The whole case surrounding assisted suicide is back on the front pages as a result of a recent decision by the Law Lords in the UK to instruct the Director of Public Prosecutions to prepare new policy outlining when prosecutions would and would not take place in cases of assisted suicide in the United Kingdom. The Law Lords have set Britain on a slippery slope.
The majority of suicides assisted or not, has a tragic impact on the whole social network they leave behind. Relatives and friends of suicides often feel guilty and failures. Families rarely consist of one couple there are children, grandchildren, extended family, those who are bewildered and confused, some supporting others opposing. We know how much pain suicide can cause. It is too often a victory for despair over hope.

Perhaps there is not enough publicity for the positive and amazing contribution to life many disabled people display.

I know of a young man who was born without arms and legs, but has an absolute awesome international Christian ministry, impacting young people’s lives in quite a remarkable way

One of the greatest evangelistic hymns of all time was written by a woman who knew well the release and peace that come from confessing one's sins and failures to God.
"Just As I Am:' a hymn frequently sung at the close of evangelistic meetings, was written by Charlotte Elliott, who at one time had been very bitter with God about the circumstances in her life.
Charlotte was an invalid from her youth and deeply resented the constraints her handicap placed on her activities. In an emotional outburst on one occa­sion, she expressed those feelings to Dr. Cesar Malan, a minister visiting her home. He listened and was touched by her distress, but he insisted that her problems should not divert her attention from what she most needed to hear. He challenged her to turn her life over to God, to come to Him just as she was, with all her bitterness and anger.
She resented what seemed to be an almost callous attitude on his part, but God spoke to her through him, and she committed her life to the Christ. Each year on the anniversary of that decision, Dr. Malan wrote Charlotte a letter, encouraging her to continue to be strong in the faith. But even as a Christian she had doubts and struggles.
One particularly sore point was her inability to effectively get out and serve the Christ. At times she almost resented her brother's successful preaching and evangelistic ministry. She longed to be used of God herself, but she felt that her health and physical condition prevented it. Then in 1836, on the four­teenth anniversary of her conversion, while she was alone in the evening, the forty-seven-year-old Charlotte Elliott wrote her spiritual autobiography in verse. Here, in the prayer of confession, she poured out her feelings to God, ­feelings that countless individuals have identified with in the generations that followed. The third verse, perhaps more than the others, described her own pilgrimage.

Just as I am, though tossed about

With many a conflict, many a doubt,

Fighting’s and fears within, without,

O Lamb of God, I come! I come!

Many years later, when reflecting on the impact his sister made in penning this one hymn, the Reverend Henry Venn Elliott said, "In the course of a long ministry I hope I have been permitted to see some fruit for my labour, but I feel far more has been done by a single hymn of my sister’s “Just as I Am.”

 

·         Cripple him and you have Sir Walter Scott.

·        Strike him down with infantile paralysis, and he becomes a Franklin D. Roosevelt.

·         Burn him so severely in a schoolhouse fire that the doctors say he will never walk again, and you have a Glenn Cunningham, who set the world's record in 1934 for running a mile in four minutes and 6.7 seconds.

·         Deafen a genius composer, and you have a Ludwig van Beethoven.

·         Make him the first child to survive in a poor Italian family of eighteen

      children, and you have an Enrico Caruso.
 

·        Have him born of parents who survived a Nazi concentration camp, paralyze him from the waist down when he is four, and you have incomparable con­cert violinist, Itzhak Perlman.
 

·         Call him a slow learner, "retarded;' and write him off as uneducable, and you have an Albert Einstein.

 

History is littered with the incredible achievements of the disabled in our world, people who would never have given a second thought to “assisted suicide.” Through their achievements our lives have been blessed beyond measure, and the world is a better place because of their disability.

 

There is an argument against suicide that goes back to Plato, the early Greek philosopher, and it has always influenced Christian thinking. Simple because Christians believe the Bible and the Bible speaks of Man being created in the image of God. Sadly however, more people in the West do not have a religious belief in any god to whom they owe responsibility for their lives.

“Man,” as Aristotle, another Greek philosopher said, “is a ‘social animal’, and that suicide tears a hole in the network of human society.”  I would go further, and say that suicide denies the amazing love God has displayed for us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It denies the wonderful relationship a man and a woman can have with God through this amazing love, and it fails to comprehend the eternal dimension to an individual’s life.

 

“To the non believer there is no hope beyond life.

To the believer there is life beyond hope.”