BIBLE READING: Judges 16:23-31
TEXT: Samson said, ‘Let me die with the Philistines! Th en he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Th us he killed many more when he died than while he lived. (Judges 16:30)
In December 1856 Hugh Miller, a church leader in Scotland, a man of science and a great author, got out of bed and wrote this message to his wife:
“My brain burns. I must have walked and a fearful dream rises upon me. I cannot bear the horrible thought. God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon me. Dearest Lydia, dear children farewell. My brain burns as the recollection grows, my dear wife farewell. Hugh Miller.”
Hugh Miller – The Christian Radical
He then went and shot himself. To this day people have speculated as to why. He was clearly in great agony – mentally and possibly physically. What happens to Christians who do that? I don’t need to go back to the 19th Century, or to read about suicides in other countries, to know that this is still an issue today.
In my years as a minister, I have known several Christians who have committed suicide. The beautiful, intelligent young student who had everything going for her; the middle-aged family man; the minister whose life and ministry went horribly wrong. Even to think about these is heart-breaking. Suicide is a dreadful thing. It may seem like a good solution to the person who is so depressed that they do not think life worth living, but the problem is that they are not always thinking straight. Indeed in some cases, they may not be thinking at all. They forget that they are usually leaving behind a people and a community who will be distraught and in despair at their death. It’s a sin against the community. But they also forget that it is God alone who has the right to take someone’s life.
We do not normally have the right to take our own life. So yes – it is a sin. It is also a terrible testimony to the world. I recall one famous existentialist philosopher saying that he could not live consistently with his philosophy of despair because it would mean he would have to commit suicide. The trouble with a Christian who commits suicide is that it is inconsistent with our belief in the goodness, forgiveness and sovereignty of God.
But whilst we acknowledge that it is a sin against ourselves, the community and God, why would that mean we don’t go to heaven? I wonder where this idea comes from. Is it a residue of a belief that those who die with unconfessed sin are not forgiven? Is it because it is considered a ‘mortal’ or unforgivable sin? That is certainly not what the Bible teaches. In today’s passage, we read of a suicide in the Bible. Samson by pulling down the temple of the pagans upon himself did kill himself – as well as many of Israel’s enemies. I suppose that is one example where suicide is at least understandable if not excused. Giving our lives for others might also be considered a good form of suicide.
But what about those who kill themselves out of despair or to get away from the fears, darkness, guilt and problems they face? Are they committing a sin that cannot be forgiven? We need to remember that Jesus died for all our sins, past, present and future. When we become Christians, Jesus doesn’t say; ‘that’s fine. That’s the slate wiped clean. Now you had better be sure you don’t sin anymore because there is nothing more I can do for you”. If that were the case we would all be in deep trouble!
None of us are in the position where we can look back on the life of Hugh Miller and say ‘this is why he committed suicide’. We don’t know. And when we don’t know about such personal and deep matters, we have even more reason to keep silent. We cannot judge. All we must do is seek to help those who are left and try to understand and encourage those who are thinking of suicide to realize that their lives are worth living. I don’t think that the Christians I have known who have committed suicide are excluded from heaven. The blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin – including suicide. They are with Christ. Purified, holy and happy. Their minds and bodies tortured no more. For the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd; ‘he will lead them to springs of living water.’ ‘And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. (Revelation 7:17)
CONSIDER: How would you help someone who confided in you that they had suicidal thoughts? What would you do if you felt like killing yourself? Who could you speak to?
RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING: Gary Nelson – A Relentless Hope – Surviving the Storm of Teen Depression
PRAYER: Lord Jesus, there is no pit so deep, that you have not been there already. You cried out in the depths of despair ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? You understand. You know. Lord help us when we struggle with such dark despair. Help our friends and family. And may we always look to you to lift us out of the pit. Amen.
Animals in Heaven – Do Dogs Go To Heaven? A.S.K 20
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If only God has the right to take our lives then don’t you think he’s quite clearly off the ball or has something against people who find this present world a difficult place to survive in. And why has he created so many corrupt, grotesquely rich people since the last war?
You have a misunderstanding both about the nature of God and of humanity. He doesn’t go round killing humans as though it were some kind of computer game. And He hasn’t ‘created so many, corrupt, grotesquely rich people.
David thank you for this reflection.
When I was 35 my 30-year-old brother committed suicide.
He had fought with demons for most of his life.
It is a long story and I have indeed written several posts about it a few years back.
Being raised in the Episcopal Church, I had always felt that suicide was the ultimate slap in the face to God…the taking of the gift of life and throwing it back in His face…rejecting what He had given us.
I felt it a mortal sin.
Then years later I had a student to commit suicide.
His family was a Christian family but he had been a troubled young man who had fought addiction on and off. The youngest of 5 children.
I had caught him huffing glue in class.
He was in turn expelled and his family sent him to rehab.
A few months later, he killed himself.
At the time, I had a friend whose husband was a minister.
He told me that at that moment between life and death we have no way of knowing about that personal meeting between God and man…
might God not extend that grace even then…during that time of “transition”??
We can’t say definitively.
So I then grew to believe that God can be and will be with those who take their own lives…but perhaps even then, the choice to accept or not to accept also still remains.
God’s grace does cover a wealth of sin—thank Goodness!!!
As somebody who still carries a burden of grief as a result of my mother’s suicide 45 years ago, I can only say that I have entrusted her to God’s mercy. That was all that I could do. As a priest said to me at the time, if we feel sadness and compassion when we hear of the suicide of a woman like my mother, a widow who had raised 7 children in poverty, how much greater is God’s compassion; bearing in mind that God knows every detail of that person’s life?
Thank you for this encouraging article.
My own conviction is that when someone commits suicide it does not “necessarily” mean that there is no hope for their soul. God’s hand is mighty to save. However, one never knows another person really. Only God knows for sure, and I leave that in His hands.
The problem I have is deciding how best to comfort those who mourn. Many well meaning individuals will say something like “brother so-and-so has gone to be with the Lord”. But how does one know this? However well meaning these sentiments are, the heinous nature of that person’s final act (to murder an image bearer of God) certainly justifies a measure of doubt and causes me to back away from making such affirmations. These are ugly situations to be in. I can only cling more tenaciously to God in trust of His sovereignty and goodness.
Thank you so much for this encouraging article. It is really helpful to me.
I am actually from Hobart, Tasmania and I know you are down here at the moment.
I am a long-time reader.
I was friends with people involved in a bad case many years ago now. It involved a local girl, Kristy Corbett, who treated her boyfriend badly and he had a mental breakdown as a result. The case was studied and documented in Wikipedia years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Australia#List_of_notable_cases
Kristy Corbett left her partner, a young Christian who by all accounts, sincerely loved her, to join the RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force). Corbett abruptly moved interstate when accepted into the RAAF without even bothering to say goodbye to him, leave a contact address or phone number or anything. This was during the Iraq invasion by the way, so she willing volunteered to join the military when facts about the illegal invasion were known. When he eventually caught up with her, she treated him with disdain and cut contact again.
Kristy Corbett was not a Christian, of course, and my understanding is a Christian should only fate/marry another Christian. Is that correct? That is how “Be not unequally yoked” ( and other verses) are normally interpreted isn’t it? That much guilt at least lies with her Christian boyfriend then. 🙁 Anyway, Kristy Corbett was very callous by now – she had changed a lot – and would not even give him a chance. She knew her earlier actions had made him mentally unwell with anxiety/depression but she would not help him, visit him or even maintain contact with him. In their brief correspondence, Corbett’s boyfriend had been desperate to reconcile with her and also prick her conscience about joining the RAAF with regard to the Iraq invasion and civilian casualties, to no avail. Kristy Corbett had hardened her heart. What he had said has now been vindicated by the way, with revelations of the RAAF’s role in the phosphorous bombing of Fallujah and recent ABC reports of alleged war crimes by Australian Army SAS death squads.
Anyway, Kristy Corbett cut all contact for the second time which led to the tragic events that followed. She was later investigated but not charged with anything. I don’t believe the police even questioned her.
I believe victims do go to heaven if they are Christian. God is compassionate and takes into account mental illness. Kristy Corbett’s boyfriend loved her too much and was too distraught at her callousness and lack of empathy and willingness to become involved in the military, especially at such a notorious time. I know he prayed a lot for her but these prayers were seemingly never answered. Kristy Corbett did not soften her heart and become a Christian as far as we know, she destroyed the life of the person who loved her and has possibly destroyed the lives of other people depending on her role in the RAAF and what theatres of war she has visited. All of this through her pure selfishness.
All in all an incredibly sad story that continues to trouble me whenever I think about it, especially with regard to the unanswered prayers regarding Kristy’s conversion which would have potentially mitigated so much suffering.
Thank you once again and I am grateful for your ministry.
I should add some more points:. We eventually learned that the reason why Kristy Corbett left our friend, the guy who loved her, was because “he wasn’t assertive enough”. That, I think, shows her immaturity and selfishness, basically expecting him to change his whole Natural personality evenwhen she knew he had already become mentally ill after her abandonment of him.
However, despite/because of the harm she caused my friend (whose name I have deliberately omitted so as not to cause hurt to his family) and despite/because of the enormous suffering she and her RAAF friends have caused to innocent civilian peasants in Iraq and Afghanistan through their bombing, we must pray for Kristy Corbett.
Dear Father in Heaven
You know Kristy’s heart and what she has done. Please soften her heart and make her repent of her selfishness which has led to so much tragedy and suffering. Please turn her so that she will give her life to Christ. Make her realise live is self-sacrificing, not selfish. Make her repent of whatever role she has had in the dismemberment of Iraq/Afghanistan and the enormous ongoing suffering on innocent civilians there, so many of whom are women and children and simple farmers. May the Muslims in those lands too come to know Christ and not be deterred from Christianity by the alleged war crimes of Australian forces, more and more of which have come to light in the media in recent days.
May Kristy mature and repent of her past and start afresh by making amends. May she come to know true forgiveness comes only from Christ. May she embrace the religion she turned her nose up at in her youth and come to see the world in a godly light and grow in empathy towards others. Soften her heart where it was once so hard. May she do a U-turn and live as a devout Christian and reconcile with the ghosts of her past to make amends for her selfish, shallow youthful actions.
We pray fervently that she may be born again and reconciled to You and to those she has hurt.
In the name of Jesus our Lord,
Amen
There are so many sad stories on here I will pray for you all.
John, I lived in Hobart at one stage and my son is about the same age as Kristy Corbett so I asked if he knew of her and he did. He remembered her from Elizabeth College in North Hobart (not a surprise since it is such a big college.) He did not know her well but apparently she was suspended at on stage for misconduct, so I guess she was always an immature troublemaker. She was close friends with another girl named Kelly-Anne Bone. Other than that, he did not know much about her. I am so sad to hear about how she treated the guy who loved her later on. So selfish.
I am fortunate in that no one close to me has committed suicides, though some associates have.
Yes, a Christian should definitely only marry another Christian. It is found in multiple places in scripture as you note.
I am strongly anti-military and, as I was saying elsewhere on this site just recently, I am particularly opposed to women in the military. It sounds like Kristy Corbett is the end result of extreme feminism, running off to join the air force and willingly participating in the rape of Iraq while not even saying goodbye to her boyfriend. I can well understand how devastated he must have been and how such events spiralled out of control when she rejected him the second time. What a selfish, unfeminine, unladylike woman Kristy must be! 🙁
With regard to Fallujah, apparently the phosphorous bombs were the same kind as the incendiary bombs used in the Dresden bombing in WW2, another alleged war crime. I cannot find it now but there was once an official RAAF website (ending in .gov.au) for a squadron or whatever actually *boasting* about how that particular squadron had taken part in the “legendary raid on Dresden”. There was no admission on the site about the massive civilian death toll or about how controversial, at best, the raid was. They were relishing their involvement in it.
Having actually been fortunate enough to have been to Dresden myself, it is hard to imagine the death and destruction wrought on such a city of lovely, kind people and such rich culture, including two major Lutheran churches (I was fortunate enough to worship in one, the Kreuzkirche, which the famous Dresden Boys’ Choir calls home. It was completely burnt out in the raid. The rail yards, which were the alleged target of the raid, are actually on the other side of the Elbe River from the city centre, so that was definitely just a flimsy excuse for the terror bombing.
Likewise, the RAAF participated in the annhilation of Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia.
Even today, the RAAF defends the likes of Bomber Harris, as per this article:
https://www.460squadronraaf.com/accolades/polemic.html
I have no time at all for the RAAF on the basis of these instances. At least armies are face-to-face with their enemies, not dropping bombs on civilians from on high. The fact that the same terror tactics have persisted from Dresden to Fsllujah with no remorse from the air force, despite the enormous public outcry is telling. It is interesting to learn just what kind of person joins the air force, in the person of Kristy Corbett and her background.
Let us all pray that Kristy Corbett will turn to Christ one day and find forgiveness for her actions and be saved.
Thanks for your kind, helpful words, Jean. Yes, it is the same Kristy Corbett who attended Elizabeth College.
It is unbelievable that Kristy Corbett would just disappear interstate without even saying goodbye to him. At no stage did Kristy ever confide in him that she was considering joining the RAAF. No wonder she gave him anxiety/depression.
When he eventually found out her contact email and wrote to her asking what had happened, she was extremely indifferent, even when he told her about his mental state. She basically said, “If I am ever in town and have a spare hour, I might have a coffee with you” and, “I have met a guy and we will soon be living together” etc. A third party friend begged her just to visit him because she could see how Kristy was treating her and to at least stay in touch with him. It was to this third party that Kristy revealed that she had left him because he was “not assertive enough”.
At the same time as wanting him to be more assertive, Kristy had undermined his self esteem firstly by just disappearing into thin air suddenly to join the RAAF with absolutely no warning and then in these belittling emails.
Despite the third party’s warnings to stay in contact with him and at least talk through their differences and reconcile, Kristy Corbett continued to undermine him and then abruptly cut contact, leading to the tragic events that followed.
I think her whole attitude typifies the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian. The bullying, the callousness, the condescension, the selfish self-absorption, the boasting about her intention to commit fornication with another man, etc.
Kristy knew what effect her emails and then abruptly disappearing for a second time were doing to her friend. She had plenty of warning yet she did them anyway. If she treats a loyal friend like this, no wonder she can join an organisation devoted to killing people. She is culpable and has blood on her hands.
Honestly, the Bible verse that gives me the most comfortable out of this whole episode is Matthew 22:30, since it teaches us there will be no marriage or sex in the next life, since it is the sinful misuse of these gifts that cause so many of this world’s problems today.
That is as much as I know. Kristy Corbett’s name is mud in Hobart as a result of what she did to that young man.
John,
Kristy Corbett seems l to have done so much wrong: abandoning friends in need, fornication, and destroying lives (both as a state-sponsored killer in the air force and by what she did to her “friend”.) Where is her loyalty?
I will pray for her. We must not feel anger for her but pity for she does not have the Gospel in her life. Let us pray she turns to Jesus one day.
I will tell you one other thing: years ago I knew a former military intelligence officer. He told us about the propaganda role he had: he’d pump the recruits full of fabricated stories about enemies like Saddam to make them hate him/think they were acting righteously in fighting him. It seemed to them they had inside information that the general public was not privy to. In fact, the average member of the Australian military knows less about what is happening than civilians do because of this barrage of propaganda. This is one form of indoctrination they are exposd to.
Pure speculation on my part but I was also wondering if something else was going on in Kristy Corbett’s life: her decision to suddenly run off and join the military, her refusal to even simply visit her friend when he needed her the most and her callousness towards him and her lack of discipline at school lead me to wonder about her home life with her parents.
