If a hotline number is advertised, one expects there will be a response when the number is dialled. But often, the demand exceeds the capacity to respond. If the hotline is just an easy-to-access number for help with queries about eradicating rodents or termites, that’s one thing. If you don’t get an answer, you can try again later. But if you have an urgent cry for help and there is no answer, that’s a very serious matter.
It was reported recently that one in six suicide hotline calls go unanswered in the USA. Over a five-year period, 1.5 million of 9.2 million calls were either abandoned by the caller or disconnected before a counsellor was available to respond. (1)
“Storm Glassheart, 25 years old, said she called the national crisis line as a last resort in 2018 after trying two local crisis lines in Arizona. She said she waited on hold for hours. Then, she said, the call disconnected.
“I followed all the steps. Like, nothing is working,” Ms. Glassheart recalled thinking. “So that must mean that I should die.”
She tried to kill herself and woke up the next day in a hospital after a friend found her passed out.” (2)
The reality is, the call demand for critical mental health interventions increased 92% from 2016 to 2021. An exponential increase. A staggering need. Thankfully, at the time of this post, an infusion of funding provides for a substantial increase in emergency mental health counselling capacity across the States. As well, the USA hotline number has been reduced from a hard-to-remember ten-digit phone number to one three-digit number – 988, effective Saturday, July 18, 2022.
This post is not about mental health or suicide prevention; it is about spiritual health and calls for spiritual help and interventions. However, before we go to that subject, we want to urge any reader dealing with a mental health crisis to immediately reach out to a friend or family member or a crisis intervention hotline. Here is some helpful information:
In contrast to overloaded call lines and urgent calls being dropped or someone experiencing a network disconnection, the Bible repeatedly assures us that God is always available to respond to the urgent cries of someone who is spiritually lost.
Often people call out to God during sickness or some major crisis they are experiencing. God, in His sovereign and gracious ways, may answer such prayers and calls of distress, but there is something cheap about such calls. Too often, people only call on God as a fixer of some immediate problem or to intervene in some precarious predicament – but their interest in God stops there. When the black cloud has passed, and the sky returns to blue, their interest in God subsides or vanishes until their next crisis.
But there is a crisis situation to which God always responds and has, in fact, joyfully obligated Himself to always respond. When a person faces their own alienation and distance from God because of their own sin – when they realize their sins will cause them to perish eternally – when that reality grips their hearts and they call out to God to be rescued from their sins, God hears that crisis call and responds swiftly. He never drops a call. He never hangs up or puts a lost sinner on hold.
When a person genuinely repents of their sin and cries out to God for salvation and forgiveness – God hears and God saves them. Such a call never goes unanswered by God – regardless of who the caller is.
This promise of a prompt saving intervention on God’s part is recorded more than once in the Bible.
For there is no distinction… the same Lord is Lord of all, and is rich unto all that call upon him: for, whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Romans 10:12-13
Did you get that? There is no discrimination or distinctions made by God when it comes to the crisis call about sin. The Bible verse says – whoever or everyone who calls!
Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Romans 10:13
Perhaps you have been let down by a friend you thought might help you. Maybe they hung up on you or joined others who are against you. Maybe you have suffered the pain of rejection.
Jesus said: “Whoever comes to me, I will never cast out.” John 6:37
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted; He rescues those whose spirits are crushed. Psalm 34:18
This poor man called, and the LORD heard him; he saved him out of all his troubles. Psalm 34:6
Jesus told a poignant story of two men – one was very religious and the other was very aware of his own sin. They both prayed. In contrast to the religious man who recited all his own personal credits in his prayer, the other man knew what the religious man did not know – a sinner (religious or otherwise) has nothing to brag about. With his head humbly bowed, the sinner cried out: “God be merciful to me the sinner.” Jesus said it was only the one who admitted he was a sinner who went home justified and right with God. Read this story in Luke 18:10-14.
Regardless of how a person has used God or regarded God in the past, God has made the first move to demonstrate His own amazing love for them – whether they ever reciprocate by loving Him in return or not.
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:8
Read the Gospel of John 3:16 for a very concise statement on God’s love for you. Read the Gospel of John chapters 18 & 19 for a detailed account of the death Christ was willing to die for our sins – even when we were still sinners and enemies towards Him in our hearts.
Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Romans 10:13
Will you call today?
Read it on this website: Son of Sam – David Berkowitz – 45 Years Later
Sources:
- WSJ, July 12, 2022, A3 “One in Six Suicide Hotline Calls Isn’t Answered.”
- ibid.