I Found It!

In the late 1970s, I remember seeing a strange sign almost everywhere in the city.

“I FOUND IT!”

The words were bold and impossible to ignore. They appeared on walls, posters, stickers, and public places as though someone was trying desperately to announce a great discovery to the world.

And as a child, I used to wonder:

Found what?

What could be so important that people wanted everyone to know about it?

At that age, I did not understand.

But life has a mysterious way of answering questions many years later.

Now I know what they meant.

Because after years of emotional torment, confusion, fear, shame, disappointments, and inner battles, I finally found what my soul had been searching for all along.

I found peace.

Or more accurately—

Peace found me.

It happened when I was already preparing to leave this world.

I had become exhausted from fighting my own thoughts. My mind never rested. Day and night, it kept replaying failures, regrets, humiliations, fears, and painful memories.

My thoughts became like cruel voices that would not stop speaking.

Why did you trust so easily?

Why were you weak?

Why did you destroy your own life?

Why can’t you move on?

Why are you like this?

The human mind can become a frightening place when hopelessness settles inside it.

And slowly, suicidal thoughts entered my life and stayed.

At first they frightened me.

Later, they comforted me.

That is the dangerous thing about despair.

Death begins disguising itself as relief.

It whispers:

“You can rest now.”

“No more humiliation.”

“No more fear.”

“No more pain.”

“No more memories.”

Suicide started looking like a doorway out of suffering—an escape from the world, from pain, and worst of all, from myself.

But somewhere deep inside me, I still knew something important:

Hell is real.

And I was afraid.

I had already suffered enough from decisions I made impulsively and emotionally. Looking back now, I understand the wisdom behind the old saying in that popular song:

“The wise never rush.”

But pain makes people rush.

Pain clouds judgment.

Pain narrows vision.

Pain convinces a wounded person that there are no more possibilities left.

And at that point in my life, I felt spiritually blind.

I had no answers that could quiet my mind. No philosophy could comfort me. No success, money, relationship, or distraction could remove the heaviness inside my soul.

So in complete desperation, I prayed.

Not a memorized prayer.

Not a religious performance.

Not elegant words.

Just raw honesty.

I poured out everything inside me before God.

I spoke to Him from the deepest wounded parts of my heart. I confessed my anger, my fears, my disappointments, my shame, and my exhaustion.

I told Him how unfortunate I felt.

How I believed I had ruined my own life through poor decisions, weakness, and lack of wisdom. I cried over opportunities lost, dignity broken, dreams destroyed, and years wasted in emotional suffering.

That day, I prayed like a drowning person gasping for air.

And tears flowed endlessly.

For a long time, I used to think tears were weakness. I thought crying was simply self-pity and emotional collapse.

But later, Scripture showed me something beautiful:

God sees tears differently.

In Psalm 56:8 it says:

“You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle.”

Imagine that.

A God so attentive that even tears are counted.

Not ignored.

Not mocked.

Not wasted.

Counted.

Then I discovered another verse that touched me deeply, Psalm 126:5:

“Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.”

That verse changed the way I saw suffering.

Tears were not proof that God had abandoned me.

Sometimes tears are part of transformation.

Sometimes brokenness becomes the soil where healing quietly begins.

And perhaps the verse that comforted me most during those dark days was Psalm 34:17–18:

“The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them;

He delivers them from all their troubles.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted

and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”

Crushed in spirit.

That was exactly what I had become.

Not physically wounded.

Not visibly dying.

But internally crushed.

And maybe that is why Jesus came to me in that moment.

Because God responds to sincerity.

Not perfection.

Not performance.

Not religious image.

Just truth.

I called on Him with the last strength I had left in me.

And Jesus answered.

Not with condemnation.

Not with anger.

Not with rejection.

But with understanding.

With gentleness.

With words that pierced through the darkness surrounding my mind.

“You’re tired… fed up… and now you’re ready to give up.”

He repeated back to me the very pain I could no longer carry alone.

And then came the words that changed my life forever:

“My turn.”

That was the moment I finally understood what those signs from my childhood truly meant.

I FOUND IT.

Not religion.

Not perfection.

Not escape.

I found the One who could finally give rest to my weary soul.