I also wonder – again pure speculation – if maybe she was bisexual since we know from statistics that a very largely disproportionate number of women who join the military are lesbian and it is obviously not a very feminine career. I stress though that all that is speculation though and she was obviously intending to commit the sin of fornication with another man. Her Christian ex-boyfriend must have been devastated: not only had she suddenly disappeared on him without a goodbye with no explanation and no trace but she was seeing another man and was preparing to sin with him. No winder that destroyed his already fragile mental state. 🙁 🙁 🙁
To close, as I said above, we must nit hold any anger in our hearts against Kristy, John C. Instead, we must pity her because she does not know the Gospel. Let us pray she finds saving faith in Christ before it is too late for her.
God bless.
Dear Ptr Robertson
I am from Tasmania and I knew all the parties in this case. I was hesitant to write after John C. told me about it but I will do so since I hope it will prove cathartic and I still struggle to make theological sense of it and I therefore have lots of questions. Thank you for giving us the chance to publish our thoughts here. Since I know most of what happened, I will give my account of the terrible things that happened twelve years and more ago.
I knew Kristy Corbett well at one stage. She attended Ogilvie High School and Elizabeth College in Hobart’s northern suburbs. I met her mother, Anne Corbett, a few times. They were very much a working class family from the rough suburb of Claremont, north of Glenorchy. Kristy Corbett’s father worked for a security firm.
As people have noted, Kristy was, in many ways, quite immature for her age. She was very quiet at high school but became more outgoing later on. Kristy Corbett was a very poor student and hated reading, for instance, because she considered it ‘a chore’. As a result, she was not very articulate nor was she a deep thinker. She tended to talk in cliches. Despite this, many people though she was ‘nice’ because she seemed kind and friendly on the surface. It took a long time to realise that the problem was she was all surface – she was totally superficial with no depth at all. It is interesting to observe, though, that even non-Christians like Kristy can appear ‘nice’ and ‘kind’, at least initially.
Anyway, later on, some people compared Kristy Corbett to a less-articulate, quieter version of the Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie because of their personalities, their perceived lack of culture and their military backgrounds.
I also knew her boyfriend. As John suggested, to protect the family’s privacy, let’s just call him ‘D.’ He was her opposite in many ways. While she was an atheist and evidently a feminist given her less-than-ladylike demeanour and defiance of traditional gender roles in joining the military, he was a conservative Calvinist-you would probably have liked him, Ptr. He was anti-feminist and, academically, he finished top student at Elizabeth College, he loved literature and went on to win a scholarship for academic excellence to do post-grad studies at uni. He was also extremely loyal to his friends, gentle, compassionate and one of the quietest, shyest, most introverted people you would ever meet. His family were more middle-class bit they had fallen on hard times.
He also happened to be one of Tasmania’s very top athletes. Even though they were like chalk and cheese, opposites attract and he and Kristy Corbett had been friends from College-where he absolutely adored her-but she suddenly decided she wanted to be good at sport, too, so he, of course, helped her out (previously she had been a good dancer). He genuinely thought she wanted to become a good sportswoman but cynics have suggested that she was just using him to build up her fitness so she could pass her physicals on applying to join the RAAF. What the truth of the matter is, I don’t know.
Anyway, D.’s father was also a qualified and well-accomplished sports coach so they trained her. D. and Kristy Corbett were very close, or so he thought. At any rate, she knew how deeply he loved her. By this stage, Kristy Corbett was working in the Harris Scarfe department store in Moonah as a salesgirl and he would come and visit her every lunch hour and tell her how much he loved her and cared for her and she apparently cared for him, too. Thus they dated each other. She knew he wanted to marry her.
Then, one day, she just vanished. He later learned she had gone to the mainland to join the RAAF. Not once did she confide in him her plans or ever asked his thoughts on the matter. She simply disappeared interstate without even saying goodbye to him. Of course, he was absolutely devastated that the girl he loved and wanted to marry could do that to him.
However, there was even more to it than that. As a devout young Christian, D. had been a pacifist since the late 1990s. (I know it is somewhat rare in some parts of the world like Scotland for Calvinists to be pacifists because if the WCF but I think it was more common in Tasmania like it is in Wales and France). After Sep. 11, with all of the blatant lies spread by Bush, Blair and Howard, he, like many, many Australians was even more involved in anti-war and anti-military protests.
Even if people were not anti-military in general, it was clear that Iraq was being invaded under a false pretext and that oil and strategic advantage in the reason for the U. S. Empire was the real reason, with Australia its ever-willing lapdog.
Despite this, Kristy Corbett had run off to join the RAAF as a willing participant in this butchery. D. was devastated to learn she had not only left him but joined an organisation of death-dealers and professional killers, against all his deeply-held Christian morals.
Jean, to answer one of your questions, I don’t think Kristy had an unhappy family life at home. It is very hard to tell though as she rarely talked about herself and often shut down questions when asked. I know even D., very quiet and introverted himself, had trouble communicating with her at times even though he was deeply interested in her life because he cared for her so much. As for the possibility of her being bisexual, I have no idea. I never saw anything to make me suspicious of it.
What I think was really the case was that Kristy Corbett genuinely thought she was too good for Tasmania and was looking for a way to leave. She often called the place ‘a dump’ and similar. She was using the RAAF to leave and further her own career and travel, never mind anyone else, least of all her boyfriend or the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians who would end up dead, with her willing collaboration, no matter how small her actual role may have been.
The fact that Kristy Corbett had left the guy who loved her without even saying goodbye threw him into depressive anxiety. The fact she had betrayed some of his most deeply-held core values by joining the military made it feel like a double betrayal. He waited anxiously for month after month to hear from her as she had his contact details but no letter or phone call ever came.
He obtained her airbase postal address and wrote to her but she did not respond (she would later claim she never received the letters. If so, what happened to them?)
A few years passed by and D. moved interstate himself to take up a corporate role. All the time his anxiety and depression became worse and worse from the implication that his girlfriend had utterly rejected him, to her betrayal of his pacifist morals to the fear that she might be in danger in a warzone or from sexual assault (very high in the Australian military) to the fear that she was actively collaborating in the horrific crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and being brainwashed/indoctrinated as just another unthinking, blindly loyal military worker-drone.
Eventually, after a few years of searching, a friend managed to obtain Kristy’s new email address for him.
Extremely anxious, he wrote to Kristy Corbett, desperate to find out if she was safe, how she was doing and if they could resume their relationship despite the way in which she had treated him.
Her responses devastated him in their arrogance. Kristy had changed a lot (or perhaps this had always been her real nature?) She might condescend to spend an hour having a coffee with him if she was ever in his part of the world was one response. Most devastating to him of all, though, was her revelation she had been cheating on him the whole time with a guy named Shane. She openly declared that they were not living together yet but soon would be. This absolutely destroyed D. Not only had she been unfaithful the whole time that he had not even looked at another girl but she openly boasted she would soon be living in sin, in direct repudiation of all his strict Christian sexual morals. I do not know if Kristy Corbett was still a virgin up until this point but certainly D. would never have done anything as wicked as have sex prior to marriage, so if she had done so, it was not with him.
Some other arrogant, dismissive replies followed his other emails.
One thing he did do was supply her with information from one of his anti-war groups who counselled people on how to leave the military if they ever felt their consciences impinged. He begged her to leave if she ever found herself unable to follow orders because of conscience or if she found herself in danger.
Seeing the effect Kristy Corbett’s dismissive responses were having on D.’s mental health, the third party who had obtained the email address intervened by writing to Kristy herself, begging her to reconcile with D. and telling her the effect she was having. Kristy Corbett was rude to her as well and told some blatant, easily-disproved falsehoods about the situation. Kristy Corbett did reveal, though, that the reason she had left D. was because ‘he was not assertive enough’.
The third party then explained that D. had to be somewhat assertive/confident, given he had risen to a position of leadership and responsibility in one of the world’s leading corporations and had achieved a huge amount academically and in sport. This news seemed to come as a shock to Kristy Corbett. She did not realise how powerful and responsible he had become, despite the depression/anxiety she was responsible for giving him.
In fact, had D. joined the RAAF himself, it is easy to see he would have ranked highly given his academic skills and leadership experience, whereas Kristy Corbett herself was on the lowest rung of servicewoman for many long years before eventually being promoted to corporal. In other words, she was a general ‘dog’s body’ at best and would have been used as cannon-fodder at worst if Australia ever fought a strong enemy.
I think by ‘assertive’ though, she really meant she had an attraction to ‘bad boys’, again showing her extreme immaturity. At school, she had often associated with the loudmouth boys, the teen car hoons and the bullies. She mistook arrogance and a loudmouth for confidence.
I have also since read about female war criminals in Nazi Germany. They, too, remind me of Kristy in that a lot of them were small-town girls with poor academic records using the opportunity of joining the military as concentration camp guards to break out of traditionally-defined gender roles. These women were not sadists but they committed atrocities in order to prove they could keep up with the male guards and show they were as ‘tough’ as them. I believe there may be the same kind of mentality at work in Kristy.
Anyway, in her emails, Kristy couldn’t even bring herself to thank D. for his sports coaching or the constant love and commitment he had shown her.
The third party begged Kristy Corbett to at least take some leave and spend some time with D., as a platonic friend if not as a girlfriend, seeing how she was undermining his mental health. Kristy Corbett refused to do even this, even though she knew, as the third party reminded her, that D. would have been the first person by her side if the positions had been reversed and Kristy were ever sick or in serious trouble, yet she did not bother to lift a finger to help someone who had been her best friend.
The third party begged Kristy Corbett over and over that, no matter what else she did, not to cut contact with D. again and disappear without saying goodbye as she had done before, as this would have the most devastating impact of all on D. Yet, after just a few more emails, Kristy Corbett did just that. She abruptly stopped communicating again with her shattered friend, knowing full well the effect this would have on him. In so doing, she pushed him to the brink of suicide.
In retrospect, it is Kristy Corbett’s callous lack of caring that shocks me the most. I am no longer in contact with her either. Her friendly, ‘happy-go-lucky’ lighthearted surface manner concealed the lack of compassion underneath. The way she disposed of D. when she joined the RAAF, her refusal to even fly over and visit him when contact was reestablished and she knew the impact her actions had had upon him and the way she boasted of her new, secret boyfriend and the fact she would soon be fornicating with him and the way she just contact twice without even bothering to say goodbye either time to her loyal, selflessly loving boyfriend are indicative, as is her lack of concern about the impact of RAAF actions on innocent Iraqi peasants, all too evident now we know so much more about atrocities against civilians in places including, but not limited to, Fallujah. She apparently didn’t care about D.’s life or anyone else’s, especially when she abandoned him without even a goodbye for the second time. She is an utterly self-centred human being.
Later on, in the fall out, of course the matter was discussed with police but she was never charged or, as far as I know, even interviewed. She is guilty of negligence in my mind though, due to her callous emails and the way she knowingly abandoned her friend for the second time, even though she was clearly and unambiguously told how sick he was and the likely affect of abandoning him again. Kristy Corbett is without loyalty even to those who love her the most. She is selfish and dies not make the slightest effort to care for others if it inconveniences her. She joined the RAAF to further her career and abandoned the guy who loved her and wanted to marry her in so doing so that she could live in sin with another man.
Although she was not charged, I believe someone also considered contacting her commanding officer in the RAAF in the hope of having her dishonorably discharged. I don’t think anything came of this though.
There was also an academic study of the case and it was mentioned on Wiki, as per the link above.
Worse, though, there was a lengthy discussion thread full of vitriol against Kristy Corbett in a Tasmanian internet forum, after all the emails inevitably leaked out. The thread has long been deleted now but it was up for a long time. People I knew were calling on her to ‘burn in hell’ and saying the RAAF should send her to Afghanistan where hopefully the Taliban would give her a ‘third eye’ [which is apparently military slang for a bullet hole through the skull] and other angry threats and condemnations, such was the hostility towards her-which D. would have hated. That shows how much anger there was against her. Fortunately things have died down in intervening years.
The saddest thing is for D.’s parents. They were an extremely close knit, loving, Christian family. They were deeply fond of Kristy Corbett at first (until they realised what she was really like) and, had she married D., they would have warmly welcomed her into the family with open arms as their daughter. Instead, Kristy Corbett treated their son with contempt and destroyed his life. His mother and father have since had extremely serious health issues and both have nearly died, his father on multiple occasions. Thankfully, God has preserved them both.
That is the entire story as I know it. It shows the harm one selfish, arrogant girl can cause to those who genuinely love her. There are so many things I do not understand though:
1. I know D. prayed fervently that Kristy Corbett would return to him when she ran off and joined the RAAF. She did not do so. In fact, she made no attempt to contact him at all. She just left him heartbroken with no explanation for years on end. There would have been times when she came home on leave to visit her parents in Claremont and D. was only a short bus ride away but even then she didn’t bother with him. Why was his prayer unanswered? Why couldn’t God have given her back to him?
2. He also prayed that Kristy Corbett would become a Christian. As far as we know, she never has. This would have softened her selfish heart and made her much more compassionate, loyal and selfless towards others. This, too, appears not to have happened. Had she become a Christian and stayed with D., he would have been fine, his lovely family would not have suffered, she would be saved, she would not have joined the RAAF and contributed to the misery and suffering in the world and she would not have become a fornicator. Why did God not make this happen? Please pray that she may still change, Ptr.
3. Per the comments above, was D. wrong to date an atheist in the hope she would convert later? Should Christians only date and marry other Christians? So much pain would have been averted if D. had avoided Kristy in the first place and stayed amongst his Christian friends. I guess love is blind and everyone who met Kristy Corbett was deceived by her ‘nice’, friendly, happy-go-lucky manner at first. The opening part of Psalm One, in particular, seems to say to me, Ptr, that a Christian should only keep company with other Christians.
4. How can we forgive and forget? I find it extremely hard to let go of my vengeful, angry feelings towards her but Jesus teaches us that is a sin. Do you have any advice, Ptr?
Thanks so much. Writing about these events from years ago is helping at least. I was naive about how selfish seemingly ‘nice’ people truly are in their hearts until all of this came about with the godless Kristy Corbett. It at least showed me the veracity of the doctrine of Total Depravity. It is deeply frightening that normal’ people out there can treat those who sincerely love them so callously when they become an inconvenience and that these same selfish people become willing pawns of the US and Australian governments’ imperial war agenda and are prepared to inflict misery on the weak and powerless around the globe to further their own careers.
To end, I’d like to invite all readers of this blog to pray this prayer for Kristy Corbett:
*****
Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
You know all hearts, including Kristy Corbett’s. Only you know her inner thoughts and her motives for her actions. Please turn her from her sinful desires and selfishness. Please soften her hardened heart and allow her to accept Your Son, Jesus Christ, as Lord of her life.
Please may she repent of her sins against you and against her fellows and may she seek to undo the terrible pain she has caused to those who loved her the most and to anyone overseas who has also suffered or been killed as a direct or indirect result of her military work.
Please turn her heart and open her eyes so that the crimes of US imperialism, in which she has collaborated may become repugnant to her.
Please teach her the meaning of true, self-sacrificing love, not the utterly destructive selfish ‘love’ that she now possesses that has destroyed lives.
Through these changes in her life, give her peace and may she, and her victims, be saved. Give her the strength to face up to her wrongdoing. May she seek out those of whom she has harmed who are still alive and make amends to them. May she then know their forgiveness as well.
Finally, despite the terrible things she has done, please always keep her safe in Your care and may she come to know the warmth of Your genuine and inexhaustible love for her. May she accept Your free gift of forgiveness, as we sincerely and earnestly seek her salvation, and we ourselves forgive her the wrongs she has done to us and to our friends.
