When I think back to my night in the tree in 1993, I remember being in darkness. I remember standing there, with a bungee cord wrapped around my neck. I remember being scared, so scared. I stood there, ready to end my life, scared to do it. And also scared not to do it. I was so convinced that this was the right thing. So convinced that there was not a single thing in the world more noble for me to do. I was saving the people I love heartache and pain, by cutting the time short that I had to hurt them. I was saving people I never met heartache and pain, by making it impossible to meet them. I was saving people from myself.

I was so scared to go on. I was in darkness, feeling like I was the darkness. Like I was a vacuum that sucked the life and the joy out of everything I encountered. Like I was a fallen Midas, whose touch brought only death and misery.

I had little rational reason to believe any of this. Yet that’s where I was, standing in that tree, ready to jump.

I was in such darkness that I saw no hope of light. No hope in a future. Light is movement – it has a speed. It always travels. Photons of light move at 186,000 miles per second. But I saw no light, no movement, while in that tree. I saw stagnation. Cessation. Negation. Damnation. I saw death. Life is movement, and stagnation is death.

I saw chaos around me, a swirling anxiety of chaos. Dark clouds. Splintered branches. Wilted hopes. A nightmare dawn. I saw around me what was inside me, churning chaos and worry. Desperation. Misery. And guilt, guilt upon guilt upon guilt. I was getting what I deserved. This was my destiny – to end my life for the sake of others. And for my own sake –I couldn’t handle this guilt for one more day.

I stood there, on the branch, ready to attach the cord to the branch above. I was frozen, frightened that I might succeed – was this right? And frightened that I might fail – what would that mean? What would I do next?

I stood in darkness, in chaos, in fractured melancholy. Waiting. Waiting, because I had no energy left. I was talking, shouting, mumbling, muttering, praying, asking for a sign. Asking for strength. Begging for a spark. For a spark within me to light up, and give me the energy, the nerve, the guts, to do what I knew was right. Muttering and sputtering for a push, for the push that would drive me to push down the fears and push away the doubts and push myself off the branch. The last push of all.

The push never came.

What came, instead, was light.

And the light was the life of all people.

And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Sorry. Biblical reference. I couldn’t resist.

What came was light. And everything changed.

From that point forward, everything changed. I am who I am because the light came that night. The choices I have made, the places I have gone, the air I have breathed, all because of that light.

I saw a light that night, as I wrote in chapter eleven of Darkwater:

Near the horizon, a bright light suddenly shone. It was a beacon, a lighthouse shining through the darkness. From one perspective, it was probably a street light popping on, or someone’s garage door opening. All I saw from a physical standpoint was a light. Nothing more. Just a flash of brightness amid the dark.

But lately I don’t think I really saw it. I don’t think there really was a light, not in the sense of photons traveling from a street light to my retinas. I no longer think there was a street light, or a garage door. I don’t believe I saw a light. I just think that was the best way I knew to explain it.

Rather, I experienced the presence of God, and the best way my brain knew how to interpret it was, “I saw a light.”

I experienced the presence of God, and everything changed. In the moment between one beat of my heart and the next, the grace of God enveloped me.

My blood was cleansed. My bones were knit. My neurons grew and my synapses fired for the first time. My soul was lit on fire. My whole life, from birth to death, was enveloped in that instant. That singular heartbeat, that holy eyeblink, that moment of light, was everything.

I always go back to that moment. I think back, and try to recreate it in my mind. I have returned to that park numerous times, and I have never once found the tree I climbed. It’s as though it wasn’t real, as though it’s just a story I’ve told so many times it’s become real. It’s a narrative. It’s my life’s narrative. Who am I? I’m the guy who was up the tree in 1993. Who am I? The depressed pastor. Who am I? The one who lives in nostalgia, lives in his own past, and finds there both mental illness and faith in God.

In that tree in 1993 is the moment it happened. That’s the moment that is sent forward and backward through my own life – that moment was the moment of my birth, the moment of my baptism, the moment of my ordination as who I am. Who I am becoming. Who I have always been becoming. That was the moment I encountered the one who was, and who is, and who is to come. (Biblical reference again. Not sorry for that one.) And through that encounter, that was the moment I became who I was, who I am, and who I will be.

It’s so hard to talk about this. It’s so hard to find the words. I used to think that was the moment I was saved from killing myself. That still feels true, but it feels like there’s so much more. It feels like there are dimensions there in that moment I’m only starting to see now. There is so much more there, and I believe that what I’m writing here is only a facet of it. I believe I have always been writing about it, and I always will.

Whenever I have written about the pain of depression, it’s grown from the pain I brought into that moment. Even the times I wrote about it before 1993. Whenever I have written about the love of God, it’s grown from the grace that God brought into that moment. Every sermon I have preached, every patient word I’ve spoken, has all flowed from that moment of grace. Even the ones from before 1993.

That’s the thing that makes this sound like science fiction, and it’s okay if you don’t understand, or if you don’t believe me. It’s okay. I don’t understand it myself. But it feels right now as though time wasn’t linear in that moment, that somehow the presence of the eternal God caused that moment to send ripples up and down my lifetime. Both into the past and the future. If feels as though God has been in my life forever thanks to that moment.

That night in the tree in 1993 was, and is, and will be the moment I glimpsed eternity.

Image by 👀 Mabel Amber, who will one day from Pixabay