How It Began

Just as one comes to understand the true nature of something, so in my youth, when I was 22 or 23, I felt as though I had grasped the true nature of this world and had come to hate it. Even though I had no knowledge of God, I believed that a power existed. When I lay down in my bed, exhausted, I began to speak with God within myself, and I said: “My God, if You exist and if it was You who gave me this life, please take it back from me, I do not want it. I know that as long as I live, only bitter events await me. The days on which I truly laugh can perhaps be counted on one hand. Please, when I sleep in my bed now, let me never wake again. I am not a good person, I have many faults and evil sides. I know these too. Did You not give us this life as a gift? Yet I do not want it. And so that I may not suffer, take it from me without letting me feel it.”

I no longer had any purpose in this world. Eating, drinking, saving up, building, gathering, marrying—these alone could not be a purpose. For humanity had always done these things and yet had never been happy. All the troubles that are endured, the oppressions, the wickedness, the jealousies, the wars, the hatreds—all of them were for these things. In short, the saying “the whole world revolves around money and pleasure” was not spoken in vain. It was ugly, repulsive, but the truth lying beneath it described the state humanity was in. These were things that had been tried by so many generations over thousands of years. Was I going to be the one to change them! But one thing threw me into doubt. If I had now become this purposeless, if nothing the world offered me held any interest, and if for these reasons death seemed to me the best of paths, then perhaps this was so only in my own eyes. Besides, was there not something in this world that I did not know, but which, once I knew it, would make me think quite differently? Was I the only wise one who wished to die and be delivered? For if God existed, did He not know us? Did God create us only to suffer and to hear our pleas to die by His hand? Even though such questions did not pass through my mind back then quite so clearly, I believed that there might be an open door somewhere in my thoughts, and that at the very least God would know of it. After all, if I was asking Him for death, and if He was God, could He not also bring about deliverance?

But why should I be delivered? My trouble was not, after all, like some illness, a bodily affliction, imprisonment, or the death of those I dearly loved. Of course, at a young age I was under very great burdens that were hard to bear. We had to live in a foreign country, as persons of a country that was not at all loved. Marriages, then separations, discord, trying to live between two countries, going to school, and in the end writhing beneath a debt as large as a mountain. Were these worth the troubles that had to be endured? For what should I struggle on? Was this all that life meant?

In my daydreams, it was as though the world lay before me, and I had attained whatever there was to be attained, yet in the end I had never been able to be happy. When I lay down, I would sink into daydreams. Whatever a person can imagine, those very things I came to possess. But as I drifted into these daydreams, I had slowly begun to grow realistic. Even in my dreams, problems kept arising. Although I could do everything I wanted, even there those problems could not be solved. Of course, these dreams were not like the dreams of a three-year-old child. In truth, they were things I wanted to attain and to do in the future. Do we not all first dream of the thing we wish to possess? Mine was exactly the same. Sometimes, in order to escape the foreign country where we were not loved, I would strive to turn the country we had come from into a paradise; at other times I would think of a car I wanted to own, or a girl I liked, or of possessing an intelligence no one else had. Again in my dreams, while my enemies melted away before me, I could give everything to those I loved. And yet neither I nor those in my dreams were happy.

I had set myself the goal of becoming very rich, of becoming the richest man in the world. But in reality the rich were not happy. They openly confessed this themselves. Those few of the world’s wealthy whose lives I had read about were sincere when they said, “Give me happiness, and I will give all that I have.” Most of the heroin and drug problems came from the children of these rich families. I saw that those who had everything were more unhappy than those who had nothing. What purpose, then, could there be for me anymore? I was very pessimistic, and now there was only death in my mind. Still, thinking that I could not know everything, at the end of my prayer to God I fell asleep saying: “If You do not kill me, if You do not take my life, then please change my life.”

Within me there was the feeling that there certainly existed someone who was listening to me. And this was God. I was so certain I would die that when I woke in the morning I was greatly astonished at why I had not died, but then at once I rejoiced. For I said, “Then my life is going to change.” I could not think about how it would happen or when it would happen. For God, everything was possible. He could change my life. Believing this, I went to work that morning.