Lord since being a young man, but I suppressed His voice in my life until not long ago. I blamed Him for loss and pain, I didn’t understand how a loving God let war and death happen. What I was not taking into consideration was man’s free will and how if God stopped all bad things from happening, then do we actually have free will?

I now commit my life to God, and since then, he has taken the thoughts of suicide and has thrown them from me and now I find that living for Him and working to be a better Christian has helped me to be a Broken man that wishes to help other Broken men.