DailySusan Humor Blog

SAVED BY THE TOILET

. . . (F)or he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.
-- Hebrews 13:5

I had this funny friend. She made my cheeks hurt from an excess of laughing. I scolded her for being so hard on my face – the last thing it needed.

I lay there in the hospital after giving birth to a 9 1/2-pounder, and had to listen to her making wisecracks, extremely graphic and highly inappropriate, that made me laugh so hard I thought I was going to give birth again.

She was super-smart, super-organized, capable, sensitive and thoughtful, the last person you'd expect to become a desperate, suicidal alcoholic.

But she did.

It's a long, sad, familiar story. Stuff went wrong. Real wrong.

She got down on herself. She slipped into self-destructive habits. The wit and wisecracks left her. She put up a good front for years and few people knew, but her private hours were black and blue. She felt all alone. She ate and ate and ate, and drank and drank and drank.

Then one terrible night, she tried to kill herself.

I still can't believe she did this. There are so many better, smarter ways of dealing with life's problems. Being stupid is just not like her. But one night, she hit bottom. She drank a whole bottle of booze, swallowed a whole bottle of pills, and stretched out her body on her lonely bed.

She had had it. This was the end. She was going to die.

But she forgot about one thing:

The female bladder.

She didn't know how long she had been laying there. She just knew that all of a sudden, she had to ''go.''

In her drugged state, it never occurred to her that, if you're going to die by your own hand in a few minutes, anyway, you might as well wet the bed. People are already going to be mad at you.

But nooooo. Ever the perfectionist, she had to get up and go to the bathroom. Somehow, she managed to stagger in there and onto the toilet.

Her head was spinning from the booze and the pills. Her body was heavy and leaden. Her muscles went off duty. She was dizzy. As she stood up from the toilet and turned to flush, she lost her balance and fell backwards — crash! smash!

Somehow, she broke the toilet.

Water seeped out from the toilet tank onto the bathroom floor where she lay. She may have passed out, but the cold water woke her up at least partly. She came up on all fours. She forgot the suicide attempt and how she got there. She was woozy. But her heavy-lidded eyes saw the water pooling up on the floor.

''Heyyy!'' her foggy brain thought. ''There's a leak!''

She crawled and dragged herself to the telephone. In her fog, she couldn't remember the apartment manager's phone number. The only phone number she could remember was ''911.''

So she dialed it. And, in her drugged-out, boozed-up state, slurring her words and making very little sense, she reported that there was a leak on her bathroom floor.

The 911 operator was sharp. She knew the call was about a lot more than a leaky toilet. She knew what an O.D. sounded like. She got my friend's address and sent a rescue squad.

My friend passed out again, but they broke down the door and got her to the hospital. They had to pump her stomach and I don't know what all.

She lived, though.

She had help.

She thought she was alone, that night.

She wasn't.

She forgot that Someone had promised to always be with her.

He didn't.

She didn't think her life was worth living.

He did.

If God can use crazy things like a pillar of fire, a talking donkey and the belly of a whale to get people's attention and show us His love, why not a life-saving toilet?

My funny friend put it this way: she was saved . . . by the ''throne'' of grace.

--------------------------------------------------

Prayer request: If there's anyone in your life who might be struggling with despair and depression, tell them this story -- not for them to ''test'' God, but for them to realize that He really is with us, every minute of every day on earth. (Romans 8:38,39).