In the name of Christ Your Son, who died for our sins and rose again,
Amen.
*****
Thank you for your time, Ptr Robertson. God bless.
A bit off-topic but the ABC gives good insight into the RAAF’s [illegal] secret chemical weapons program today:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-10/australia-world-war-two-secret-mustard-gas-chemical-program/13034000
The RAAF mustard gas story reminds me of these scandal from the US, Canada and Britain where soldiers volunteered as guinea pigs in nerve agent experiments:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2015-09-18/soldiers-subjected-to-military-experiments-are-denied-care
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-soldiers-used-as-guinea-pigs-now-denied-care-20150918-story.html%3foutputType=amp
https://amp.theguardian.com/uk/1999/sep/03/freedomofinformation.politics
https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2004/may/06/science.research
It seems that, if you join the military, you really do sell your body and soul to the State for it to do with as it pleases. Extremely upsetting. 🙁
I’ve just been reading about Solzhenitsyn’s 100th anniversary on the Lutheran Church of Australia website. For those of you struggling with the magnitude of the revelations of the extent and cruelty of Australia’s alleged war crimes, this might help:
“Solzhenitsyn kept on thinking about punishment as just deserts, but grew to see how ludicrous it was – then Stalin would have been less evil than the millions he’d slaughtered. He later wrote, in his momentous book The Gulag Archipelago:
The only solution to this would be that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but… in the development of the soul. From that point of view our torturers have been punished most horribly of all: they are turning into swine, they are departing downward from humanity. From that point of view punishment is inflicted on those whose development holds out hope.”
Source: http://www.lutheransforlife.lca.org.au/2018/08/07/commemoration-of-aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/
Note also that the LCA has formally pledged to support pacifists and vonscientious objectors:
“11. The church however accepts the validity of a person’s refusal to engage in military
service if he or she is convinced that participation in a military conflict amounts to the
transgression of God’s commandment ‘You shall not kill’.
12. The church refuses to support the government’s engagement in war if and when the
government subverts its God-ordained functions (cf par 2) and acts in contempt and
violation of the laws of God. Under these circumstances, the church will support with
all available non-violent means the conscientious stand of its members against
participation in such wars or conflicts.
13. The church maintains that warfare which potentially and actually involves the mass
destruction of human beings is never justified (cf par 7), and therefore involvement in
such immoral activity is always against an informed Christian conscience.
14. The church supports legislation which recognises the validity of conscientious
objection of citizens who firmly believe that participation in war or military conflict in
general is against their conscience. Conscientious objection against participation in a
particular war or military conflict (= selective conscientious objection) demands of the
objector a careful assessment of the nature, relevant available facts, and
circumstances of the war or military conflict.
15. The church gives witness to governments about its commitment to the word of God
and to prayer for peace. It will inform the authorities of its views on relevant legislative
and political decisions, socio-moral issues, ethical concerns, economic circumstances,
and other matters which affect the well-being and security of the people. The church
cannot afford to be silent in the face of mounting armaments and increasing national
and international tensions; to do so would be to fail in its obligation to help prevent
mass destruction and to minimise global conflict.”
Source: https://lca.box.net/shared/static/3pyjcv2ap3irq92n1cgf.pdf
Since Romans 13 is often used yo legitimise warfare, this clause ftom the LCA’s statement on capital punishment is also noteworthy:
“3. In the New Testament the passage Romans 13:4 is most generally assumed to
demand capital punishment. Two points must be noted in regard to the
understanding of this text:
a) ‘The sword’ is a general term taken by St Paul from the language of Roman law (ius
gladii); it refers in a general sense to the power of the State to administer and
execute the law, including capital punishment, but the reference is descriptive
rather than prescriptive.
b) The passage does not indicate specific crimes to which the death penalty should
be applied. ”
Source: https://lca.box.net/shared/static/5rqzs0138uzy7akx5j2z.pdf
The LCA also, of course, speaks out against cohabitation outside of marriage:
https://lca.box.net/shared/static/rjxtpcn9isfs8s329u6t.pdf
I couldn’t find a statement on suicide per se but the statement on euthanasia contains this paragraph:
“The church rejects the practice of mercy killing or euthanasia in all its forms, because such
killing is contrary to the word and law of God. The church’s opposition to past, present, and
future proposals for euthanasia legislation is based, above all, on ethical considerations
concerning the life and the death of human beings. The ‘right to life’ of every person must
be protected by law. The ‘right to die’ concept is completely foreign to sound biblical
ethical principles. ”
Source: https://lca.box.net/shared/static/bvbioeoa4xt2url4qcj1.pdf
I hope these help
Here we go. I found some more discussion of suicide and self-harm elsewhere on the LCA’s website. I hope these articles are helpful:
http://www.lutheransforlife.lca.org.au/life-issues/self-harm/
“Sometimes people feel like giving up on life. We can endure terrible suffering in this life and sometimes see little hope for the future.
Healthy people have no need for legal options to end their life. But what about people whose suffering feels intolerable? Some people in Western societies have begun advocating for the legal taking of life in these circumstances through euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide.[1]
Christians are called to show mercy and compassion to those who are suffering. However, true mercy and compassion means suffering alongside someone in their greatest hour of need, loving and serving them in every practical way and assuring them that life is still worth living, even when all seems lost. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan provides us with a beautiful example of this mercy. True mercy costs us something (Luke 10: 25-37).
The LCA official statement on euthanasia and mercy killing says: ‘The Church rejects the practice of mercy killing or euthanasia in all its forms, because such killing is contrary to the Word and law of God’. For Christians, our life is never our own. We are creatures owing our very existence to our Creator, and so the taking of our own life is no less grave than that of another.”
Source: http://www.lutheransforlife.lca.org.au/end-of-life-issues/euthanasia-physician-assisted-suicide/
That statement in the third para, “true mercy and compassion means suffering alongside someone in their greatest hour of need, loving and serving them in every practical way and assuring them that life is still worth living” is where this Kristy Corbett girl showed an absolute dereliction of duty and care towards her friend, ifI am understanding you all correctly. I am coming aroind to the same view as the rest of you that she should have married him.
Thank you David for this article. It has brought back sad memories of an evangelist here, Willie Mullan, who sadly took his own life in 1980.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Mullan
For someone who has (and recently) had these thoughts this post is very thought provoking, and when you are in the depths of dispair you can feel alone and are not thinking straight. It’s these times the thoughts come into your mind that God is to busy to care for you.
The thought of leaving my children without a father has kept me from doing it.
For the record currently I’m not in this dark place, I’m trying to do each night the M’Cheyne’s Bible reading plan. I do feel better now that each night before I go to be bed I’m feeling my head with scripture.
David – many people have been in this place….it is sometimes just a case of hanging on and looking to Christ…I find Scripture really does bring light..
if we are truly believers in Christ, his righteousness is imputed to us and will not be taken away. However in this life we have trouble and we have no right to condemn those who are depressed or commit suicide. Shall not the judge of all the earth do right? Yes he does.
How does your worldview regard assisted suicide, of say a terminal cancer patient is a Christian?
Would an atheist soldier fighting in Afghanistan who laid down his life for his patrol by using his body to cover a mine be damned to Hell or would your worldview consider he would warrant favourable dispensation from Yahweh?
REad the article….it would help….
Of course I read it. You did not include assisted suicide.
I’ve had several times in my life where I have wanted to end it all. First at 18-19 when violent step-dad who had been angry & violent to my mum and myself all my life. He’d beaten me up and so I waited until it was dark and walked to the park that led to cliffs in Arbroath, thinking I wouldn’t see where I was going if I jumped. But met a drunk man sitting on a bench. He called out to me, asked where I was going. I said I was going to the cliffs to jump. But he talked me out of it and even walked me home right to the door.
Another time after another beating, I got up on the window of my 4th story bedroom window, about to jump. Saw a lad I went to school and shouted to him that I was going to jump. Did he say no, don’t do it? Did he offer to come up to talk to me? No… H actually just laughed and said “Go on then!” But something in my heart urged me not to. I believe that was the Lord. Then when I lost my baby at 9 months to adoption, again I wanted to give up & die. Cut myself and went to Sunnyside {psychiatric hospital}, There again, I believe I met the Lord when I was at my lowest. Read Psalm 69 where it says, “Save me O God, for the waters have come up to my neck!” And that became my prayer.
Thankfully I don’t get suicidal any more. But it’s a horrible feeling. So dark, despairing, hopeless, thinking you’d be better off dead. What a terrible way to feel. I have a dog now called Caleb and he makes life worth living these days.
Maggie
God bless you Maggie.
When a depressed person takes his or her own life, it is because all one can see or experience is darkness … darkness thad is above, below, in front and behind as well as on both sides of them with no hope of ever seeing light again. He or she is surrounded by darkness and despair. Depression is an illness that sometimes leads suicide. As a chaplain and pastor, I have always counseled families that our loving God would never condemn someone to hell because of an illness that ended their loved one’s life., even if that death was self-inflicted.
The fact is, we do not know what is in people’s hearts or what takes place between two people in a relationship. But it is NOT devotion or romantic to pursue somebody – no matter who it is or what their behaviour – who has made it clear they do not want the relationship to continue. Even God himself, while He never closes the door to a change, has bound Himself not to force us through it.
As to suicide, I can only, like others here, testify for myself: that it can sometimes seem not only like a just self punishment, but also an altruistic act when it appears that your removal will both enrich those you care about and relieve them of an insoluble problem. It’s how I fear the “right to die” will be argued to the sick and elderly, concurrent with the end of NHS care, to overcome both principles, such as our host presents, and resistance. (Just as we are persuaded to abort “defective” babies when the truth is that our society refuses to support anything or anyone that will not pay its way.) It’s not always about “running away” to save oneself.
As to the judgement to come, “he is with the Lord” could be taken two ways, couldn’t it? If someone right up to the last and beyond is in enmity to Him – real deep seated hate, not just anger about an unjust situation – that might be the worst that could ever happen to him. Not a thought to dwell on comfortably…
I’ve obviously missed something here. Isn’t the very reason that the many Christian sects imply one would go to hell, is to discourage people killing the selves to get from this life to an eternal one so say full of joy.
When you realise this is the only life you are going to get, there is more incentive to make the most of it.
Surly if your god didn’t want people to kill themselves he would intervene.
I’ve been through very dark times and so very close to ending it all and fully understand the manner that your thoughts can overwhelm you. I’ve lost friends to this as well but I’ve also lost too many to illnesses, which killed them far to young. Almost out of respect for those that never had a chance at a long life, I have continued with mine.
I’m now in a better place. I for one could see no reason why your god wouldn’t let them in but I also see no reason why it shouldn’t help them.
It almost acts like it doesn’t exist, hmm?
Hello John C. and Tasmanian Girl,
Your story about Kristy Corbett continues to touch me and not only because I once lived in Tasmania. I have had the facts of the case to him, as you have already related.
I found this quote on the internet the other day that is relevant to the case of Kristy Corbett. I think you will find I and many, many other Australians will quietly agree with it:
“Above all, those who would defy Political Correctness must behave according to the old rules of our culture, not the new rules the cultural Marxists lay down. Ladies should be wives and homemakers, not cops or soldiers, and men should still hold doors open for ladies. Children should not be born out of wedlock. Glorification of homosexuality should be shunned. Jurors should not accept Islam as an excuse for murder.”
Tasmanian Girl, I am just a member of the laity and I do not know the answers to the tough theological questions you raised. However, I did ask the Pastor a related question not long ago about those who were praying for Hitler: had their prayers been answered, he would have been saved and the war and the holocaust would have presumably been averted. You can find my question and the Pastor’s response in the comments section of this post:
https://theweeflea.com/2018/01/29/the-new-secular-puritans-jordan-petersons-book-and-churchills-finest-hour-quantum-117/
Finally, if Kristy Corbett was this disloyal to someone who loved her and cared for her, I can’t help wondering whether she would also betray/abandon her military colleagues. Not someone you would want to be relying upon on the battlefield with that track record.
I would have thought that the RAAF would see her actions as bringing their organisation into disrepute. She abandoned her friend twice, showing negligence and failure in a duty of care and made no concrete attempt to help him or even visit him. She drove her friend to mental illness and abandoned him a second time when he needed her the most.
All we can do is pray for her. I hope one day she can face his family and apologise. That is what she needs to do and, more importantly, turn to Christ and leave her sinful lifestyle of state-endorsed violence and killing, neglect and abandonment of friends, lies and fornication behind.
I promise I will pray the beautiful prayer you wrote for her. If someone like Paul of Tarsus can be saved, or a former military commander like Martin Niemoller (who became a devout Christian pacifist and pastor) then God can certainly reach out to Kristy Corbett and open her eyes as well.
May God bless her and save her.
The Kristy Corbett case shocks me too. Tasmanian Girl, a book I came across is T E Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)’s ‘The Mint’. It is about induction into the air force. The book is called ‘The Mint’ because, like coins, individuality is stamped out of the recruits as they are fashioned into uniform soldiers, without even realising what is happening to them.
Irrespective of that, this is a terrible case. For someone to abandon their boyfriend when he needed her the most shows a breathtaking selfishness and immaturity. She definitely should have gone back to him. I will pray that Kristy Corbett is saved, too.
Hello Wayne
I know your comment wasn’t addressed to me but I’d like to thank you for recommending “The Mint”. I have been reading about it on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mint_(book)
I think I should read it. I would find it very difficult and confronting because it sounds like everything I oppose: men willingly volunteering to become state-sponsored killers, the indoctrination/manipulation, the loss of individualism and submission to uniformity, the allegiance to vacuous concepts like the State/patriotism, etc. For those very reasons I think I should look at it just to get some more insight and understanding of people who do voluntarily join the military, as repulsive as their mindset may be.
In terms of other books, there is obviously a lot of Christian literature out there on topics like suicide and betrayal by partners (though mainly dealing with adultery).
As always, though, I think the most helpful thing is to immerse oneself in the Bible and to hear God’s Word.
Regarding marriage to a non-believer, Ezra 10 and Deuteronomy 7 are two good starting points in the Old Testament. There us also a very useful list of verses here:
https://biblereasons.com/marrying-a-non-christian/
Reading above about how D.’s elderly parents both had life-threatening illnesses in later years, would Kristy Corbett have stood by him through such stressful trials if she just abandoned him without so much as a goodbye when she ran off to join the RAAF? Would she have had the strength if character to stick with him “through better or worse” if she was so flighty and unable to show even basic loyalty to someone who clearly adored her, if she lacked a firm grounding in Christian morals?
In terms of being abandoned by a friend whom you love and care for, I think God can definitely relate. At the very beginning of the Bible, God’s “friend” Adam betrays Him by showing no faith in Him. Adam chooses to listen to Eve/the serpent’s insinuations against God than to trust his friend.
Likewise, in the New Testament, Jesus is betrayed/abandoned multiple times. Whilst it us true Jesus did not have a romantic relationship, he was let down by his friends: for instance they fell asleep when their support was needed in Gethsemane.
More acutely, Jesus was betrayed by Judas and even abandoned by the apostle Peter. The difference between Judas and Peter is that Judas was consumed by guilt whereas Peter, also feeling extreme guilt, sought to face Jesus, apologise to Him and receive forgiveness and once again be entrusted. Peter only received peace of mind through his repentance and face-to-face apology which Jesus wholeheartedly accepted. That is why I say below Kristy Corbett should also seek out D.’s family and apologise for the way she abandoned him. Not knowing her, though, I do not know how hard her heart is.
