“Stop! We are all here!”: Jamie Palmer

“Don’t kill yourself! We are all here!” Acts 16:28 (NLT) 

From the time I was young, about 12 or 13 years old—and up until very recently—I liked to consider suicide an option. I thought of dying as an escape from my daily mental pains, of which there are many. Often, I really hated what I was feeling or the way the world seemed to work. Life rarely seemed worth it to start with, so taking it away felt like an easy step to take for me when something big was going wrong.

Others consider suicide for different reasons. I recently wrote a research essay for an English class about the reasons and context around suicide in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The trend observed by research is that often, men take their lives because they feel like they have failed their families or failed vocationally. In the story of the jailer in Acts of the Apostles chapter 16, the jailer feels he has failed at his job after the earthquake loosens the prisoners’ shackles and throws open the doors. Perhaps he worries about the consequences or punishments he will face, and he feels his life might as well be over. Perhaps he feels that his honor and worth as a person have been compromised. Even though the earthquake was entirely out of his control, he still blames himself—or perhaps anticipates that he will be blamed by his supervisors.

But Paul interrupts this fearful thought pattern. When Paul alerts him that the prisoners are still there, the jailer asks them, “What must I do to be saved?” He is using the word saved in a very literal sense here, more literal than we often take it to mean in religious contexts. He realizes that these men have saved his life by not running away, and now they hold his future in their hands. He needs to be saved from punishment and the mental place into which he was just thrust, a place on the very edge of life where the nature and value of living really comes into question.

When Paul says, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, along with everyone in your household,” Jesus’s saving power and the greater meaning of life that He offers is put up against the narrow and punishing view of life that the world offers. The end of a vocation and human failures pale in comparison to the fullness of life in Christ Jesus. In the above verse, we also find out that the jailer has a house full of people that seem to care about him. They all end up hearing the word of God and believing, then rejoicing and being baptized with the jailer. For this family, these men of God who bring God’s word have literally saved their relative’s life, while also disseminating the hope of salvation to each one of them, though they may not fully understand it at first. The man who was so willing to kill himself because of something going (albeit, badly) wrong turns out to be surrounded by people who care for him. It hurts to think about, because this is my reality as well. 

Once the jailer is woken up from his narrow suicidal mindset by Paul, he decides to wash the prisoners’ wounds and care for them. When Paul says, “We are all here,” to get the desperate jailer’s attention before he kills himself, I think of my times of suicidal ideation. Often, “We are all here” is what I need to hear. Realizing that other people are in the world all around me, especially friends who care for me, has brought me out of the space of mental despair and into a hopeful place of external action. There are people whom I can help (in the story, the jailer washes their wounds) and who can help me (in the story, Paul baptizes the jailer and leads him and his whole household to salvation). The jailer is able to wash their wounds and relieve their pain, and they in the Holy Spirit are able to offer him Christ’s salvation, and his sins are washed away. What a beautiful give and take, well worth living for. 

There is so much more than our failures, even if the consequences of them seem inescapable. There is so much more than what a despairing person is able to see. There is caring for others and letting yourself be cared for, and there is God’s plan of hope and a future. Sometimes what we need to hear to escape a selfish or self-destructive thought pattern is “Stop! We are all here!”

Jamie is a junior at LA Tech and a second-year member of our Wesley Discipleship Team. With her servant’s heart and kind nature, she has been a breath of fresh air ever since becoming a part of our community. She is an extremely talented pianist and enjoys writing and drawing, as well. We’re very blessed to know her!