One of the best blogs I’ve recently discovered is John Pavlovitz’s blog “Stuff That Needs to Be Said.”  Pavlovitz is a Christian pastor, but he is different because he abhors what has become “conservatism” and is an active member of the resistance.  Like Jesus himself, he is compassionate and bravely defends all those who are vulnerable or “different,” including groups many fake Christians hate and fear, such as the LGBTQ population and Muslim immigrants.

Every day, Mr. Pavlovitz writes impassioned, brutally honest posts calling out the darkness and evil so many of us see in the new White House and in the greater society.   I love what he has to say and I love the way he writes.  But he doesn’t write exclusively about the political situation.   In this post, he calls out those who accuse Linkin Park’s frontman Chester Bennington as weak and selfish for killing himself on Friday — and in so doing, defends all people who have sunk into such despair and hopelessness that they think suicide is their only way out.

Please Stop Calling Suicide Victims “Weak” and “Selfish”

By John Pavlovitz

Soon after news broke about the death of Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington, amid the flood of condolences and the raw expressions of grief and shock—came the others; the ones who are never far, always hiding just out of view, ever ready to crawl from out from the cracks.

In moments like these, they surface to offer flippant, callous, armchair sermons about how selfish suicide is, about how cowardly the dead person was, about why he or she should have thought of their children, spouses, loved ones.
They add insult to fatal injury by heaping shame upon a suffering that had already proven to be too much to bear for someone.
These people somehow feel fine critiquing dead strangers, before they’ve even been buried.

I’ve come to realize that there is only one kind of person who says things like this about those who take their own lives: a person who has never been where Chester Bennington was in his final moments, or where Chris Cornell was, or where 121 people in the US are every single day—where many are in the seconds it takes for you to read these words. The people who say such things, are those who’ve never (because of mental illness or acute trauma or severe addiction), been pushed to the precipice of their very will to live. They are people who (fortunately for them) have the luxury of their ignorance, who’ve never walked through this unrivaled internal Hell and wanted nothing more than to get out.

Read the rest of John’s post here. 

And follow his amazing blog!