Maybe she will come to appreciate how deeply she was loved and how rare it is to have true loyal friends in life. She must realise how much he loved her since she knew the first time she abandoned him, he was plunged into anxiety/depression. How she could do it again instead of running to his side and offering her live and support, I do not know. If she only loves men who are confident/assertive, then that shows a real superficiality.
We can only pray God will make her wake up to herself one day and that she will seek forgiveness for her terrible deeds. I am sure, as Christians, D.’s family would give it for the way she treated their beloved son.
This reminds me of something I was reading recently. In this article, an ex-US air force person talks about the tactics the military uses to suppress individualism in recruits and brainwash them into groupthink, without them even being aware of it:
He likens the military’s induction techniques to those used by cults:
https://medium.com/@the_wise_sloth/how-and-why-military-basic-training-brainwashes-recruits-6ac795e1b21
The RAAF undoubtedly uses many of the same techniques. The military is horrible. Let’s also not forget the am0hetamines soldiers are still fed to this day in combat situations.
The extreme callousness of this Kristy Corbett person shocks and appalls me. The fact that she made no real effort to visit or help her ex-boyfriend when she found out how sick he had become by the depression she had caused shows how sinful us humans can be. There is nothing worse than a fairweather friend who uses you for personal gain and then abandons you. As Christians, what can we do, though? We are told to turn the other cheek, even if this sometimes means we end up being treated like doormats. That is our fross to bear.
It is all very well for this Kristy to say her boyfriend wasn’t assertive enough for her but I think the real question is, “Was she submissive enough?” Did she recognise male headship in the relationship? Did she take a complementarian or an egalitarian view of tge relationship? As an Australian feminist and atheist, she was probably an egalitarian and refused to recognise their different roles. 🙁
Certainly, joining the military and learning how to kill and aid and abet in bombing of third world countries is not a traditional female role. From what I have read above, I see embodied in Kristy Corbett the logical endpoint of feminism and it utterly disgusts me.
All we can do is pray that she turns to Christ one day.
Hi, I’m from Tassie. I don’t know Kristy Corbett myself but I’ve heard the stories. I just wanted to share this comment I saw today on an article over on BB.com. I’m not saying Kristy is necessarily like this but it tallies with what I’ve seen of many women in the military unfortunately-
”Reply
7 hours ago
Exactly and I am an Army Reserve nurse since 1988 and served in two wars. All those rapes in the military? I could tell you a few hair raising stories about that. Women on maneuvers or on deployment are about the dirtiest creatures I ever had the unpleasant experience to spend time with. When my husband on deployment and I followed him around the world and worked for Special services teaching dancing etc. I saw it then also. Men whose wives I knew back home, good men finally hounded til they gave in.
Women are not saints nor better than men.”
Hello @Sloane
I’ve been reading a similar discussion about the US situation in the comments section of a website, too. I’ll just quote what a few of the people are saying:
*****
“Tyrone Mayo 11 hours ago
Thomas Jefferson said that “there are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation…one such instrument is a standing army.”
I would emphasize that the over paid and over comfited officer class should be ripe for down-sizing or eliimation.
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justanavgjoe2 13 hours ago
I always marvel at the affinity the military always seem to have with Fascism. What is it about guns and war that draws fascists like a firefly to a campfire. Interesting.
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Stuart Estrine justanavgjoe2 6 hours ago
More like lemmings to the sea. Contemporary career military personnel, regardless of rank, are psychopaths. It will be up to the enlisted personnel to refuse to fire on their domestic brethren, should it come down to it.”
****
🙁
Some final thoughts on this before I take a break for a while:
The most famous case of a soldier becoming a Christian is Martin of Tours who famously resigned his commission declaring, “I am the soldier of Christ: it is not lawful for me to fight.” When accused of cowardice by his comrades, he offered to go unarmed at the head of the army towards the enemy.
Also, the wonderful, wonderful Welsh preacher, Dewi Higham, gave a sermon this weekend on the conversion of the centurion at Christ’s crucifixion. Dewi notes what a hatdened callous man he was, so if someone like that can come to Christ, there is hope Kristy Corbett’s heart can also be softened, despite the terrible things she has done to her ex-boyfriend and in theatres of war. Here is Dewi’s sermon:
https://mp3.sermonaudio.com/download/111719123515180/111719123515180.mp3
My heart cries out for all of the other suicides and contemplated suicides mentioned in this discussion. I am sure God will save them. He understands the human heart and mental illness and what all of these people were going through more than we can. If he can forgive and save persecutors he can forgive the victims of this terrible world too. God bless you and look after you all. May you know His love in your lives.
I will pray for all of you who have known suicide victims or have considered it yourself and I will pray that God will soften the hearts of people like Kristy Corbett who treated the guy who lived her so poorly. May she become compassionate and filled with remorse and seek forgiveness, reconciliation and salvation from her terrible actions. If she ever reads this, may she renounce her sins and turn to Christ.
hello im from tassie and i knew anne who is kristy corbetts mother years ago. when i heard from various people what kristy corbett had done to her boyfriend i was horrified. i cant believe shed turn her back on him and abandon him twice after giving him depression. of course i never spoke about it to anne and danny corbett though. it breaks my heart to see how kristy corbett turned out. so rude and selfish. im no longer in contact with the family now though. how she could have treated her dear boyfriend like that ill never know. now of course we know all about australias war crimes in afghanistan. of course kristy would not have anything directly to do with it shed be too low ranking and unskilled to be linked to the sas but it breaks my heart that she might have facilitated or supported them in any way now we know from the brereton report they were murdering disabled people, amputees, women, unarmed prisoners, and even children and blooding new recruits all for nothing but oil. kristy has been on my mind especially since i heard the brereton report. a quote to end with that i read today. “Military Men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns of Foreign Policy.” Henry Kissinger in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book The Final Days. seems so true in light of afghan and iraq oil wars. of course although kristy destroyed her boyfriends life many military people commit suicide too from ptsd and maybe even guilt at what theyve done and horrors theyve seen and participated in. the world is in such a mess.
Thanks for telling me about this discussion, Derwent Waters.
Folks, I knew Kristy Corbett too wgen she lived in Tasmania. When I heard what she’d done to her partner, abandoning him twice and doing nothing for him when he had depression because of her, I was shocked at her callousness. She treated him as if he was just an annoying inconvenience in her life. He would’ve done anything to help her if the tables had been turned but she jilted him without even saying goodbye or making any effort whatsoever to stay in touch when he’d bent over backwards for her. He stayed loyal to her all that time when she couldn’t even be bothered emailing him. Mostly that was out of his absolute love and loyalty towards her but alao I think there was a fear that idmf he ever had another gurlfriend, she might just abandon him too without even saykng goodbye. After all, if it had happened once, it could happen again and that eoukd destroy him which is ultimately exactly what Kristy fud the second time around. Also the way Kristy had left him had left a person who already had low self-esteem feel unlovable and I know he became incrrwasingly reclusive outside of work, even when he moved to Logan.
Later when he finally did find a way to contact her and she knew her actions caused him to get depression she just abandoned him again and he went into a downward spiral as a result. All of this was because she didn’t consider him “assertive enough” for her, she was so immature. When you do see the military accepting people like Kristy into their ranks, people so incredibly immature and callous towards the feelings of others, things like the Brereton Report start making sense. Kristy was a very, very small insignificant fish in the military pond but if she had that little regard for her ex-boyfriend’s feelings and life, the life of someone she knew well and whom she knew absolutely and faithfully loved her, what little regard would she have for Afghan prisoners she didn’t know. That is the kind of mindset I’m guessing belongs to these people. There is just sheer callousness and selfishness there. Why couldn’t Kristy have been faithful and loyal to someone who clearly loved her? If nothing else why didn’t she raise a finger to help him when she became aware of what her earlier callous actions had done? Why dudn’t she give him a chance and help build his confidence to help him become more assertive if that was such a big sticking point with her? Why didn’t she confide in him she was considering joining the RAAF instead of secretly leaving without even saying goodbye to him? Why was she so unfeminine in terms of her career path? Why didn’t she answer his letters? Why did she lie so much? What made her so callous? It is so hard yo understand her mindset. I fon’t know how she vould sjow so much apathy and callousness to someone who loved her so much that she would repeat her cruel actions twice, knowing it would destroy him. She had no regard gor his feelings or his unwaveringky loyal love for her and obviously felt no loyalty herself, feeling fine to abandon her boyfriend, ignore letters and then jilt him again even as he was in mental decline knowing full well what the likely outcome would be. How someone could be do stonyhearted to a former boyfriend, knowing full-well how deeply he loved her, I cannot understand.
thanks for publishing my thoughts on this dreadful matter. hmmm somehow my message above linked to some other persons avatar and profile which is odd. maybe i put my email address in wrong. anyway im not the person photographed in the icon! i will use my other email address this time. it is sad but i e known lots of people whove committed suicide. the way kristy treated her boyfriend really shocked me though. that girl turned out to be such a disappointment. she had no loyalty or care for someone who loved her and by all accounts wanted to marry her. realky he was far too good for her and she ruined his life. it is such a heartwrenching story and i feel dirty and grieved just thinking about what she did to him and the pain she caused. why didn’t she fo the right thing and marry him like any normal girl would do?
“hello im from tassie and i knew anne who is kristy corbetts mother years ago. when i heard from various people what kristy corbett had done to her boyfriend i was horrified. i cant believe shed turn her back on him and abandon him twice after giving him depression. of course i never spoke about it to anne and danny corbett though. it breaks my heart to see how kristy corbett turned out. so rude and selfish. im no longer in contact with the family now though. how she could have treated her dear boyfriend like that ill never know. now of course we know all about australias war crimes in afghanistan. of course kristy would not have anything directly to do with it shed be too low ranking and unskilled to be linked to the sas but it breaks my heart that she might have facilitated or supported them in any way now we know from the brereton report they were murdering disabled people, amputees, women, unarmed prisoners, and even children and blooding new recruits all for nothing but oil. kristy has been on my mind especially since i heard the brereton report. a quote to end with that i read today. “Military Men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns of Foreign Policy.” Henry Kissinger in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book The Final Days. seems so true in light of afghan and iraq oil wars. of course although kristy destroyed her boyfriends life many military people commit suicide too from ptsd and maybe even guilt at what theyve done and horrors theyve seen and participated in. the world is in such a mess.”
Hi i used to know Kristy Corbett and her friend Kelli-Anne Bone too. Thanks for giving us a space to talk about this terrible story here. Kristy showed so much apathy + lack of consideration + compassion to the love of her life it was mindblowing. She just didn’t care about him at all. How can you be so uncaring to someone who loves you?How can you abandon them TWICE ? She totallybrokehis heart+ destroyed his life. Ican’ t understand her.Lots of people are still hurting today thru her actions + the whole thing is to hard to even bear thinking about.
“now of course we know all about australias war crimes in afghanistan. of course kristy would not have anything directly to do with it shed be too low ranking and unskilled to be linked to the sas but it breaks my heart that she might have facilitated or supported them in any way now we know from the brereton report they were murdering disabled people, amputees, women, unarmed prisoners, and even children and blooding new recruits all for nothing but oil.”
Hello Derwent Waters, I’ve taken a break from commenting here for a while but this is important to note. I am a member of a very small anti-war group on the Sunshine Coast. I heard some vague rumours and tiny fragments of information about the alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. There was nothing big or cohesive, just hazy unsubstantiated rumours. The point is though, if a complete nobody like me, living in a small country town, has heard whisperings about what was going on, there is no way that the members of the Australian military [and the political establishment] would not have been aware of the alleged war crimes documented in the Brereton Report, except by wilful ignorance. I expect that members of the military community like this Kristy Corbett would have had at least some vague idea of what was going on and deliberately turned a blind eye to it, just like people in Nazi Germany didn’t want to know what was happening to the Jews and wilfully ignored it; they “preferred not to know”. I expect that, based on this kind of psyc hology, throughout the Australian military the SAS’ purported crimes were regarded as some kind of open secret that everyone knew about but nobody discussed.
Yes, when I read about people like Kristy Corbett and what she has done, and also things from the Brereton Report like this –
“So systemic were the killings that Special Forces recruits were “blooded” by being ordered to assassinate captured detainees. This level of depravity, confirmed by the report’s author, Paul Brereton, a judge and Army Reserve Major General, cannot be explained as the actions of isolated individuals at the lowest ranks of the armed forces. It points to the brutalisation of the military itself in preparation for criminal new wars….
… It is obviously implausible to claim, as the report does, that the Special Forces atrocities were simply the work of a “small number of patrol commanders, and their protégées” or a “warrior culture” that remained totally unknown above the level of corporals and sergeants. By the report’s own admission, this “culture” began domestically, in military training and indoctrination, not in Afghanistan. “It was in their parent units and sub-units that the cultures and attitudes that enabled misconduct were bred,” the report states.”
==> https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/02/wars-d02.html
and this
“Page 120 of the Brereton report noted an alleged incident during which special forces soldiers “were driving along a road and saw two 14-year-old boys whom they decided might be Taliban sympathisers. They stopped, searched the boys and slit their throats.” Military insiders stated that this was “not an isolated” occurrence. Other anonymous witnesses said it was routine for all of the young men and boys of a village to be found with their throats slashed after an Australian special forces raid.”
==> https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/02/twee-d02.html
and this
“Shina villager Abdul Wali told an Afghani journalist that his elderly father, Abdul Wahid, was unarmed and killed in cold blood. “[My father] was on his own land. He never stole or did anything bad to anyone,” he said. “This is impossible to forgive.”
Jan Mohammad was the young, mentally ill man killed in the SAS raid. Sahki Daad, the victim’s brother-in-law, gave an account of the killing, saying 20-year-old Jan Mohammad was tending a grazing cow when the SAS approached the village.”
==> https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/30/afgh-j30.html
and this
“At what point do the calculated, macabre, executions of innocent human beings perpetrated by the Australian defence force in Afghanistan, provoke the outrage of the liberal media? At what stage in the reporting of the ritualistic slitting of 14-year-old children’s throats, severing of people’s hands, beer guzzling out of the prosthetic legs of the dead, or shooting handcuffed and fleeing civilians in the back for sport, summon some deep reckoning by the Australian liberal press, about the truth of war and what Australia’s military attack on Afghanistan has really been about?
When will the liberal media in Australia give the same level of care to humanising the Afghans who have suffered atrocities at the hands of Australian soldiers as they do to humanising those soldiers? When will Afghans have the chance to speak about their PTSD, their nightmares, their mental health, their broken lives, after the Australian SAS and military came to their country and blew it and them to bits? When will they invite the parents of two children whose throats were carved open by SAS soldiers and whose bodies were then bagged and dumped into a river, into the oh-so-genial newsrooms of the ABC, where journalists politely question ex-SAS soldiers about why it’s a travesty that their mass murdering buddies will have their medals of honour stripped from them for butchering children?”
==> https://redflag.org.au/node/7486
all I can doat the moment is think of this passage from Job 21 at the moment –
“13 Evil people enjoy successful lives and then go peacefully to the grave. 14 They say to God, ‘Leave us alone! We don’t want to know your ways. 15 Who is the Almighty that we should serve him? What would we gain by praying to him?’ 16 The success of the wicked is not their own doing. Their way of thinking is different from mine. 17 Yet how often are the lamps of evil people turned off? How often does trouble come to them? 18 How often are they like straw in the wind or like chaff that is blown away by a storm? 19 It is said, ‘God saves up a person’s punishment for his children.’ But God should punish the wicked themselves so they will know it. 20 Their eyes should see their own destruction, and they should suffer the anger of the Almighty. 21 They do not care about the families they leave behind when their lives have come to an end.”
