“. . .though he stumble, he will not fall, 

for the LORD upholds him with his hand.”

 At the turn of the 20^th century, what Willa Cather experienced as a child out on the Great Plains, surrounded as she was by a weave of ethnics, recent immigrants all, was something she never forgot and always celebrated.  My Antonia, a great pioneer novel, has given us one of the most powerful women characters in American literature, Antonia Shimerda, whose strength of character and purpose out on those broad plains simply will not be defeated.

 And hers was not an easy life.  When she was still a girl, her father, an educated musician in his native Bohemia and someone clearly not fashioned for opening rugged prairie, takes his own life one cold night in his first winter as an American.  Because he was a suicide, the local cemeteries wouldn’t take the body; the most unpardonable sin at the time, it seems, was the despair he suffered, the abandonment of hope itself, which is to say, by those old religious calculations, the abandonment of faith.  Mr. Shimerda, who shot himself in the barn, was buried in the road.

Willa Cather frequently drew her stories from her own experiences, and if you’re ever blessed to visit Red Cloud, Nebraska, where she grew up, you can follow dusty roads through the bleak, unforgiving landscape she loved, roads which pass places where she found some of her stories. 

 Mr. Shimerda had a prototype on the land west of Red Cloud, and on one of those roads you can actually drive over the intersection where an anguished suicide, forbidden a place in the local cemeteries, was once buried, very much alone. Driving through that intersection is eerie, even though the man’s remains have long since been removed and reinterred.

Today, suicides are not refused burial in any local cemeteries that I know of, and, for that, all of us should be wonderfully thankful.  I can not sympathize a whit with those who kept Mr. Shimerda’s body out of proper burial, but when I read a verse like this—from David—I can at least understand something of their fear, for fear is what it was, I’m sure. To take one’s own life is to reject the eternal truth of what David says:  “though he stumble, he will not fall, for the Lord upholds him with his hand.” 

Even though, out here on the Plains, we have come a long way from Mr. Shimerda’s—and others’—horrific rejections, we don’t know quite what to do with those among us who depart on their own. We don’t know what to do with them, in part, because we do know—those of us who are believers—that the act of suicide defies the eternal hope of this line and so many others from the Word of God almighty.

Not long ago, it happened again, in a community not far away.  I didn’t know the man, never met him, but I know his family and I know of their profound grief.  Since it happened, no one has said much about it because, well, there’s not much to be said. By all accounts, he was a believer. And he suffered, suffered badly, within, for the past several years. I know very little else. But I know--as we all do--the horrific toll darkness within can register.

What I do know—what I can believe because I know this much of the Almighty—is that he alone will judge the living and the dead. 

And I trust Him and his promises.  I trust he will do what he has always done and promises he will do forever—he will love. He is love.