Today I did something I have never done before. It was one of the scariest things I had ever done. In fact it was nightmarishly horrific. So much so that by the end of the day, when I went for my usual afternoon walk, I pulled the hood of my jacket low over my eyes as not to draw attention to the passers by and wept.

Not that appearances mattered because I doubled over and through my sobs gave myself a severe talking to. Why did I do it? If it was this terrifying and I was doing it, then surely it must be foolish, I rationalised. And yet it is something that most of the planet’s population does every day, every hour, minute and second without giving it a second bat of an eyelid. 

How do they do it?

Needless to say I realised my constitution is not at all as resilient as I thought, if resilience is even a necessary thing. What took me a week of deliberation and mental preparation to do, dissolved in these futile tears. The wasted anticipation saw my days leading up to this event plagued by indecision and turmoil. 

Why did I do it?

I wanted to know what it would feel like, what my thought patterns would be and what the road ahead might look like with this new mindset I chose to adopt, even if it was just for twenty-four hours. I could not even make it to ten.

It started in the morning when I refused to do what I’d done every morning since I was a kid – to pray to God and ask Him to guide me through my day, protect my children and make sure Jenni would still find new ways to love me. But this was the morning I point blank refused to engage my Maker to assist me in seeing any business blind spots that would come my way during the day. I prevented myself of petitioning Him for new tenants and for the first time ever, I avoided any reading material that would remind me of Him. That’s pretty much every coffee table and bookshelf around our house.

The day began as a chore. I immediately looked for ways to distract myself so I did not have to pray as I watched the BBC news website I frequented or some of the social texts of someone that needed healing. I was stung by this acute selfishness and tried to escape the thought that it would only be for a day, which in itself would defeat the purpose of this endeavour. Quickly I dismissed these rationalising thoughts as dumb. As the day got going I thought that although it was sunny outside, it seemed dark. I remember reading somewhere that when some of the African native tribes looked up at the sky they described the colour as black. I had always found this eerily odd, until today. It was as if the sky was made of iron. Perhaps this was indeed the colour of lonely.

I proceeded through the morning uploading and downloading bits of data from the cloud whilst I sat there in my own cloud of despair working from home. Dealing with my peers I had to constantly stop myself for caring what they did when the logged off at the end of the day. And though I still imagined them showing love and affection to their young children and spouses, I wondered what the point of their devotion was? Why were they so invested in their families? If God no longer existed and they eventually fell into a hole in the ground, what would they have really achieved during all their fidgets? Would they be satisfied leaving all their hard earned stuff to someone else? Although I regarded these interrogating thoughts with disdain, I felt I was making progress with this dismissive endeavour.

My despair however, grew as the day wore on. I perceived my own work wondering what I was doing and why I was doing it. Subsequently I got up many times during the day and just stared out the window up at the black sky, telling myself I was doing it for my family. Just because I abandoned purpose did not mean I had to thwart their purposes. This proved a good motivation to return to my desk. 

This was to be a day without scripture and yet I could not escape the words already tattooed inside my flesh. Solomon wrote in the book of Ecclesiastes that a “live dog is better than a dead lion” because while there was life there was hope. But Solomon was wrong because one has to have hope in something, which he poignantly does not divulge. I dismissed his so-called wisdom, which was surprisingly easy to do whilst simultaneously suppressing all hope I had in a better future, or that there was any after life. I decided right away that hope was the enemy and should always be written with the prefix or suffix “false”. Left with a single disconcerting thought that today I was deliberately oppressing myself, which meant if I was not to be branded a hypocrite I could no longer speak out the against oppression of others. I was going to be a hypocrite, come what may. Black lives don’t matter because my life don’t matter.

By lunch time I realised that for me to see the setting sun at all, I needed some coping mechanisms. With suicidal thoughts approaching the door like a Jehovah’s witness I quickly scribbled down my options and ignored the knocks. 

One. Distraction. I quickly convinced myself that as long as I could keep myself busy I would be fine making it to the end of the day. I became my own marketing department, that as long as I sold the worthiness of each project I invented right there on the spot, I would successfully thwart early death. The way I sold value to myself was that it was one stepping stone after another to some unknown elixir. Being a creative there was some joy in the prospect of randomness. Pleasure in the unknown. But most importantly I fervently decided I would ‘like’ whatever the final outcome was.