We truly live in a veil of years at the moment. As a Christian I really do feel like a pilgrim in a wicked stramge land but I have some of tgat wivkedness in me myself. I pray that people like Kristy snd these alleged war criminals will repent and come to know Christ before it is too late for them even if they seem to ho unpunished in this life.
Tasmanian Girl,
Here are some other things that may help you in the Kristy Corbett case. These are from a French Protestant question and answer website I find extremely helpful. The questions have been translated into English with Google Translate, so they read a bit funny but you’ll be able to get the gist of them:
****
Matt 8: 5-13 is difficult for me. A leader of the brutal occupation force (killings – atrocities)
who swore allegiance to the imperial cult (idolater) is healed. [Jeans]
February 17, 2018
No comment
ANSWER: If I understand what you are saying, what is difficult for you in this passage from Matthew is the fact that Jesus agreed to heal a Roman centurion. It is clear that what you say to describe it is true. He had a lot against him … But is not it the same for each of us? In his letter to the Romans (3: 9-
24) Paul writes: “For we have already proved that Jews and non-Jews are all under the rule of sin, as it is written: There is no just, not even one; none are intelligent, none seek God; all turned aside, together they perverted; there is none who does good, not even one; (… ) Indeed, no one will be
considered just in front of him on the basis of the works of the law, since it is through the law that comes the knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God of which the law and the prophets testify has been manifested independently of the law: it is the righteousness of God by faith in JesusChrist for all who believe. There is no difference: all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of
God, and they are freely declared righteous by his grace, by means of the liberation that is in Christ Jesus. The end of this passage is decisive: The justice of God by faith … What the centurion says to Jesus is the expression par excellence of his faith, his confidence in the authority that Jesus has
over illness. This faith is irrelevant to what we have done or not. We do not know what this man became then. But it seems difficult to imagine him continuing his life absolutely as if nothing had happened. A faith like the one he has expressed can only renew the one in which she lives.
****
I am a Christian pacifist. Is my position biblical? I understand that the early church was
strictly pacifist.
December 13, 2018
No comment
ANSWER: It seems important to me to be precise about the terms you use. You call yourself a pacifist, that is to say, a supporter of peace. If this positioning concerns human relations or politics between the states of the world, I believe that it is difficult to deny that it is biblical (Romans 12, 18, 14.19, Mark 9. 50
…). Now, the spiritual life of the Christian is a life of struggle, but not against human beings
(Ephesians 6:12). As Christians, what I believe characterizes us more than pacifism is non-violence and non-power. The first Christians, as you recall, refused military service. Still, non-violence has nothing to do with cowardice or passivity. In the event of a risk of non-assistance to a person in
danger, for example, it seems to me that if violence is the only recourse, one must be ready to use it,even if it means humbling oneself before the Lord.
The latest events in France have led the Protestant Federation of France to make a statement. I
invite you to consult it, to see if you feel in agreement with: http://www.protestants.org/index.php?
id=23&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=4320&tx_ttnews[year]=2018&tx_ttnews[month]=12&cHash=
5c90555e92
***
My company works partly in an immoral sector (arms trade – military contracts). As a
Christian – should I resign and work elsewhere? [Stephane]
January 31, 2019
No comment
ANSWER: I’m not very comfortable with the idea of telling you what you need to do, Stéphane. What does your conscience tell you when you pray and submit your work situation to the Lord? The Bible text seems clear to me that violence must be denied in all these aspects. Now, I can not take God’s place in what to make you choose. If, as you continue your journey in this company, you feel the discomfort grow (because I think it is already a little there, otherwise you would not ask the question), I think you will need really ask yourself the question in prayer and under the sole gaze of the Lord.
****
I hope these answers help you. Once again, I promise I will pray for Kristy Corbett’s repentance, forgiveness and her salvation. I will also pray that she one day has the courage to seek reconciliation with the family she has harmed so much.
Here the French pastors discuss
the topic of suicide, in case it helps someone:
I knew a person who had always been brought up in religion and who put an end to his life in
a brutal way. Is she going or is she in hell? [Alexander]
November 27, 2017
No comment
ANSWER: This idea is widespread. I remember that a family who had called me to celebrate the funeral of one
of its members had hid me that he had committed suicide, for fear of being refused by me, and
probably thinking that the presence of a pastor would automatically ensure the departure of the deceased to the sky .. Double mistake!
The Bible tells us about some suicides: that of Judas of course, remorseful after betraying Jesus. Or Ahitophel, counselor of Absalom, because he had not been listened to, and he feared that his master would lose the game against David (2 Samuel 17,23). He who puts an end to his life can no longer
stand to live because all that founds, justified in his eyes his existence collapses without recourse.
What distinguishes Judas from Peter (who has also betrayed Jesus by denying him) are the tears of repentance that he has shed. Peter accepted that he could not justify himself and open himself to the Lord’s forgiveness. But let us beware of the eternal fate of the one who could no longer stand to live and who has
succumbed to despair, even if he has been “brought up in religion” (religion protects nothing, which
saves it is faith!). Let’s keep judgment. The Bible reminds us that the last word on all life and all
being belongs to God. Hell, for the one who committed suicide, it was first his life of suffering, his
unanswered questions, his loneliness, his depression, his impasses, what do I know yet.
And even a sincere believer can succumb to despair. Hell for those who remain, relatives, is the guilt that entails such a gesture “If I could listen to it, help him, understand his suffering” … But of all these hell, the Lord can we go out, as he brought out his son from hell.
I am sorry to return to this subject again but I was thinking of one of my Christian heroines, Clara Immerwahr, who committed suicide in 1915. Far too little known by most people today, she was a Jewess from Breslau who converted and became a Christian pacifist.
She and her husband were chemists and developed a way of extracting nitrogen to produce artificial fertilizer. Through this work, millions of people around the world have been saved from famine.
However, after doing work that has saved uncountable millions of lives, her husband turned to producing the first poisoned gas for the military in WW1. She pleaded with her husband to stop this immoral work but he refused to do do. Eventually, she committed suicide. Most people interpret this as her final, despairing protest against her husband’s work in creating weapons of war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Immerwahr
https://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/7815041/100th_Anniversary_Clara_Immerwahrs_Death.html
https://joyexcel.com/2019/03/17/clara-immerwahr-a-tragic-heroine-of-science/
We are not to judge but it seems to me that Clara Immerwahr is likely to go to heaven.
I also think of the thousands of despairing citizens of destroyed cities like Koenigsberg, many if them elderly, who took their own lives at the end of WW2 rather than face the barbarity of the invading Russian forces and the trauma of starvation. I don’t know if they made a morally right or wrong choice (I suspect it was wrong) but surely God will forgive them given the circumstances and those otherwuse-faithful abd devout Christians who today commit suicide through illness (depression).
God bless.
Hi! Thanks for talking about the Kristy Corbett case in the comments. I am from Tasmania. Kristy Corbett’s name is mud around Hobart because of the way she mistreated her boyfriend and pushed him toward suicide. It was disgusting, I won’t go into any more details as they are discussed by other posters above.
(Also now that the ABC has revealed more about Australia’s alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, we can see too what kind of company Kristy Corbett likes to keep and the environment she enjoys. This is what feminism has brought us to.)
It is so hard to forgive and forget – it is an enormous challenge. He was too good for Kristy. I pray every day to be able to forgive her in my heart.
Yes, I can confirm and reiterate Kristy Corbett is notorious and greatly disliked out here in Hobart’s northern suburbs because of the pain she has caused.
Just to summarise what others have said above – she left the guy who loved her without so much as a goodbye to go interstate and join the RAAF. At the time though she was working as a shopgirl at the Harris Scarfe department store in Moonah and lived with her parents in Claremont, a poor working class area consisting of a mixture of housing commission homes and private residences. Her boyfriend was from the working class like her but he was very gentle and kind and a top student and athlete. He was warmhearted and extremely caring with a great sense of humour with those who knew him well. He was also a deeply devout, very conservative Bible-believing / calvinistic Christian and churchgoer with very strong morals. He and Kristy Corbett knew each other from school and sport and they were extremely close. He would visit her at Harris Scarce every lunch hour. He constantly told her he loved her and she knew he wanted to marry her. Suddenly she just vanished interstate. He later learned she had joined the RAAF. She had never once confided him in her plans. She just disappeared one day.
Kristy Corbett did not consider him good enough for her because he was not confident enough / assertive enough – as she later told a friend. This was probably because he was extremely quiet, introverted, shy. However she didn’t even give him a real chance. To make matters worse, he was a Christian antimilitary activist so he felt doubly betrayed at the way his girlfriend had left him without even bothering to say goodbye to him and that in doing so she had betrayed one of his core beliefs. He had become a Christian pacifist earlier, as a teen in the 1990s, due to Scriptural statements like man being made in the image of God, the prophetic announcement that swords would be beaten into ploughshares and Jesus’ declarations that ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and His rebuke of Peter for cutting of the servant’s ear in His defence and His subsequent prophetic curse that ‘Those who live by the sword shall due by the sword’.
‘Soldaten sind Mörder’ as Kurt Tucholsky famously said and all that.
Kristy’s utter betrayal of his values and his trust and the fact that she had not even bothered to confide in him at all before abandoning him triggered severe anxiety / depression in him. He was already a very nervy person at times so he evidently had some degree of an anxiety disorder but this utterly callous rejection by the girl he loved so dearly massively exacerbated it.
A few years passed by. He moved to the mainland because he had to get away from all the painful memories she had left him with in Tasmania. He rose up high at an IT company, become quite influential and powerful there. He later worked in an important role for a Christian charity organisation. All the time though he was in a downward spiral of anxiety and depression because of what she had done to him. Despite his tendency to be reclusive on the one hand, on the other he traveled the world going to Europe numerous times over the period of just a few short years. Kristy Corbett missed out on all of that which she could have enjoyed as his wife.
The way she had just abandoned him preyed on his mind. He confided that because she was so extremely precious to him, he felt emptiness and desolation. She had completely destroyed his self esteem.
She made no effort whatsoever to contact him even once in all that time – not even a phone call, letter, or email yet Kristy had been the person he loved and trusted above all others.
Later on he finally obtained her email address and got in touch to try to woo her back. He still loved her despite feeling completely betrayed by her. She was arrogant, rude and dismissive in response. When she realised how sick he was with depression / anxiety she did absolutely nothing to help him. She didn’t lift a finger. Another friend told her how sick he was because of the way she had left him earlier yet she did nothing now. It would have taken very little effort to visit him or at least stay in touch. Instead she talked about how she had been seeing someone else behind his back and how they would soon be ‘living together’. Soon, she abruptly and callously cut contact again, despite knowing her friend had been reaching out to her desperate for help. He had never shown anything other than pure live and kindness towards her.
Typical of people with anxiety / depression he went into a downward spiral all he could think of was the girl he loved who couldn’t care less about him. It was a kind of tunnel vision. All he wanted was his girl back although she had cheated on him, abandoned him twice, betrayed his deepest values on war and sexual purity, and made not the slightest effort to help him when he was at his lowest ebb. He also felt utterly humiliated when he realised how she had used him and how every effort to win her back was rejected or met with coldness. His downward spiral continued as she never once made any effort to respond to him again and that led to his downfall. She was solely and totally to blame for what happened; of that no-one has any doubt.
She hadn’t actually committed a crime so there was nothing the police could do. She was probably guilty of some kind of culpable negligence but his parents were too kindly, too forgiving, too Christian to sue her.
I think the lessons I have learned from this are just how people who can seem ‘nice’ on the surface can be utterly callous underneath. As per the comments above Kristy Corbett could easily be described as lighthearted and ‘happy go lucky’ and even kind at a superficial level. Then you realise as others have stated that she is all surface – a supremely selfish, immature, unempathic person lay underneath who thought only of herself and would not inconvenience herself to help another, even to help someone she knew loved her unreservedly and who had constantly told her so.
In terms of the military, on a personal note I am very much a staunch right winger and conservative myself, like many Tasmanians. Like many Tasmanians I am also very strongly antimilitary. Some people in Tassie hold that sentiment because they are Greenies. Others are actually conservative though including me. One example of how I feel that way can be seen because I’m a fan of the right wing East London working class street punk musical style ( not the dark side of the genre ) and so it is that kind of conservative right wing working class antiwar antimilitary sentiment that expresses how I feel as in the poem recited at the beginning of this compilation album – https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6qDSGCxLJBI
To quote the key lyrics that really hit me –
Soldiers wearing pin-stripe suits
Want us to march in marching boots
Army life they say is fun
Clear the streets of all the young
We want you to go to war
And kill another country’s poor
We are the class who fight their wars
You know the kids that their kind hates
Cos we live on council estates
So they`ve invented a new state game
Playing soldiers is the name
That poem neatly sums up how I feel about the military. Of course people who actually join the military are too indoctrinated to see it for what it is since they are fed all kinds of tripe about patriotism, sacrifice, mateship, elitism, honour, duty, and other empty words and rhetorical rubbish.
Enough about me. I know many other right wing working class people around Hobart who feel the same way – people who are otherwise staunchly conservative Liberal Party voters who despised Little Johnny Howard’s forays into Iraq and Afghanistan as the USA’s lackey and the general increasing focus on Anzac Day, military spending and the like. Tasmanians are much more antiwar than right wingers on the mainland I think maybe with the exception of Melbournites. Very few people from schools – even poor working class state-run schools – are dupes enough to join the military as they know they’d just be cannon fodder for the politicians so Kristy Corbett is an anomaly in that regard too. Hard to know if she was stupid or just ambitious and saw Iraq as a way to further her career. Is she using the RAAF or is the RAAF using her?
She joined the RAAF at the time when everyone knew the reason for invading Iraq was bogus. She evidently just didn’t care about the destruction of that country and its people. One interesting thing is that she always reiterated to people – long before she joined the RAAF – that she had no prejudice against anyone, be they gay, foreign, Muslim, whatever. We can only conclude therefore that Kristy Corbett did not join the RAAF for ideological reasons but purely and simply for career advancement. To be Frank, she was too shallow to have thought much about ideology or to know or care much about Islam. Apparently she simply didn’t care one way or the other about the people being bombed. Her only creed was individualism which she frequently trumpeted. This individualism had mutated into an extreme selfishness where she held absolutely no regard for the lives and welfare of others. If she didn’t care about the guy who loved her whom she knew so well and she was prepared to abandoned him for a second time knowing he was suicidal and she was the one person who could have helped, then what hope would the impersonal civilian victims of the RAAF bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan have for any empathy from her?
As others have mentioned above we now know about the RAAF’s phosphorous bombing of Fallujah. The RAAF has a very dark history with its direct involvement in some of the most infamous alleged war crimes history including the fire bombings of Dresden, Konigsberg, as mentioned above and I think Hamburg and numerous other German cities as people have also mentioned above.
We also now know from the ongoing ABC revelations about the alleged butchery of civilians by the SAS and the subsequent attempts at a military cover up. The one that shocked and sickened me the most was the revelation a few weeks ago that the SAS executed a severely handicapped man, a crime they callously referred to amongst themselves as the ‘Village Idiot Murder’. This is the works in which Kristy Corbett evidently feels so happy.
Along with this, she apparently did end up having the affair with the other man – his name was Shane – I believe it’s Shane Cunningham or something along those lines. They ended up ‘living together’ as Kristy Corbett had boasted she would. I know this would have sickened him, not just because she was cheating on him with another man, but because he hated the whole concept of living in sin / sex before marriage as utterly immoral. He would have been heartbroken that she had sexually degraded herself by becoming a fornicator and openly living immorally.
