Dreamed of suicide starting at 14.

I would come down and open up the cabinet and I would just stare at the bullets. I would just look at them and I would wonder what it would be like. I wondered when I would finally have the guts to load a gun and pull the trigger. That dominated my thoughts for years, definitely starting in eighth grade, definitely all the way through High School. I remember writing suicide notes. They were thirty pages long. It was also in eighth grade that I decided that God did not exist. I had grown up Catholic but I got to a point where I was sick of blaming God for my problems and not having him respond at all. So, I made the decision to become an atheist. Becoming an atheist really became a badge of honor for me because it made me different from everybody else. That was a way for me to get attention. Someone who is dealing with depression and thoughts of suicide, attention was something that I really craved. I was fairly militant about it. I liked to engage people in conversations about it and debate them and make fun of them because they were pathetic and weak minded. I had settled on the age of twenty-seven. It was one of those things where I knew I was going to die when I was twenty-seven. But I didn’t exactly know why I knew. At the time I kind of associated with Kurt Cobain who had just recently died at the age of twenty-seven because of suicide. I knew that some others like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin had died at that age and I just assumed it had something to do with that. I moved to Colorado when I was twenty-four. My drinking, I started drinking when I was twenty-one. My drinking went out of control, went into overdrive at that point. My anxiety was so out of control that there were basic things, everyday things that I couldn’t do. I remember being so nervous about stopping and putting gas in my car that there were times that I would just run out of gas driving down the road and then have to walk there anyway. Interestingly enough, a good friend of mine, she was the same time period. She was invited to church by an acquaintance at her work. She started going to church with them and then a couple of weeks later she became a Christian. While I was dealing with this depression, I was dealing with anxiety. I had this really overwhelming feeling, every day I’d drive past this little church and feel like I needed to visit, which was a really weird thing for me because I was an atheist. I just remember sitting in that church, (it was the following week), feeling like the pastor was speaking directly to me. Like he knew exactly what was going on in my life. I said this prayer, first prayer in fifteen years. It was simply; “God I feel like you’re telling me I’m going to die this year.” I had just turned twenty-seven three days before that. That feeling of dying at twenty-seven was something that had never left me in the previous fifteen or so years. God answered that prayer in a very loud way. I have no proof of this or anything else. But it seemed to me that the way he answered was audible. It was so loud and it rang my ears, it felt like He was in the car with me. And God clearly said; “You are going to die this year.” I remember it scared me. It scared me because I thought; either I’m hearing voices or there is a God. And if there is a God and He is as powerful as He says He is and He just told me I’m going to die, as much as I have wanted that for the last fifteen years, I don’t know if I’m really prepared for that yet. I started hanging out with that couple quite a bit. We started a new beginner’s bible study and they started pouring into me. It was like God just opened up something in my mind that I had never considered before. I said; “Hey, do you guys remember that time that God told me that I was going to die?” They said; “Yeah, we’re pretty familiar with that story.” I said; “Well, He just showed me what that means. The person I have been for twenty-seven years is dead. I am now a new creation.” It was at that moment that I broke. It was at that moment that I made the decision to stop running because God grabbed my heart at that moment. I was moved and I was transformed because of what He did for me on the cross. The fact that He sent His son to die for me on the cross, was resurrected from the dead and my sins were paid for. All of those things meant a ton to me but what really grabbed my heart was knowing that when I was in middle school, when I was starting on that road with the depression, when God told me that I was going to die when I was twenty-seven, it meant that He was with me at that moment.