Two. I wanted options in case my strategy didn’t work so I tried to settle on this new found freedom by fondling the edges of depravity. I could look at whatever I wanted, do and say whatever I pleased, because it didn’t matter. I’m over-sharing I know but honestly I struggled with this, because my actions would undoubtedly hurt loved ones if it ever got out of hand and became an addiction. I did not anticipate the difficulty of this. It was going to take some time. If I made it through the day. So I put my mind to a close cousin of depravity – pleasure. I schemed some moments of happiness, convincing myself that its brevity was only an illusion if I neglected its perpetuity. Happily I jotted down some complex Masterchef recipes I wanted to try, some films I still wanted see and books I still wanted to read before I died. The final thing I scribbled down was another enemy I discovered that kept standing in my way as an uninvited sentry – the question “why?” Why did I want to see those films and read those books? I had no reasons and didn’t want to think up any which is is why, ‘Why’, became enemy number one. 

Repeatedly I circled it until I finally crossed it out.

I basked I the prospect of these little pleasures a while and frustratingly found that I could not give myself over to any of it whole and complete. Like Nietzsche I began ‘squinting at everything.’ Happiness was a peppy little bromide, it was like chewing gum, because sooner or later I’d have to spit it out. I convinced myself rather unconvincingly that the more I pursued pleasure the easier it would get. I would eventually short circuit my conscience that seemed to be filled with something that closely resembled residual guilt that prevented me from moving at the pace I wanted. Like those dreams where the harder I tried to run, the less gravity cooperated.

So I wrote down a third option.

Three. To try and numb myself. I convinced myself that I was a machine. A blunt instrument numb to any emotions. Ignoring my feelings and rationalising abilities was strangely liberating but did come with the requisite not to care about anything. This proved a scary tactic because not caring returned me to my motivation for depravity, which I still could not allow myself but it was on the horizon, glimmering it’s blinking taunts. So like a ping pong ball inside a pinball machine I returned to distraction to complete a neat little trinity that would be my safety net in this strategy towards apostasy.

By the late afternoon I signed off work and sat a while pleased that my strategy worked these last few hours. I was about to go on my walk and indulged one of my most endearing pleasures I could not yet abandon – thinking. More specifically my thoughts swirled around the idea of suicide. Why others had done so? Whether it would be difficult to do? I listed how many motivations for suicide I could come up with, kind like a brainstorm. It suddenly scared me how quickly I had succumbed to morbidity. As much as I wanted to stay away from scripture I could not wash it off. Like a fingerprint it would take some time to get tasered or lazered off. What lingered was how Jesus said that we should love each other like we love ourselves. I suddenly saw a loophole in his argument. How could I love others when I didn’t even LIKE myself? I realised rather shockingly that I never liked myself. I’ve been faking it all this time. I had spent a lifetime lying to myself, distracting myself from the fact that Stephen was not worth loving. 

The scales dropped from my eyes.

I didn’t want to dwell on scripture. Not today. I wanted an absence from what I had known my whole life but at the same time I did not want refute, offend, hurt, curse who I convinced myself today wasn’t there. I was anxious that I couldn’t give myself over completely to hopelessness, fatalism, atheism. It bothered me that I couldn’t and yet it would crush me more if I did. I suddenly knew, that I had to embrace an utter rebellion against God  to the point of cursing Him, if I was to give myself over to this strategy, even if it were for only an hour.

Yet I could not. Why not? What was the thing that prevented me?

This proved an insurmountable hurdle. This is where I stopped. I could not move forward because I LOVED. In such a short day I had come to loathe myself and yet I loved my God more. I could not tear myself away from Him and His goodness.

This was the reason I wept. Not because of pain, but because of love. What in hell was I doing? What was I trying to prove? Loving Him is like breathing air. I rushed back home and asked for forgiveness for embarking on such a foolish thing.

It’s been a few weeks since I wrote this and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Solomon’s book Ecclesiastes. Many believe that he was playing the part of someone who pretended to be faithless to prove a point. I am convinced this is not the case. Solomon was in despair because he did not yet know what Christ revealed centuries later – the resurrection. How could Solomon know?

The resurrection is the game changer. In microcosm it rejuvenated me at the end of a dark day. In macro we shall live again in the light of His love.

“Jesus wept.” The shortest verse in the Bible. Why did he weep? Because even though he knew he would rise he at that moment felt the utter despair we all experience in the amnesia of our resurrection, which preceded his rage that followed against our final mortal enemy. Is it not startling that Jesus was not the first to rise from death’s bed? Does Lazarus not foreshadow our own daily resurrections before our final redemption?

Never again shall I grieve Him. Never again shall I despise and scorn what makes life worth living.

His love.