I’ve heard that Kristy Corbett and Shane Cunningham or whatever his name is did eventually marry and that she now goes by the name Kristy Cunningham or Kristy Corbett Cunningham or something similar.
I do ponder if Kristy Cunningham ever wonders what her life would have been like if she’d stayed in Tasmania and married her boyfriend. First and foremost he would still be with us and his mental health would have been fine. He would have been a great community leader and manager. She could have traveled the world with him. She would have avoided the military culture and not been complicit in the crimes we now know were committed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Much more importantly Kristy Cunningham could have been a moral and upright woman and actually been respected by others and had a devoted, loving and loyal husband to care for her and lead her through life.
The thing is though that in recent years his parents – with whom he was extremely close – have both been extremely ill. His mother nearly died at one point and his father nearly died multiple times from a multiplicity of very serious issues. What kind of support would Kristy Cunningham have given if she was disloyal to her boyfriend and abandoned him in the good times? There is no way she would have stayed by his side as a loyal and supportive spouse when his parents were so ill.
The thing I have learnt from this tale is that it has been a wake up call about human nature – someone can seem lighthearted, friendly and full of happiness and joy and friendliness on the surface like Kristy Cunningham did yet have no empathy and be utterly callous and selfish underneath. She lacked true compassion even for those who loved her most deeply. I didn’t realise how people who seemed nice friendly people on the surface could be so selfish. With her it was all about self gratification – she did absolutely nothing to help hr best friend even when she knew how deperately in need he was.
What would the RAAF think if they knew how disloyal and untrustworthy she has proven to be to her friend?
Whether it was due to immaturity or just plain selfishness it was a wake up call to me about the depths of human sin and depravity. All we can do is pray for her and pray that we ourselves can forgive her.
Yes I have known Kristy Corbett for many years & so I know what she did.
Kristy Corbett is an utterly selfish & immature & untrustworthy person.
I will never respect the Australian Defence Force while she has a job with the RAAF.
I have known a few other suicide cases around Hobart too.
It always drives me to despair& a feeling of hollowness to hear of one.
Reading these accounts helps me.
It is cathartic.
“In my years as a minister, I have known several Christians who have committed suicide. The beautiful, intelligent young student who had everything going for her; the middle-aged family man; the minister whose life and ministry went horribly wrong. Even to think about these is heart-breaking. Suicide is a dreadful thing. ”
I’m sorry to read of your own experiences.
All my love to you and those affected.
Tasmanian Girl.
Yeah, I know the Corbett family really well too. I cried when I heard what Kristy did to her partner and I realised what she was really like. No she did not marry a Cunningham. She currently lives in Townsville and is involved with the RAAF up there. She has no conscience or remorsd it seems over what she did to her boyfriend or Australian actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Some people get all their rewards in this world and she’s one of them.
Please, please pray for her.
Further to my last post, I don’t know how Kristy can be smiling joyously in photos in Townsville after all she has done. She has blood up to her neck.
I am reminded of this famous quote which I have often pondered:
” I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.” – Major General Smedley Butler, USMC
Knowing Kristy Corbett and her parents personality just makes it sting more so please, please pray for her that she might repent, come to know Christ and be saved!
God bless you Pastor tiis New Year’s Eve!
Sorry, I was becoming very emotional before and I was starting to make lots of typos, etc. Apologies, Pastor.
I guess it just goes to show how one selfish, unChristian young woman can tear a family apart all because her loyal, loving boyfriend wasn’t assertive/aggressive/attractive enough for her and she couldn’t care less about his love and devotion to her and shr certainly had absolutely no regard for what her betrayal and abandonment did to his mental health. She betrayed the one person who truly loved her and never once glanced back. I am appalled such disloyal people, so markedly devoid of love and empathy, exist and serve in our military. If only Kristy Corbett coukd at the very least apologise and make amends for what she has done by failing on her duyy of care and abandonkng her boyfriend for the second time when he was at his most vulnerabke. But that would be too hard and take too much effort for someone like her who thinks only of herself. She just doesn’t care, even about those who loved her.
Just to add one more statement, Pastor, if Kristy Corbett could at least apologise for what she did AND start making amends, I would at least feel some degree of respect for her but that would take too much maturity and remorse, I am afraid. Instead, she is swanning around Townsville, living the life of Riley with her RAAF colleagues, leaving the test of us to suffer because of her actions. If she would apologise and make an effort to make amends, I reiterate, it would help so much and I would even respect that and accept that in a forgiving manner as a step towards reconciliation. As it is now, she runs from her responsibilities and doesn’t care who she hurts or destroys, even when that person was the guy who loved her and wanted to marry her.
Thanks for letting me have my say before, Pastor. I was very emotional and upset sering a photo of Kristy Corbett in Townsville grinning with clearly no remorse while knowing the pain she caused in Logan QLD and Tasmania.
The craziest thing about her is she rejected her boyfriend for “not being confident enough” to be attractive to her but abandoning him without so much as a goodbye did more to destroy his self confidence than anything else. She was the suthor of it all. It just shows her total immaturity if she was hudging peolle by their self confidence and not by their morals. She was so cruel.
I meant what I said before. She needs to apologise to his family face to face and make amends for what she did to him. Only then could I find any kind of respect for her.
Writing all of this down is definitely healing for me. Thanks again for providing this space Pastor to talk about this.
“She hadn’t actually committed a crime so there was nothing the police could do. She was probably guilty of some kind of culpable negligence but his parents were too kindly, too forgiving, too Christian to sue her.”
Nathan yes but also if it was deemed a crime the military police would have to become involved since Kristy Corbett was a member of the RAAF at the time. A civil proceeding would probably have been an easier course to take.
Thanks for this. The thought of Kristy Corbett grinning and swanning around the tropical resorts of Townsville sickens me. 🙁 🙁 :(:( 🙁
She turned her back on her boyfriend – a good, decent Christian young man – and left him without so much as a goodby to join the RAAF. Never once did she write. Later when he got in touch and revealed how sick he had become – with worry about HER – Kristy abandoned him again. Not once did she lift a finger to help him. Instead she boasted about her new boyfriend named Shane and how they would soon be “living together”. She is a user and abuser.
She DESTROYED his self-esteem and MENTAL HEALTH and his life all because he loved her and she felt such contempt for him she couldn’t even say goodbye or keep in touch because he “wasn’t assertive enough” for her.
She failed in the most basic duty of care to the guy who wanted to MARRY her because he LOVED her. She COULDN’T care less about him or his poor elderly parents. Never ONCE did she even attempt to follow up with him. It makes me so angry even today that she would SPIT IN THE FACE of the one guy who GENUINELY LOVED HER and wanted to marry her so much. She is all smiles on the surface, grinning like a carefree monkey which fools people, but underneath she is a self-centred egoist who cares for noone but herself and did not care what she did to destroy her soulmate’s self-esteem and eventually life.
She is cruel and remorseless. She is the kind of person who destroys lives with no remorse. No wonder she wanted to join the air force and destroy lives in Iraq. How could a young woman be so cruel to the guy who loved her and had given his heart to her? He had gone out of his way to show her every kondness imaginable, visiting her every day at work, teaching her to run and looking after her and being an empathetic friend and supporter through thick and thin and all the time she was USING him. 🙁 I am sorry, I can’t write any more. It breaks my heart. It is just that he loved hr so much and shd used him and drstroyed him, and she didn’t feel a care in the world. She didn’t even try to help him and he had onky ever shown her kindness, loyalty and love.
I am very emotional and almost crying as I weite this this morning but when I think of how Kristy Corbett treated her boyfriend and utterly abandoned him teice without so much as a goodbye it tears my heart to pieces and now I see her in this photo at a RAAF function in Townsville grinning and seemingly carefree and not showing the slightest sign of guilt or remorse –
https://raafatownsville.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/vol20-no6.pdf
How can someone who looks so strikingly beautiful on the outside have such an uncaring heart and be so lacking in empathy that she would abandon her best friend and drive him to the pont where he cpuld no longer cope? She utterly failed to be “her brother’s keeper”. All he craved was her companionship and he had been utterly faithful to her all that time since he was the loyalest of friends to her and he loved her with an unfattjomable deepness of affection. I don’t understand her at all. She just didn’t care at all. What kind of mindset and heart must Kristy have to be like that? Your denom. must be right about “total depravity”. This grinning, stunningly beautiful-looking girl is also obviously prepared to kill for her country too or at least support and facilitate those who do the killing and are now known to commit all kinds of horrible atrocities too as posters above have discussed. She was so cruel to her best friend and knew what she was doing to him was killing him though and she knew she had given him depression by leaving him the first time and not bothering to write or even pick up the phone for almost five years and then she did exactly the same thing all over again when he did contact her and tried to reconcile and be her boyfriend again even though she knew she had made him sick and had destroyed him emotionally and psychologically. She was hard hearted towards him and did not lift a finger to help when she realised how sick she had made him by abandoning him and when she realised how truly deeply he loved her and it was all smiles and laughs but not a hint of true compassion from her. She made no attempt to go and see him in person or talk to him when he needed her so badly and just wanted some earnest honest communication and her love. She even boasted how she would soon be “living with” some other guy. Again, no guilt or hesitation to indulgence in the filthy sin of fornication. I don’t know but maybe she really thought she was better than him even though he was a devout Christian, top academic and sportsman and a truly compassionate human being. However he “wasn’t assertive enough for her” she claimed so she rejected him callously and dismissively showing her total lack of maturity and empathy and didn’t give a care how sick she made him and couldn’t be bothered to confide in him, her best friend, her plans to join the RAAF or even bother to say goodbye when she left him. She was totally superficial and treated him like dirt IMHO. The fact he was part of a Christian anti-military group made things worse and if course she was using his sporting skill to get her own fitness up to join pass the fitness tests to join the RAAF we all suspect. She is a user and emotional abuser without remorse. She has caused so much suffering and pain in his family and our community.
She is obviously unsaved so all we can do is pray that she willl turn to Christ and confess her sins and learn that even she can be forgived if she truly repents and hands her life over to Christ. I hope God calls to her one day and she learns of the Gospel and that it is not too late for her despite all the suffering she has caused if she truly repents and turns her life around and seeks Christ’s forgiving love.
Thank you for listening to me as a pour my heart out like a ninny. I was very “triggered”, as the silly SJW crowd would say, to see that photo of Kristy grinning unrepentantly and I needed to vent at all the pain and suffering this girl has caused for us all. I agree with that passage from Job posted above. At least I am very grateful Jesus tells us there will be no marriage in heaven so all the suffering hurt and rejection caused by romantic relationships will be finished for all time. Seeing the extreme pain and hurt Kristy has caused through her selfish choices there is no way I wil ever marry and I certainly won’t “live with” anyone or indulge in wicked pre-marital sex.
God bless you, Pastor. May God wake Krisry Corbett up to herself and the pain and suffering she has caused. I wonder if she could live her life again would she have looked after her friend better and given him a real chance and embraced his love and support for her? I’d like to think she will one day feel that way. Her heart was like stone and she was wilfully blind to his love and loyalty and neglected her true and faithful friend in search of worldly pleasures and glory in tge RAAF and with other men. It is a truly heartbreaking story of one girl’s sinfulness, pride and selfish, individualist behaviour that has hurt so many. Like the person said above she really needs to apologise to his family face to face and domehow make amends for there to be any peace and reconciliation and respect for her in our community. God bless again. Sally
Sorry for the typos. I am as bad as everyone else posting on here with my fumbly fingers. I wish you had a spellcheck underliner on here to pick up mistakes. I am still emotionally raw after seeing that photo of Kristy Corbett enjoying life guilt-free. The Job passage is very helpful – it tells me the writer of Job, and the God who inspired him, understands. As I said above I am glad that one day there will be no more romantic relationships too and that marriage will cease to exist in the afterlife. I am going to go for a walk now to try and relax and calm down and not think of all the hurt Kristy Corbett has caused us. Thanks. God bless. Sally
“stunningly beautiful-looking girl is also obviously prepared to kill for her country”
She’ll be a “stunningly beautiful-looking” piece of cannon-fodder for the Military-Industrial Complex to throw away if China and America really go at it one day.
From what I read here of her utter failure to care for her (ex-)boyfriend, it really goes to show how beauty is only skin-deep. Give me a gentle, compassionate girl, full of love for Christ and good Biblical morals, and genuine love and empathy for her fellow man than an empty-headed, shallow-hearted beauty queen like Kristy trying to act like a male by joining the military. She is obviously willing to sell her body and soul to act as a dupe/pawn of the politicians and elitists in their petty little oil wars. She is also obviously only interested in herself as she evidently didn’t care for her boyfriend or anyone else, given her total lack of regard for his welfare.
This type joins the military for the career opportunities and rewards it brings them. They don’t care about the suffering they inflict on others, be it former boyfriends or the third worlders whose countries they bomb. They are too interested in enjoying the military lifestyle and their careers to care that what they are doing hurts other people, often horrifically. I know this type of military careerist only too well. Huge egos but very shallow and often not very bright. Without them, there would be no one to fight our wars.
Well, I’m sorry but I think Kristy was an arrogant little thing from the emails that have leaked, saying things like how she was seeing that Shane behind D’s back and boasting how she was not yet “living with him” (but soon would be), saying she might be able to meet up for a coffee for an hour if she is ever in town and arguing she “might just” consider going out with D again if he were much, much more assertive. That all just reeks of arrogance to me. That and the stuff about how she sees herself as an “individual” (even though in reality she is just part of the military collective!) tells me all I need to know about her – totally selfish, immature, feminist and lacking in any kind of gratitude, appreciation or ability to appreciate love.
No, the thing is these very pretty girls like Kristy – and I’ll admit she is strikingly pretty – is that they are often very shallow because they have it easy in life with men fawning over them. They get used to “using and abusing” them as one of you said about her. As a result, she didn’t recognise – or care – that D truly loved her, unlike all the other boys. She was dismissive of his heartfelt love. He cleatly cared for her more than just her looks but she was so arrogant she either initially didn’t recognise or was impervious to this. Certainly later on she proved she just didn’t care about him by the fact she didn’t even say goodbye or bother to visit him and make amends when she gave him depression through her absence and neglect. She was so arrogant she didn’t even bother writing to him for five long years after she joined the RAAF(!) What kind of girl would do that?
What kind of hirl joins yhe RAAF anyway and learns to shoot guns and conditions herself to kill people, wear camouglflage, march atound the desert and allow herself to be propagandised and brainwashed to be part of a collective? Why does she reject her natural gender role when she is clearly straight (or at least not gay)? Why does she try yo prove hersekf by living like a boy and showing she is prepared to kill,when she says in her emails she has no bias against anyone? (Does this mean there is nothing personal in killing, that letting the RAAF bomb peasants is just another day at the office for her, with no regrets?) Why did she join the RAAF at a time when everyone knew the WMDs were false? Gojng off to join the military like that at any time is bad but it was an especially cynical moment when they were invading poor Iraq on false pretences just to prop up the US-Aus relationship. There is something very insincere about Kristy in all of this. She just diesn’t seem to care about anything or anyone except herself. 🙁
The recent photo of her grinning like a village idiot in Townsville just confirms this. She lacks any remorse whatsoever for all the pain and hurt and misery she has caused. Good luck getting her “to apologise or make amends” as many of you are asking (prove me wrong, Kristy, if you ever read this.)
The way she treated D with his deep, deep-hearted love for her is beyond shallow and cruel. He yearned for her and she didn’t ecen give him a chance. Perhaps if she ever matures and comes to realise what real love – from the heart – really is, she will realise and repent. His love for her will never die though she did not deserve it. She should have at least tried when she rralised his heart overflowed with genuine, deepest of deep, heartwarming love for her. Instead she rendered him apart.
