Suicidal thoughts are just like all other thoughts people have in visualizing or “pre-thinking” how to attain some desire they find in themselves.
Desires can be for some “good thing” that seems missing or for escape from some “bad thing” that seems to be impending (or perhaps inevitable).
If your desire is hunger, your pre-thinking may take the form of seeing yourself driving to the convenience store and getting junk food or (hopefully) something better suited to fueling your body. If your desire is sensual satisfaction, your pre-thinking may take the form of visualizing yourself looking at pornography, or more. If your desire is to be free from the suffering you see as never ending, the loneliness, etc., your pre-thinking may be visualizations of how to take your life, to stop the pains you know will recur.
This “pre-thinking”, these thoughts and visualizations that almost automatically happen, are a kind of “misunderstanding” of why we have “desires”.
Our desires are not for us to fulfill, but for prompting us to make requests to God. The “pre-thinking” is what we do if we do not know that “all good things come down from above from the Father of lights” (James 1).
James says to count it all joy when we are “tested”, when we have desires. That is the place to learn to turn to God and persevere in turning to God, and by doing that to defuse the pre-thinking. We are “tested” when in the course of our “desires” (part of what God created us with), we are “lured and enticed” to do something for ourselves, to accomplish our own satisfaction, rather than not being deceived and not remembering that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above”.
St. Paul calls this “pre-thinking” the “Flesh’s Forethought” in Romans 13, saying not to do this forethought of the flesh, but instead to clothe oneself in the Lord Jesus, who, when he had desire (hunger) in the desert, did not do the “pre-thinking” or “forethought” suggested by Satan, but said he lived by the Word proceeding from the mouth of God.
When anyone desiring anything realizes they are doing the mental visualizations of how they can satisfy their desires for themselves, it is time to stop and pray for God to provide, and then to start working at the real tasks they are supposed to be focusing their thoughts on, to focus on doing their work in the world, with the stomach still growling from the desire.
There is a Word proceeding from the Mouth of God (by which Jesus lived). While Jesus was hungry in the desert, God was saying to his Angels, “Go. Minister to my Son. Give him food to satisfy his hunger”. Jesus relied on God and not on pre-thinking, not on forethought, “Then the devil leaves him, and behold, angels came and ministered to him.”
(if Jesus had turned stones to bread, eaten, and then moved on, the angels would have come but found no one to minister to, since Jesus would have already walked away with rocks (former rocks) in his stomach)
God is speaking the fulfillment of our desires, for your friend, for you, for us, so we must not do the forethought, the pre-thinking, and miss the real satisfaction. It is an illusion, a deception, our forethought of the flesh. We must end the inner self-dialog and enter a dialog with God (which is prayer). Check out this - Brother Lawrence on the Practice of the Presence of God (
ccel.org/ccel/lawrence/practice ) - a quick read (choose “Read Online” at bottom) for insight in praying always (which might be termed “chronically praying”).
