AN SOS ONE NIGHT

by Géraldine Gaboyard—Joinville, France

Last week I had dinner with a friend I've known since elementary school. She had just come back from a weekend in London, and was telling me all about the trips she wanted to take.

I was glad to hear her talk this way because her life hadn't always been so happy, especially at the end of junior high school. Back then, she would often come over to see me when she was depressed. And I'd try to cheer her up.

She was the oldest in a family of six children, and she was in charge of all her brothers and sisters — from taking them to school to cooking for them. She also had to take care of the family's paperwork, because her parents were Cambodian immigrants and spoke very little French. Her schoolwork always had to come last. On top of all this, her father beat her, her boyfriend had just left her, and she had serious problems with neighborhood gangs.

It seemed I was the only friend she trusted enough to talk to about her troubles.

“When we hung up she was much calmer.”

I especially remember the night she called me just before I was leaving on vacation. She was crying, and it was difficult to calm her down. She kept saying that she was going to commit suicide and that there was no other solution to her problems. I was in a total panic. I was 14, and had a pretty problem-free life. I figured anything I said would sound hollow in the face of everything she was up against. But I felt as if her life depended on what I might come up with to say to her.

So as I was talking, I asked God to give me the right words, to give me the ideas that would help her. I wanted her to feel that she was surrounded by God's love and that she wasn't helpless. We stayed on the phone for two hours. When we hung up she was much calmer.

The next day I left for vacation, and I was worrying about having left her alone. So each time I felt afraid I prayed to know that I wasn't her only support. God was. She wasn't abandoned. My friend, who was always doing so many good things for her family, couldn't be deprived of feeling God's love.

A long time later, she told me she had tried to commit suicide once before by injecting herself with a massive dose of sedatives. She said she would have tried again that night if I hadn't been there to help her. She thanked me often for helping her, and in the months that followed. It's been ten years since this all happened, and she's still one of my closest friends.

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