Thank you. I agree this whole discussion is extremely helpful. I am very grateful. I have known a number of people who have committed suicide: two workmates, Ricky and Matt, and a local shopkeeper. Also another colleague’s daughter tried to kill herself by throwing herself off a bridge due to university study pressure, but, thankfully, she survived.
You feel so hollow inside when anything like this happens and feel a disgust for our whole society or the system/institution or people who drove them that way, like the university academics in the aforementioned case.
The only other constructive thing I can say is that in s scene of the film about the life of Martin Luther starring Joseph Fiennes, Martin talks about having compassion for suicide victims in one wonderful scene. I don’t know if these thoughts are based in Martin’s historical writings anywhere but most of the film is historically highly accurate, so probably. At any rate, it is a wonderful film that I emphaticallhy recommend to one and all.
Hi. Yes I also agree this whole discussion is really helpful. It is therapeutic to talk about tgese things. A man in my street, Ed, took his own life. I think it was because of business pressures but I don’t know all the facts. It was a terrible shock to us that he went so suddenly and we would never see the familiar sight of his face again.
I remember that scene from the “Martin Luther” film! Yes it is one of the best moments from one of the most heartwarming and beautiful films I’ve ever seen. God’s words really burnt into my heart when Luther preached in that movie. God bless.
A few people, including myself, have taken the opportunity to write to the RAAF Association/Social Club in Townsville, asking them if they would please consider withdrawing Kristy Corbett’s membership in light of her past actions as she brings their organisation into disrepute.
I am yet to hear back from them.
Sorry I ranted a bit before pastor. I realise anger is a sin and I repent. 🙁 I just think of how much Kristy was cherished and deeply loved with a genuine and heartfelt, deeply loyal love by D and what she did to him in return. Jilting, abandonment and not even a goodbye, not lifting a finger to help him when she knew she’d given him depression, not even taking time out of work to visit him, then more abandonment. He wanted to share his heart with her and she’d shut him down completely. His sin was idolising her too much and she was an atheist as far as anyone knows. He adored her though and she used him and discarded him without a second thought until he contacted her again and she realised she’d destroyed him psychologically and then she just abandoned him again. So much for love and commitment from her. Not even a hint of appreciation for the guy who loved her and earnestly wanted to spend his life with her as his wife. She squandered God’s gift of a soulmate and companion who cherished her and only wanted the best for her and she destroyed him. It is a devastating, heartrending sequence of events.
Kristy should have definitely married D. The way she left him without so much as a goodbye was the cruellest, most selfish act of rejection I have ever heard about. She devastated him and he was a resilient person with a quiet inner strength up until that point! (He needed it for his anti-military church work, which she aldo betrayed by joining the Raaf, of all things. Another betrayal of his core values and a smack in the moth from her!) I hope she never marries as a result; someone who treats love with so much contempt and greed doesn’t deserve a man, I’m afraid to say. She is all bad news. She needs to reach out and try to undo the damage she has done to whatever degree is still possible, I agree. I don’t know if I can see that happening though but I’d really, really like to think Kristy will surprise me one day by showing remorse and seeking to make amends. Maybe she will if she ever decides to grow up.
She rejected the guy who loved her and was totally devoted to her for absolutely no good reason and knew for certain, at least the second time around, what the consequences were likely to be but still pursued that selfish course of action. Now she needs to face up to the consequences of her actions and undo what she still can.
One thing I find surprising is that, given she was going out with a Christian antiwar activist when she joined the raaf, it is a wonder they recruited her at all. I would’ve thought that would’ve been a red flag to them. She must’ve proved her blind allegiance to the state somehow.
Anyway I had a look at that pdf. Her photo is small but I zoomed in and, yeah, she has the looks of a supermodel. What a shame that such a beautiful woman has a heart that is obviously either very very flippant or very very uncaring to fail to reciprocate what sounds by all accounts like a very deep and sincere love from her boyfriend and to fail to visit him or care for him in anyway when her abandonment made him sick. Your story is heartbreaking, guys.
I found out my forebear Joe committed suicide when I was researching my ancestry. It was a secret in my family and was never discussed and not even my parents knew about it. His family were all Christian so I hope je was too and that you are right Pastor and he is forgiven and saved. God bless.
An old friend of mine committed suicide. Thanks for your article. It gives me hope.
I’m a Tasmanian in my early forties. This page is the best discussion of the Kristy Corbett incident I’ve seen.
The article I ha e linked below says people actually act far less assertively if they fear being rejected, so she really got things the wrong way around.
Her boyfriend was afraid of losing her so he was acting more passively then she went and left him anyway which must have been a devastating for him. To think she didn’t write to him or call him for five years and didn’t drop into visit him when she was home seeing her parents must have been incredibly painful, especially if one considers what is written by others above, namely that previously he would visit her every day on his lunchbreak. There is a real disparity in levels of loyalty there, to say the least.
The article is short and well worth reading:
1. https://www.psychologistanywhereanytime.com/mobile/relationships_psychologist/psychologist_rejection.htm
One should also consider what must have been going through his mind in terms of uncertainty too: for all he knew, Kristy Corbett could have married in those five years, had babies, found herself in danger in a war zone, suffered physical or psychological wounds in said war zone or been forced by the military to commit some unethical act (which would be a nightmare to a Christian pacifist like him) and he just wouldn’t know what was going on. His fears and uncertainty over what the woman he loved was doing would have been nightmarish if he was one of those loyal, devoted souls who just couldn’t forget about her, move on and find a new girlfriend. He would have been consumed by constant worry over Kristy’s wellbeing over the five years they were out of contact, especially with the possibility she would end up in one of those dangerous war zones.
Kristy Corbett’s own apparent lack of empathy and caring for him seems to extend out: she doesn’t seem able to comprehend other people could care and feel concern and love for her either, so she doesn’t bother to communicate at any stage what is happening in her life as she apparently doesn’t think people care, not even the guy who obviously loves her!
Other people on here have mentioned Kristy Corbett’s apparent immaturity for her age. I think they are onto something. Her actions seem emotionally stunted and juvenile. There seems to be no ability to form a depth of commitment there, like she has a kind of arrested development and still acts like a teenager. One just wishes she had displayed loyalty and love in reciprocal measures to that which she was receiving from D. and had stayed with him and married him. He would clearly have been very good for her as an emotional support and role model, given his maturity, intelligence and spiritual depth/religious commitment, all of which she evidently lacked. With her giving him such a commitment, his assertiveness would have returned and he would have been a good leader and stable, role model husband and head of household for her. In short, one can say, he would have been able to give her everything she lacked. He needed her but she did not realise how much she needed him.
Instead though she tore his heart apart with her flippant, immature ways and her lack of understanding about how deeply he was concerned for her wellfare. She shpuld have at least given him a chance and their love for each other would have grown from there. As it was, she sabotaged him and shut fown the possibilities of a relationship from the outset, with a devastating effect on his mental health. She refused (probably wilfully) to understand or care how sensitive, sincere and deeply heartfelt his love for her was.
Thank you. Your erudite reply really helps me process my grief over how Kristy Corbett treated D and all that subsequently unfolded. That psych. article about people who fear rejection becoming less assertive makes a lot of sense.
I think everything you’ve written hits the nail on the head, especially when you npte that D must have been so worried not knowing what Kristy was doing or where she was for so long. That just illustrates to me better than anything else how selfish she is, not to let him know about her welfare by a simple act of communication when he was worried sick about her for five long years yet, like you say, he checked in on her every single day when she worked at Harris Scarfe in Moonah. She knew exactly how much he loved and adored her and she couldn’t even be bothered calling him to tell him she was alright and, later on, she made no effort to visit him when he was depressed and sick, even when she had caused that sickness. He would have rushed to her side if their positions had been reversed. He just could never let go of his love for her even after she abandoned him to join the RAAF without even saying goodbye. He loved her so much. It is truly heartbreaking.
He and his parents were such nice Christian people too and she has never even met with them to apologise or try to make amends before it is too late as people on here have implored she should. His parents had been so kind to her in the past, too. I can’t understand her. Kristy was loved so warmly and sincerely and wholeheartedly, she should have married D. She didn’t even try to love him. It breaks my heart. She couldn’t even be bothered writing to him once she joined the RAAF. It is so hard to let that sink in. What kind of uncaring apathetic girl would be like that to a guy she knew perfectly well adored her? What is wrong with her?
I hope she never marries. It is terrible of me to say that but she doesn’t deserve a man, given how she treated D. He deserved so much better. His love for her deserved her caring and affection in response. As I said it breaks my heart.
Sorry, I was rambling and repeating myself a lot just then. It is easy to get emotional over things like this. It is just that D loved Kristy so much and he was such a decent, caring , warmhearted young Christian guy she should have married him instead of treating him so dismissively and with so little regard or care. I can’t understand her. His heart was so overflowing with genuine, gentle, caring love for her. Why couldn’t she have given herself to the one who truly loved her?
Now she is too much of a coward to face up to what she has done and apologise and try to make amends. Why can’t she get some courage and some self-respect and do the right thing, face-to-face to those kindly people she hurt?
The heartache she has caused to the people who loved her the most is unbelievable.
I can contribute a lot to this discussion both about suicide in general and about Kristy Corbett’s actions in particular. I’m originally from Tasmania and I went to uni with Kristy Corbett and I knew her well. I haven’t kept in touch with her but I knew she was responsible for driving her boyfriend to suicide but I didn’t know the details so thanks to previous posters for clarifying.
I can tell you that Kristy Corbett definitely didn’t join the RAAF for patriotic regions. She would constantly call Tassie a dump and say that she couldn’t wait to leave the place. I would suggest she probably used the air firce as her ticket out of Tasmania.
I also think its fair to say she also wasn’t very couth and would put her feet up on the back of chairs in the uni lecture theatres for instance. Although she came across as light and breezy she was sometimes hard to talk to and would shut down the conversation especially when it came to any personal matter.
Part two
Someone in the comments above asked if Kristy was bi-I don’t think so at least I never saw any evidence of it but I’m aware that statistically it is certainly very possible. This page discusses the issue.
https://www.broadagenda.com.au/2020/lgbti-military-personnel-and-the-march-of-history/
Part three
We also know the full extent of civilian deaths caused by the RAAF in the recent wars is hidden but it must be high. Apparently even RAAF leaders are like ostriches with their heads in the sand and the public has had virtually no access to any information to gather a real picture of what happened.
Part three
Back to Kristy Corbett. In recent years, I’ve been living in the north of Germany. I’ve told some local girls about what she did and they have been shocked. None of them would treat a boy like she did. One of them in particular commented that for her to reject her boyfriend because he was “not assertive enough” showed just how “totally immature” she was.
I also had to see a psychologist myself at one stage about a small problem I had – don’t worry, I’m definitely not suicidal myself. One day when we were talking about psychology in general I happened to mention Kristy Corbett to him. He felt that her happy go lucky nature was possibly a facade and that there was something troubled underneath. He commented that ironically although she had demanded assertiveness and confidence of the guy she jilted she was not even assertive enough herself to say goodbye to his face so there was possibly an element of hypocrisy there plus a judgmental nature.
Part four
Anyway that is enough of that story. It is too upsetting to dwell on.
In terms of suicide in general I was back in Australia during COVID and it amazed me how many people could not cope with social isolation or being housebound at all, even for just a little while. Friends of mine who are chaplains described some of their experiences trying to help people who couldn’t cope with the restrictions.
Part five final
I also know someone who became a telephone counsellor on a suicide hotline recently. They have to follow a script closely and she’s been rebuked a few times for drifting off it as she tries to be flexible in dealing with each individual’s situation. Despite that, she finds the work rewarding as she is trying to help those who are most in immediate need.
D absolutely loved Kristy without limits but she didn’t appreciate him at all. She was too arrogant and selfish and that had terrible consequences. One day, if and when she ever matures as her looks fade, she will understand and appreciate how deep-felt the warm and caring love in his heart for her was. Such a sad and cruel story.
My mum’s best friend’s been battling depression on and off for a long time. She tried to commit suicide the other night and is now in a hospital psych. ward. She’s going to undergo ECG (electroshock) treatment. Please pray for her. She’s a Christian. Blessings.
Good morning Pastor Robertson,
A friend of mine committed suicide and it left me gutted. Thank you for your words of comfort and hope.
To the other people on this forum, I share your pain. Regarding the discussion about the military above, one thing that always disturbed me, to put it mildly, is when the military – even the militaries of purportedly Christian vountries – issues cyanide capsules to agents on missions, to prevent them being captured and disclosing secrets. That is one of the things that makes me lean towards agreeing with the comments above and think maybe militaries are totally immoral.
To anyone in a similar situation to the guy mistreated and abandoned by his girlfriend who joined the military, I very strongly recommend the book, Rejection, by the Christian counsellor June Hunt. I think they key verse she talks about for anyone in that situation to remember is Psalm 34:18.
Some of the other key verses are Matt 21:42 (Jesus is rejected too), Galatians 1:10 and Proverbs 29:25. The latter two verses are about seeking the approval of men and the world in general but I suppose they apply to being rejected by an unchristian girl too.
She also draws on the example of Joseph and how he had the pain of being rejected by his brothers. This raised a question for me – Joseph forgives them but only after he tests them to see that their attitudes really had changed. How would Josrph have handled them if he found they were just as proud and murderous as ever?
The book also talks about how Jesus warns us we will experience rejection for His sake and it is really Him they are rejecting but I wonder what He means here too. I take it to mean rejection for the Christian message when we are evangelising, like the Apostles Paul and Stephen did. Could it be just rejection for being a Christian in general though, even if the persecutor knows little about your faith or may not even know you are a Christian?
One more thing: the book talks about 3 kinds of reaction to you –
1 where people just reject you altogether which should be countered with Ephesians 4:31-32,
2 like the air force girl in the discussion above who will only accept you on certain conditions like being more assertive in her example, which Hunt calls performance-based acceptance and which she counters with James 2:13,
3 people who accept you wholeheartedly as you are without conditions which Hunt equates to Zechariah 7:9.
Hunt also notes that rejection IS more painful than death for many people. The painful rejection of a loved one is the mpst penetrating wound of all. She also notes the Greek word for rejection means “to throw away or treat as useless” and abandon. I can imagine the enormous pain of being treated like rubbish by the person you love.
Hunt also guves a lot of practical advice, the main one being not to think of yourself as unlovable by all people just because you have been rejected by one or even many. There will be people who do like you and value you. Try not to set your own worth through the eyes of other people. God values you and he is especially close to the brokenhearted, as per that first verse I cited.
For anyone who is suffering from rejection, I urge you to buy the book.
Also, Christians definitely should not get romantically involved with non-Christians. Deuteronomy and Ezra have strong warnings about marrying foreign (ie, not of the faith) wives, as does the example of King Solomon. There is also 2 Cor 6:14 and Amos 3:3.
Also, since the air firce gitl boasted about “living with” someone else, remember Hebrews 3:4 clearly warns fornicators: “Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge” and 1 Cor 7:9: “But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.” (Marry, not fornicate) so that girl’s heart was already embroiled in other unrelentant sinful desires aside from her callous treatment of her Christian friend.
Okay, I have written much, much more than I originally anticipated. I hope this helps someone out there. I am not a psychologist or monister though so I would strongly urge anyone in need to ring a counselling service. They are anonymous and will provide you with professional help and advice.
Just remember God loves you.
@James, I will pray your family friend recovers soon.
@Colin, I will pray for the family and friends of the person you knew. My love to them all. The hollowness and grief they felt must be terrible. I hope they temember Hod is with them all.
