Thinking about suicides

From time to time there are scandals in France about spates of suicides, usually in the big companies like EDF or Orange, but this time in the Paris police. People quite rightly try to work out why folks are driven to suicide, looking at conditions of work, the practice of moving people round the country at short notice, injustice in the workplace, etc...

I wonder whether we ought to look deeper. 

People are increasingly taught that life is an accident, that the world is going nowhere except destruction (the big crunch ?), that there's no story in history and that there's no meaning to any individual life.

Meanwhile people live in dysfunctional families with financial insecurity, sometimes health concerns and the promise of a late retirement made up of money worries. As one pastoral colleague says, "at least the food is good !" but what about when a nice cheese is no longer sufficient reward for the hassle of life ?

Well if life loses its savour and means nothing anyway - isn't it logical to end it ?

The Christian knows that life has meaning, my story is part of a bigger story that means that history has a meaning, a purpose and a goal. Makes life worth living ! 

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