@Colin, you raise some great other points.
Psalm 34:18 is a beautiful truth: “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” Anyone going through what that Tasmanian guy with the air force girl suffered should write those words on their hearts. It ties into the first beatitude too, where Jesus teaches, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”. He is clearly referring back to that Old Testament quote from the Psalm.
Yes, I didn’t think of suicide pills in the discussion of the military above. To me, things like that are a form of idolatory: military secrets/state secrets are considered so important that they are put on a pedestal above God’s law to the point where the military is prepared to kill its own
people and – those people are prepared to destroy themselves – to protect them. It is nationalism at its most extreme where peolle destroy themselves in the name of the state, even when they know states are finite, temporary things and will all pass away in time for God has “marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.” (Acts 17:26.)
I am not a theologian, so hopefully Pastor will step in and correct me if any of the things I say are wrong but I think you are absolutely spot-on when you say Deuteronomy and Ezra’s injunctions against taking “foreign” wives in the Old Testament are injunctions against taking non-believers as wives.
Here are two Biblical stories that confirm this: in Numbers 12, Moses takes a foreigner as a wife. When Aaron and Mirism use this as an excuse to criticise Moses, God rebukes them. (By the way, Numbers 12 also nites how meek Moses was and Jesus, too, blesses the meek as worthy, flying in the face of the air force girl’s hunger for assertiveness and confidence; she may reject such men but they are found worthy and vindicated in the eyes of God and it is they who shall inherit the earth!)
The Old Testament story of Ruth and Boaz is another story of an inter-racial marriage where the girl is accepted because she has found faith in God first. The fact that an enture Old Testament book is dedicated to her and her faith and that she is an ancestor of Jesus is very telling of how much God approved of her!
By contrast, as you mentioned, King Solomon’s downfall was caused by marriage to non-believers.
Another Old Testament example whose marriage to the non-believer, Jezebel, leads to his downfall. (1 Kings 16 – 18.)
The “unequally yoked” verse in the New Testament is that kost frequently cited to condemn mariages between Christians and atheists. I find it challenging in wider terms though: surely it also means we must not go into business partnership with unbelievers? Likewise, what happens if we are uoked to an unbelieving boss at work who asks us to do unethical things? That verse raises all kimds of challenges for me about how we shpuld live our lives and prrhaps it has sometimes been interpreted too narrowly as only referring to marriage.
Leaving that aside, we are also warned, “Do not be misled: ‘Bad company corrupts good character’”. (1 Corinthians 15:33) as we have already seen illustrated by the downfalls of Kings Ahab and Solomon.
On a positive note, we know that if someone is already married to an unbeliever, they should not leave them for their faith might save them. We should not serk out and marry an unbelievervthough, this is only if you were already married to one before you, yourself, converted to Christ.
Christ’s relationship yo the church is likened to a groom’s love gor his bride. How can our own marriages reflect this if we are married to an unbeliever?
Likewise, the chief purpose of married life is to glorify God and His Gospel. How can we do that if we are married to an unbeliever?
Jumping back to the Old Testament again, we find in Proverbs 31 the traits of a good wife: we hear that prudent wives are rare and are given to men as a gift from the Lord.
We also hear that compassion for the poor is a trait of a believing wife:
“She extends her hand to the poor,
And she stretches out her hands to the needy” (Proverbs 31:20.)
Some other traits of a God-fearing wife listed in Proverbs 31 are these marks:
“She opens her mouth in wisdom,
And the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.
She looks well to the ways of her household,
And does not eat the bread of idleness.”
From the discussion above, the air force girl was apparently not like this. However, that is not to say there is no hope for her, even after all she has done. I would urge you to pray that Christ comes into her life and that she accrpts Him as her Lord and Saviour and repents of her sin and seeks to make amends to those whom she has hatmed. Despite her terrible sins and mistreatment of her partner, pray she will be saved. No such sin is too big to be forgiven, no matter howcterrible or how much pain she has caused. It is not too late for her to find salvation and dedicate her life to the Lord if she just lets him in to her hardened heart and throws herself on his mercy. Let us pray He comes to her and helps her soon so that she may come to know and trust Jesus Christ as her Lord and Saviour and know His love and forgiveness for her sins. Amen.
Finally, you raise a vital point about contact numbers for helplines. If anyone is reading this who feels suicidal, please, please, please contact an anonymous helpline number. Your life is precious to the Lord who loves you and He will help you overcome Your pain. You don’t feel that way now but things will get better. Please remember that verse quoted at the start of this post: “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34:18.) Hold this truth dear in your heart.
These are the helpline numbers for Australian readers. (This is the notice of contacts that typically appears on ABC news articles dealing with suicide topics):
If you or anyone you know needs help:
Lifeline on 13 11 14
Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800
MensLine Australia on 1300 789 978
Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467
Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636
Headspace on 1800 650 890
ReachOut at au.reachout.com
Care Leavers Australasia Network (CLAN) on 1800 008 774
God bless. He loves you even if you feel abandoned. He is always there for you and loves you and wants only the best for you.
“There were relatively few occasions when RAAF personnel sought specific spiritual guidance, but knowing that a Chaplain was there provided opportunities at significant times.”
Source: https://anglicanfocus.org.au/2019/11/04/remembrance-day/
I just read this. It sounds like the air force has a very secular/atheistic culture based on that quote. Not many Christians there, as one would expect. Please pray that at least some of them, including this girl we’ve been discussing so extensively above, will repent and turn to Christ and be saved. Thanks.
I’m taking a break from this site again for a while now. God bless.
Good afternoon Jean
I thought you might enjoy this incredible story. It is a very short fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson, written in 1840, in which he predicts the advent of air forces and machine guns and the terror they would bring: http://hca.gilead.org.il/wicked_p.html The story has very strong and unambiguous Christian themes. What a pity it isn’t as well known as H. C. Anderson’s other fairy tales. It would definitely benefit adults as well as children. Anyway, I thought you’d like it.
Anyeay, I am writing for two reasons:
1) I want to thank you Jean for explaining why Christians should only date and marry other Christians. I am a Christian myself but I had only ever heard this edict once from my pastor and I later rebelled against it in my youthful vanity. (To be fair to my pastor, our congregation consisted mainly of elderly people, so issues surrounding the morality if dating weren’t relevant to most of yhe parishioners. There was only a handful of young people like me.) Anyway, thank you so, so much for explaining why it is a Christian teaching and giving the Biblical verses that explain why it is so. I repent of my rebellion now and I have suffered much pain in the past from dating a non-Christian girl with bad morals so I have well and truly learnt the lesson of the danger of blind love with an atheist or agnostic girl. Now that I am more mature, I will never again consider dating a non-believer because I know the pain and suffering it brings. We definitely can’t be unequally yoked. It brings to much pain to be going in different directions in life.
2) Thank you Pastor for your words of wisdom regarding suicide. Without going into details this really helps me as I come to terms with the shock death of a man I knew in my local community. I hope he was a Christian that he might be saved. You have realky helped with this article. God bless you, Sir.
One final point I feel impelled to add is that God has a plan for each of us before we are even born. (Jeremiah 1:5.) That plan does not end in suicide.
Whatever dark tunnnel you are going through now and whatever problem has you fixated that feels so overwhelming that death seems better than carrying on, remember this is a lie of the devil. God loves you and He will give you the strength to survive this time if you simply put your faith in Him and let Him be Lord of your life. Turn to the Bible.
Things will get better. though it does not sem that way. Let Jesus take charge and make Him captain of your soul. He loves you. God bless you.
Thank you for these lovely words pastor. The allegations against Christian Porter and the suicide of his accuser brought back some bad memories for me. Your post and the peoples comments on here have really helped me.
I second this. It is really helpful because I have a friend going through depression at the moment so it will enable me to help her and also as a bonus I am a young person who hasn’t dated yet so the discussion about how the Bible teaches us to only date and marry another Christian is really helpful too because I didn’t know that before and I am too embarassed to ask my parents about these things so now that I know this and after reading the terrible warning story above about the Tasmanian girl I will definitely only date a committed fellow Christian who will not abandon or mistreat me and we will respect and support each other and work together for God’s glory. It is really helpful. Your words are really comforting too Pastor as they are hopeful and helpful and Biblical. I think my friend will be ok now she has had her medication changed but I think of those who were not so lucky and their family and friends left behind so I will pray for those families. As people said sbove if anyone is suffering please seek help from a helpline or your GP or psychaitrist and they will help you. God bless you Pastor sir and all the contributors to this page. Thank you.
Thank you, Pastor sir. This page has helped me through a really dark time. God bless.
This site has helped me a lot in recent times, too. Thanks. Christ be with you.
I agree this is really helpful. Gdbless all the contributors to this page who have suffered. Remember the Beatitudes.
Cat,
London
Thanks. I lost someone too.
This discussion is great.
Many years ago, a relative of mine killed himself. I agree this article really helps.
I’ve been there, having lost a friend in the past. I’ll pray for you all. Know that Christ always walks with you through the hardest of times. Remember the Footsteps in the Sand poem. Look it up if you don’t know it.
One more thought – regarding the pacifism Jean brought up – you are right about the military being unChristian because I can’t imagine Christ shooting or bayoneting anyone.
My heartfelt prayers for you. Christ be with you and guide you. May you feel His presence and love in your lives.
My engliscjlh poor but I want to say such sad stories here I will pray and empathise. Also COVID pandemic leads to increase in suicide. My heart is with you all and so is Jesus.
Wow, I’m glad this link came up. Some very sad stories here. Just remember God promises us in His Psalms that His heart is always with the lowly and suffering. That is His promise to us. God bless you all.
Such beautiful words, Pastor. I’m on the verge of tears after reading them.
Pastor, this is very good.
Don’t worry, I assure you I am definitely NOT suicidal myself but I have a certain personal problem in my life that has caused me a lot of pain and I discovered a Reddit group for people suffering from the same problem and many of them are suicidal in their despair and goading each other to take the step.
I don’t know whether it is all just talk but that us the problem with these social media echo chambers – these people are wallowing in self-pity and dwelling on their problem so much and feeding off each other that they become very insular and lose sight of reality, instead of offering each other encouragement and practical solutions. Some members also apparently have Asperger’s, which probably doesn’t help them wirh coping, either. There is no mention of the hope given us in Christ or proclamation of the Gospel in any of their discussions, either…
Please pray for them. Thanks and God bless.
Thank you Pastor. This is a lovely piece of writing. We know there is onky one infirgivable sin amd suicide isn’t it. I am glad it was recommended to me. I will pray tonight for all of those despairing people considering this step that they may stop and put their hope and trust in Christ instead.
One thing stood out to me, though:
“In today’s passage, we read of a suicide in the Bible. Samson by pulling down the temple of the pagans upon himself did kill himself – as well as many of Israel’s enemies. I suppose that is one example where suicide is at least understandable if not excused. ”
After reading this, the thought occurred to me that someone could twist the Samson story to legitimise suicide bombers and kamikazes and other suicide attacks in warfare.
However, I then thought about it some more and realised it is remarkable that we don’t generally tend to see such practices among Jews or Christians: the Muslims have utilised suicide bombers and the Japanese (shintos) had kamikazes but, aside from some suicide attacks in warfare and the previously-discussed immorality of the provision of suicide pills on military missions, thankfully such an abuse of the Bible story dies not seem to have occurred in the West to give theological legitimacy to such heinous actions.
I also thought about Jesus. He knew Jerusalem always killed its prophets but He went there anyway and submitted Himself fully to His Father’s Will when He could have escaped or called down a host of Angels to defend Himself in Gethsemane. In so far as He knew going to Jerusalem would lead to His death, was He in some way partly-responsible for what happened to Him or is this kind of thinking twisting and distorting Scripture too much? I don’t want to be blasphemous!
I realise He was fulfilling His Father’s plan and that He wonderfully sacrificed Hinself that we might be saved but is not this kind of sacrificial death and willing surrender of Himself to the authorities without any resistance a form of suicide?
A lovely reflection.
“But what about those who kill themselves out of despair or to get away from the fears, darkness, guilt and problems they face? Are they committing a sin that cannot be forgiven? We need to remember that Jesus died for all our sins, past, present and future.”
That is beautiful. I hadn’t thought of it like that.
My only question though is why do we then ask for forgiveness each time we sin and, for instance, every time we attend church on Sunday or recite the “Our Father” prayer? Wouldn’t it just be a case instead of asking for forgiveness once at the time of our conversion and this being effective for the rest of our lives?
Also, how does this relate to that really difficult passage in Hebrews (Heb 10:26) about sinning “wilfully” after we have converted? Some people clearly cannot help commiting suicide if they are in the pit of despair or depression but for others, wouldn’t it be a wilful act to kill one’s self?
Sorry if these are dumb questions…
These are not dumb questions at all. Hope these answers are not either!
Asking forgiveness is something that keeps us close to Christ. It is part of an ongoing relationship. Just because you have said I love you to your spouse on your wedding day, does not mean that you never need to say it again!
Hebrews 10:26 is not speaking about suicide. It’s talking about those who receive the knowledge of salvation but deliberately reject it – all they can expect is ‘the judgement and raging fire that will consume the enemies of God’.
A powerful and moving mini-sermon, sir. Thank you.
Thank you tor your rapid response, Pastor. I had always really struggled with Hebrews 10:26 – it was the one verse in the Bible that really frightened me. Bless you.
I hope this page continues to help those in need.
“the problem is that they are not always thinking straight”
Yes, I’ve heard it becomes like tunnel-vision. They can only focus on the problem that is causing them so much pain and hurt and are unable to think of the bigger picture and the good things they have to live for. Hence, they can’t think of the family the leave behind or the blessings they have, only the tremendous pain and if there is no eay yo resolve the problem causing that pain, they see suicide as the only way out. 🙁 🙁 🙁
A Christian family friend is currently in a psych ward with bad depression. Please pray for her.
I was in a bad way at one stage. I am better now. This discussion has really helped too. Thanks for everything. Praise the Lord for He is good!
‘“the problem is that they are not always thinking straight”
Yes, I’ve heard it becomes like tunnel-vision. They can only focus on the problem that is causing them so much pain and hurt and are unable to think of the bigger picture ‘
I’ve been there too because of pain and hurt in my personal life. I ended up with anxiety and depression.
I’m much better now but I was a really talented creative writer. Now, I struggle to write a cohesive, grammatically-correct sentence because my concentration is shot. I have to really concentrate hard right now to do something that was once natural and easy to me. Whereas words once just flowed from me, I now struggle with this short and simple post.
Medication helps enormously but my brain races at times and I am still a bit mentally confused at times. More than anything, I just wish I could have my God-given writing talent back. Please pray for me, Pastor.
It is hard. I am much better now most of the time thanks to medication but when I was sick I just felt so overwhelmed by the complexities of life and feeling I could not cope – with modern dating, with bureaucracy, with the complex tasks I had to do at work, with office politics and bullying in the hierarchy, with our whole capitalist way of life. I think the complexity of the modern world and fear of unemployment, failing at finding a girlfriend and other peer expectations in life lead to the increase we see in anxiety.
I think many of us, including myself, would have better mental health with a simpler peasant lifestyle or even something nomadic (like the Sami people). I was born at the wrong time. Arranged marriages or structured courtshios would take much pressure off people who are not well-equipped fir “dating” either and being closer to nature by luving a life of simple self-sufficiency without many of our currentexternal pressures woukd be more conducive to good mrntal health in many of us who struggle in our current corporate- and industrial-driven world.
God bless.
Thank you for your beautiful words, Pastor. They are very helpful.